Our take
Editorials
In California’s Capitol, 147 women’s #MeToo statement must not be shrugged off: “Why didn’t we speak out? Sometimes out of fear. Sometimes out of shame. Often these men hold our professional fates in their hands,” the letter said. Their points are well taken. Enough is enough, especially in oh-so-progressive California.
Jack Ohman visits Steve Bannon at his new gig. Get greeted here.
Columns
Foon Rhee: Sacramento’s Amazon HQ2 bid: A long shot, but worth the try. Business leaders and elected officials send in an 80-page proposal that outlines 12 potential sites. Other cities are offering much more lucrative incentives, but Sacramento may have one ace in the hole. When he was state Senate leader, Mayor Darrell Steinberg brokered a deal that is saving Amazon a ton of cash.
Marcos Breton: Doubt that Donald Trump is hurting America by insisting NFL players stand for the national anthem? Just look around.
Dan Walters, CalMatters: Last year, the state’s lawmakers, governor and voters enacted a veritable blizzard of legislation making private gun ownership more difficult and expensive, though none of it cut down on the number of guns. This year, only a handful of relatively minor new gun laws were passed and signed by Brown. One induces head-scratching bewilderment: a measure removing the power of local school authorities to allow someone to legally carry a gun on school grounds. Meanwhile, the state also repealed the requirement of extra years behind bars for anyone using a gun to commit a crime, leaving such “enhancements” to the future discretion of judges.
Op-eds
Eugene Eng and Pat Fong-Kushida: We believe this is a special moment for California businesses and our brand, seen especially by Asian consumers as one of quality, trust and open-mindedness. California is well positioned socially, geographically and historically to benefit from the economic power shifting to the Asia-Pacific.
Karla Ornelas: I am a third-year student at UC Davis and an intern at Clínia Tepati, a student-run clinic that provides health care and education to the undocumented and uninsured Latino population in Sacramento. It has affirmed my goal: to become a physician and work in the Central Valley. But my career plans and future are in jeopardy.
California Forum
Randye Hoder: The real difference between Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein is the one the GOP won’t talk about.
Steven Maviglio: Dianne Feinstein’s age is a silver lining, not a “silver ceiling.” And age discrimination isn’t OK.
On behalf of The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board, welcome to The Take, your opinion-politics newsletter. Please sign up for it here.
Their take
Charlotte Observer: We hate to put any kind of damper on the Amazon party, given how fun the Ric Flair GIFs on Twitter are and how giddy we get over visions of light rail to the River District. But with Thursday being the deadline for cities to submit their bids to be home to Amazon’s second headquarters, let’s take a breath and think about what we’re willing to give to land it and what it might mean if we do.
Los Angeles Times: Over the past nine months, the nation has seen evidence accrue that the man it elected president entered office ill-prepared for the job, and whose core personality – vain, venal and vengeful – made him ill-suited for work that requires tact, humility and compassion. What the nation learned this week is that the man it elected president is so unsuited for the job, he can’t even get a condolence call right.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Firefighters are gaining control of the monstrous fires burning across wine country, evacuees are beginning to return home, there’s less smoke and soot in the air, and forecasters say the season’s first rain may be on the way. After 10 stressful days, things are returning to normal – at least a new normal – for most of us.
Baltimore Sun: If there is a purpose to President Donald Trump and Sen. John McCain existing in the same universe at the same time and in the same country and even as members of the same political party, it is surely to force Americans to grapple with their understanding of integrity and leadership. On the day McCain was giving a memorable speech in Philadelphia condemning “half-baked, spurious nationalism,” the sitting billionaire president was in the Rose Garden falsely accusing former President Barack Obama and his predecessors of not calling the families of fallen soldiers.
Bloomberg View: Good news: The North American economy has been granted a stay of execution. Negotiations to revise NAFTA, which seemed close to collapse not so long ago, have been extended into next year. The U.S. should use this pause to rethink its whole approach to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Chicago Tribune: The once-fearsome Islamic State army now staggers through its last days. U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters declared Tuesday that they had recaptured Raqqa, the self-proclaimed capital of the fast-crumbling caliphate. That is a swift and remarkable achievement for an improbable coalition of global friends, enemies and frenemies who looked past other conflicts to focus on crushing the barbarous Islamic State. Does this portend an interlude of relative calm in the Middle East? Sadly, not likely.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Last month’s announcement by Equifax that its consumer-credit database suffered a catastrophic hacking attack meant that nearly half of all Americans had their Social Security numbers and vital financial information exposed to theft. The threat of massive-scale identity theft is very real. Equifax is only the latest of multiple, large-scale data-hacking incidents. It’s time for the federal government to come up with a more secure identification code to protect citizens.
Syndicates’ take
E.J. Dionne Jr.: All Republican politicians who take their obligations seriously must stop rationalizing the irrational and say what has long been obvious, that Trump’s way of doing business is unproductive, erratic, mean and scary. Until this happens, Republicans deserve to be seen as enablers of a dangerous presidency.
Ross Douthat: Not everything about the Bush era was disastrous, and there were ways in which the Bush White House had a clearer sense of what conservatism should offer to the common man than any its would-be successors have come up with since.
Nicholas Kristof: We have ignored the biggest drug pushers of all: U.S. pharmaceutical companies. Our policy was: You get 15 people hooked on opioids, and you’re a thug who deserves to rot in hell; you get 150,000 people hooked, and you’re a marketing genius who deserves a huge bonus.
Dana Milbank: The White House chief of staff is like the maitre d’ at a restaurant opening gone horribly wrong. The dishes are coming out ill-timed and half-baked, if they come out at all. The chef clearly has no idea how to cook, and all he seems to do is yell.
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Some educational officials now deem it their duty to offer “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” to protect their students from vexatious language or behavior, like what is in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” But these educators are doing nothing less than presiding over what I will call the stupidification and wimpification of this country.
Mailbag
“I must have missed a class when I completed a lifetime credential to be a school nurse. The class I must have missed? Binary Politics. But I don't believe that is a science. Maybe it was in a political science class. Only in California.” – Marilyn A. Chilton, El Dorado Hills
Tweet of the day
“The DC playbook is obsolete and it’s time that we, the people of California, bring the agenda to Washington – not the other way around.” – Kevin de Leόn, @kdeleon
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