Bee Opinionated: First Partner testifies + Siskiyou steals water + GOP tries to ‘move on’
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Robin Epley here with The Sacramento Bee’s Editorial Board. I hope you had a great weekend and are looking forward to spending some time with family and friends this week.
I wrote last week for the Editorial Board about California levying a fine against a group of farmers. A water irrigation district in rural Siskiyou County stole water from the Shasta River last summer for eight days, breaking state laws that require the conservation of the river for the sake of the fragile ecosystem — and especially a salmon run that is sacred to the Karuk Tribe.
In theory, the State Water Resources Control Board has broad authority to regulate how water is used and to punish those who misuse it. But as a Bee investigation revealed, that authority is hopelessly undermined by “a convoluted web of state and federal laws.” State authorities are not even equipped to effectively track water consumption.
Water disappears, and state officials often have no idea where it went.
The Bee’s investigation found that on average, only 11% of California farms and cities have complied with the state’s 2015 law requiring them to accurately monitor and report their water use to the State Water Resources Control Board.
In the Shasta Valley, where the egregious draining took place this summer, the compliance rate is even lower — just 7%.
There are only 1,000 functioning gauges on a California river system that spans nearly 200,000 miles. The Bee found that according to a recent report by a consortium of state agencies, the shortage of stream gauges “results in data gaps that hamper effective management of California’s limited water resources.”
The initial investigation by my colleague Ryan Sabalow is fascinating, and the follow-up is incredible. If you’re looking for reading to dive into this evening, I can’t recommend this story enough.
The Retro World of Rape Prosecution
I’ll start this section off with the same warning Metro columnist Melinda Henneberger placed ahead of one of her columns last week:
“Note: If you don’t want to be disgusted, you should stop reading now. But if you do want to learn about what it takes to testify about a sex crime, go right ahead.”
Melinda went to the Harvey Weinstein trial in Los Angeles last week, where she heard California’s First Partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, testify that the Hollywood movie mogul raped her in 2005.
“It’s still 1940 in a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, where a ‘bimbo’ who supposedly tried to get ahead by sleeping with a big-time Hollywood movie producer is turning on the waterworks,” Henneberger wrote. “I say this because unfortunately, nothing about Harvey Weinstein defense attorney Mark Werksman’s cross-examination of California’s first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, has been updated in the years since we all thought that only liars recalled traumatic events imperfectly. Now we know that it’s actually the liars whose stories are tidy and perfectly groomed. They never vary, because they are scripted from the start.”
Siebel Newsom testified that she had gone to the hotel thinking she and Weinstein were going to meet in the bar to discuss the projects she was working on as a young actress and producer. But after she had arrived, an assistant told her to go to a suite, where she soon found herself alone with Weinstein. Then, she said, he excused himself and called out from the bathroom for her to come help him. She found him in a bathrobe touching himself.
Several women in the audience wept as Siebel Newsom testified that the disgraced producer raped her for somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour that evening.
“He knows this is not normal. He knows this is not consent,” Siebel Newsom said, her mind back in that horrible night more than 15 years ago.
If Siebel Newsom’s harrowing rape testimony seems to you like the kind of thing that anyone, “let alone the wife of a popular governor and presidential aspirant, says under oath for any other reason than that it’s true,” Henneberger wrote, “Then you may need almost as much help as the convicted former film producer does.”
Moving On
“Now that Donald Trump has authored Republicans’ third national electoral rebuke in four years, the party that collectively surrendered to his dangerous buffoonery has devised an equally brilliant strategy for emerging from its resulting marginalization: They’re simply going to “move on.”
So wrote Deputy Opinion Editor Josh Gohlke this week in the aftermath of the midterm election and Trump’s announcement of his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election.
“All the party’s talk of page-turning fails to account for Trump’s invariable refusal to accept responsibility for any defeat or disgrace,” Gohlke wrote. “It also ignores countless previous paroxysms of futile Republican exasperation with him, beginning with his original hostile takeover of the party in 2016. Trump’s outright ownership of the GOP never had anything to do with the preferences of its ostensible intelligentsia, and it doesn’t have anything to do with them now.”
While we’re on the subject, don’t miss one of The Bee’s most popular guest essays from last week: “Donald Trump’s classified records stash put a spotlight on an obscure, crucial profession.”
Opinion of the Week
“McCarthy had the opportunity and the understanding to reject Trump when the then-president nearly had him killed by a lunatic mob. But he didn’t have the guts.” — Josh Gohlke again on how Trump and House Speaker-elect Kevin McCarthy turned a surefire Republican victory into a historic humiliation.
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May your turkey be moist and your cranberry sauce be can-shaped,
Robin Epley
