Bee Opinionated: California storm, scandal + Biden’s paper problem + Sacramento’s trees | Opinion
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I’m Robin Epley, here again with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board.
This week has been full of surprises, storms and scandals. Not the least of those was Rep. Katie Porter’s surprising announcement that she would begin campaigning now for longtime California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat — but the announcement came at a poor time: Right in the middle of the worst storms and deadly flooding the state has seen in decades.
“In the weeks now that Californians have been lashed by high winds during epic rainstorms and multiple mudslides as a series of atmospheric rivers moves through the state, I’ve heard from friends across the country, asking if we’re OK. So it’s weird that Rep. Katie Porter seemed not to have heard any of this,” wrote Metro Columnist Melinda Henneberger in a column last week.
“The Orange County Democrat definitely didn’t know that it was less than ideal timing, launching a U.S. Senate
campaign with the death toll in her home state still climbing, to 19 as of Wednesday night. Floodwaters ripped a 5-year-old out of his mother’s arms, and cars were being swallowed whole by sinkholes. There was kayaking on the streets of Santa Barbara, evacuations from Montecito and whole roads turned into rivers. Yet this ongoing disaster didn’t rate even a passing mention in Porter’s announcement video, which focused on the need for ‘a warrior in Washington.’ ”
Porter told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that the storms “are a result of ignoring problems for far too long in Washington,” yet her first campaign video didn’t focus on the natural disaster as her reason for launching the campaign; it focused on how much Washington, D.C., needs Katie Porter to be a senator.
“She’ll lose few if any votes in 2024 because she couldn’t wait for the storms to subside,” wrote Henneberger, but Porter’s Washington-centric focus “does make her seem a little less shimmery, and a little more like every other campaigner.”
The Latest False Dichotomy
“Every day now seems to hold some fresh, grim reminder that the American government is run by three children stacked inside a trench coat. No other explanation could plausibly explain the antics and hypocrisy we’re forced to endure.”
I wrote last week about President Joe Biden’s recent debacle — that is to say, the president was “caught” with around a dozen top secret and classified documents in a private office that he used before beginning his 2020 campaign as well as at his residence in Wilmington, Delaware.
Biden is cooperating with investigators, in stark contrast to former President Donald Trump, who had more than 300 classified and top-secret documents seized at his Mar-a-Lago resort in August 2022. But I’ll give you one guess as to what conservatives are doing with this new information.
“Even three children in a trench coat could see that Biden’s crime doesn’t compare to Trump’s, but facts bear no weight in this country, as the near-cultist right stopped listening to reason long ago.
“Because the most basic facts of the case use the same three words as Trump’s staggering treason pared down for an illiterate audience (‘classified,’ ‘documents’ and ‘criminal’), we now have to litigate Biden’s actions in the same way reasonable Americans could only hope to ever litigate Trump’s … if he ever stopped kicking long enough for FBI agents to get a hold of his legs.”
Who Speaks for the Trees?
“After gutting out fire season after fire season — was it ever not fire season? — we now contend with biblical flood. And apparently it’s not even enough to end the drought. ‘It’s going to take many methods and several wet years to make up for the region’s long period of low rainfall,’ UC Santa Cruz hydrologist Andrew Fisher wrote recently. ‘One storm certainly doesn’t do it, and even one wet year doesn’t do it.’ ”
Here in the City of Trees, the atmospheric rivers repeatedly slamming against Northern California have reportedly felled almost a thousand trees in less than a week. But here, Ohman wrote, we have to take some comfort in the recent levee upgrades, because Sacramento is a near-swamp perhaps second only in dangerous conditions to New Orleans, which Hurricane Katrina infamously nearly destroyed in 2005.
“But we never think about that,” he wrote. “We build more McMansions in Natomas even though the city is a mere 26 feet above sea level.”
On a similar note, check out some of the photos of downed trees across Sacramento; they’re both terrifying and beautiful.
Opinion of the Week
“‘Kevin McCarthy’s tragicomic struggle to grasp the House speaker’s gavel, the coveted, costly prize denied him by his fellow Republican representatives again and again for days, wasn’t just a historical anomaly. It was also a gem of justice in an unjust world — one of those vanishingly rare cases of a man getting exactly what he deserves.” — Deputy Opinion Editor Josh Gohlke on California Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s historic and, frankly, incredibly embarrassing battle for the speakership last week.
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See ya later, alligators,
Robin Epley
