While the bill received nearly unanimous support in the Legislature — the measure was in response to the Brock Turner case, where the former Stanford University swimmer received a few months in county jail and probation after sexually assaulting an unconscious woman — law and order is a basic tenet of Republican ideology.

“All victims of sexual assault deserve equal treatment regardless of socio-economics, education or immigration status,” the Orange County Congresswoman wrote to Gov. Brown. “However, the reality is that the law can and has failed victims by giving well-connected and affluent predators like Brock Turner an advantage with an alumni judge who will neglect the crime and ultimately disregard the victim.”

In the letter, Sanchez also highlighted her work on the House Armed Services Committee, where she pushed for policies that cracked down on how the military deals with sexual assaults. 

“As the highest-ranking woman on the Armed Services Committee and the founder and chair of the Congressional Women in the Military Caucus, I understand from testimonies that sexual assault can happen anywhere, anytime and by anyone,” Sanchez wrote.

The Times called it

Earlier Thursday morning, the Los Angeles Times published a story headlined: “Hurting for support in her own party, Rep. Loretta Sanchez tilts her Senate campaign to the right.” Only a few hours later the letter to Brown was released to the news media. 

Sanchez has made it no secret that she is hoping to ride a coalition of Latinos, some Democrats, independents and Republicans to victory over the Democratic establishment candidate, Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is the frontrunner. There is no Republican in the race as the two women seek to replace Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, who is retiring. 

Sanchez has drawn several high-profile Republican endorsements. And the Times article focused on recent boasting of her record against “Islamic extremists” on a conservative radio show, a recent trip to Shasta Lake (in the deeply red, proposed State of Jefferson) to discuss water issues and a joint appearance at Camp Pendleton with conservative firebrand Darrell Issa, the Vista congressman. 

Mark Petracca, chair of the Department of Political Science at UC Irvine, said the play to the right seems “desperate” and is “highly unlikely” to work for fears of Republican undervoting.

“It’s intended to attract GOP voters who do not have a dog in the fight,” Petracca said. “(GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump) is losing the state right now at least handily and there’s no excitement at the top of the ticket to mobilize GOP voters on Election Day. Is Loretta going to get them out to vote for her? Highly unlikely.”

Will it work?

In fact, of all the groups she’s hoping to win, she’s only performing strongly among Latinos, although there’s plenty of time to change that as the campaign ramps up. Harris led among the rest, according to a July poll from the Public Policy Institute of California.

However, Sanchez has a history of upsets. Sanchez was first elected to Congress two decades ago after defeating Republican Congressman Bob Dornan, who was heavily favored. But Sanchez walks a fine line now, trying to win Republicans while not alienating Latinos and Democrats in an extremely partisan era when the space between the two sides widens each day.

The Legislature passed it, the governor said he’ll sign it, and so a $15-per-hour minimum wage is all but a done deal.

The measure, which raises the wage from $10 per hour incrementally until 2022 and 2023 (depending on the size of the business), was approved in both chambers of the Legislature on Thursday, and Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown issued a statement of support immediately after.

Both chambers debated the measure, with proponents and opponents presenting oft-cited arguments. CalWatchdog covered the battle lines in detail in February, when two union-backed initiatives were vying to make the November ballot.

Debating the policy

Proponents of the wage increase argue businesses will ultimately absorb much of the increased labor costs, workers will have more money to put back in the economy, and the increased wages will exceed inflation in terms of buying power.

Opponents argue the inflation will reduce the purchasing power of the dollar and offset the increase in pay. They also argue the minimum wage is meant to be introductory or temporary and a more effective solution is increased opportunity for advancement. Opponents argue smaller, seasonal and low profit-margin businesses (like restaurants) will be forced to cut jobs and invest in labor-saving technology while larger companies will flee the state looking for a friendlier business climate.

Politics

The measure actually stalled last year in the Legislature over concerns that the wage was increasing too much too soon. Earlier this year, Gov. Brown warned in his budget proposal that an increase to $15 per hour would raise the state’s labor expenses by $4 billion.

But when one of the two initiatives qualified for the ballot a little over a week ago, Brown cut a deal with the union leaders that slowed the increase ladder and added “off ramps” to pause increases in tough economic times. The deal was announced Monday.

Brown was in a bind, as the measure seemed sure to pass on the November ballot. Polling showed Californians were in favor of the increase, presidential-cycle turnouts are usually favorable to Democrats, who largely support the increase, and the success of Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has campaigned heavily on an increase, showed his message was resonating with voters.

“The basic economic problems of a minimum wage haven’t gone away, but political considerations were too strong to resist,” said John J. Pitney, a Roy P. Crocker professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College.

Slow down

Prior to the vote, the left-leaning editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, which called Brown’s compromise “good,” urged lawmakers to slow down and consider all options, arguing that little is known about the impact of a 90 percent increase over a nine-year period (which includes two prior increases), floating a regional wage increase instead.

“Lawmakers are not doing their due diligence if they don’t take the time to analyze the alternatives to a blanket $15 minimum wage, or at least take steps to mitigate the potential impacts,” wrote the board.

Brown supports

After the bill passed, Gov. Brown repeated his comments from earlier in the week calling the deal “responsible” and “careful,” and said he’d sign the measure on Monday in Los Angeles.

“California is proving once again that it can get things done and help people get ahead,” Brown said in a statement. “This plan raises the minimum wage in a careful and responsible way and provides some flexibility if economic and budgetary conditions change.”

The first increase of 50 cents per hour goes into effect at the beginning of 2017.

Through an in-depth investigation, the paper revealed embarrassing details of the train’s lurching progress toward an apparent morass of spiraling costs, spooked investors and — worst of all — an engineering disaster in the making.

Heads in the sand

In one particularly galling example of misfeasance, when California’s main project management contractor, Parsons Brinckerhoff, raised the alarm years ago, it was simply ignored by the authority’s top brass. A document obtained by the Times revealed that Parsons Brinckerhoff had briefed state officials on the spiraling cost projections in October of 2013. “But the state used a lower cost estimate when it issued its 2014 business plan four months later,” noted the Times. “Jeff Morales, the rail authority chief executive, said he was not aware of the Parsons Brinckerhoff projection. A spokeswoman for the authority declined to discuss the differences in the estimates.”

Opposition to California’s high-speed rail project has been strong since Gov. Jerry Brown first threw his weight firmly behind the idea. Critics have predictably held up the Times report as proof that they saw its failures coming from a figurative mile away. As the Reason Foundation suggested as early as 2008, “cost overruns were likely, state and federal funding would not be sufficient to cover the costs of the project, the state would have to spend more money, and private investors would not be making up the difference,” as Scott Shackford noted at Reason.com.

A policy earthquake

The challenges revealed by the report go far beyond those objections, however, raising the specter of dangerous environmental damage done virtually blind. “It will be the most ambitious tunneling project in U.S. history. Crews will have to cross the tectonic boundary that separates the North American and Pacific plates, boring through rock formations and earthquake faults, some of which are not mapped,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted. James Monsees, “one of the world’s top tunneling experts and an author of the federal manual on highway tunneling,” said the plan was unrealistic. “Faults are notorious for causing trouble,” he cautioned.

That trouble could well become calamitous — especially given California’s propensity for large earthquakes affecting populations centers. As the Los Angeles Times added:

“A 2012 report by Parsons Brinckerhoff, obtained by The Times, warned the rail authority that the ‘seismotectonic complexity … may be unprecedented’ and that the rail route would be crossing faults classified as ‘hazardous.'”

But the tunnel trouble arose from the authority’s inability to surmount public criticism to easier, more direct routes. “The original plan was to build the train route up along the 14 Freeway, but a host of nearby residents from Pacoima to Acton, many freaked out about a high-walled train corridor cutting through their towns,” according to Curbed Los Angeles. “Angry citizens in San Fernando even interrupted an informational meeting in on the rail project to protest its dangers to the local economy and the ‘death wall’ that would split the town in two along the route.”

That led the authority toward the current, disparaged tunneling plan — and, last month, a request for “permission to test-drill deep beneath the Angeles National Forest to determine the feasibility of digging a rail tunnel through the rugged San Gabriel Mountains near Santa Clarita,” as the San Gabriel Valley Tribune noted. Among officials, the fear of another public outcry has yet to abate. “In what only can be described as an unusual process, the U.S. Forest Service is asking the public for their thoughts on whether to allow the rail authority to proceed with its tunnel study,” the Tribune added.

The Golden State drought became an issue of national concern this past year as it drew in federal legislators and national policy activists. For many Californians, drought has been a fact of life for decades.

And for the state’s elected officials, water policy has been one of the few areas of reliable bipartisanship. As CalWatchdog.com recently noted, Gov. Jerry Brown went out of his way to ensure his latest pledge of water relief enjoyed support from prominent Republicans as well as Democrats — although it meant enduring strong criticism from those to his left.

With attention to gain through sensational news reports, media outlets often have been pulled in the direction of activist environmentalist perspectives. For now, however, a fragile cooperative balance has prevailed in Sacramento.

False warnings

Analysts and policymakers have built steadily on a broad understanding that California’s water reserves have fallen to historic lows. But in an effort to raise the alarm, a NASA water scientist with a professorship at the University of California, Irvine touched off nationwide concern that California would run out of water entirely in just one year.

Although Jay Famiglietti actually warned in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece that California has about one year’s worth of water stored in its reservoirs, the Times triggered a wave of dismayed coverage by sensationalizing the editorial’s headline.

“California Has About One Year Of Water Left,” it read. “Will You Ration Now?”

“A previous version of this article’s headline,” as a subsequent Times correction ran, “left the impression that California has only one year of water left.”

The corrected version, currently online, now reads, “California has about one year of water stored. Will you ration now?”

“Famiglietti said it gave some the false impression that California is at risk of exhausting its water supplies,” the Times later reported of the original headline. “The satellite data he cited, which measure a wide variety of water resources, show ‘we are way worse off this year than last year,’ he said. ‘But we’re not going to run out of water in 2016,’ because decades worth of groundwater remain.”

The correction did not erase the many stories it inspired from the internet. News outlets from MSNBC to Fox News picked up on the one-year claim, and have yet to pull their stories. Wired, which did try to fact-check the apparent claim, wound up arguing that California faced more like three years until it went dry.

Legislating morality?

Although the truth has pointed in a different direction, the flurry of misleading reports helped reinforce the notion that only draconian measures could save California:

• As far away as Great Britain, the claim surfaced in the Daily Mail that the drought had turned parts of California into “an environmental time bomb.”
• According to KRCR News in Redding, Californians discovered the drought was driving up the flea population.
• The Washington Post reported on California’s rough ski season.
• The relatively snowless slopes also imperiled California’s efforts toward hydroelectric power, as the Christian Science Monitor reported.

The drumbeat of stories created the impression of a state on the brink of an economically harmful transformation.

Already, an expert consensus has formed strongly around the need for increased conservation. “Although scientists seem to have differing opinions on exactly how much water remains available for California, they all agree that the state’s citizens need to step up conservation efforts to keep the dwindling supply available,” Weather.com observed.

But officials and scientists have also agreed that a full-blown catastrophe was not around the corner.

Still, Brown recently chose to speak out with vitriol against Republicans he characterized as in denial about climate change. But his use of terms like “immoral” to describe opponents of carbon emissions regulation created a controversy of its own, as some warned that a conservationist consensus would be harder to forge if skeptics believed they were seen as evil.

The peer review of the California Air Resources Board’s 2007 report on the economic impact of the law included criticism from a UCLA professor and other academics who faulted the air board for failing to acknowledge the law’s likely eventual impact on manufacturing, in particular. The air board has been more candid about the AB32 economic fallout since then. In 2009, officials warned of what is known as “leakage”:

Producers that face compliance costs may not be able to pass costs through to consumers because their competitors that do not face similar costs do not have to increase prices. … Industries in this category may include non-ferrous metals smelting, iron and steel-making, cement, and other energy and/or emissions intensive activities.

But the typical California coverage of AB32 rarely discusses this prospect. Instead, it often uncritically accepts the idea that green jobs created directly and indirectly by AB32 will be its primary economic effect.

‘Manufacturers are the canaries’

But the national media generally look at the law differently. Bloomberg news service offered the latest example with a Feb. 5 story:

California manufacturers from food processors to apparel makers are warning costs will skyrocket if state regulators proceed with a plan to reduce their allocations of free greenhouse gas emission credits.

Starting in 2018, some companies California considers to be at risk of losing business to competitors outside the state’s landmark emissions cap and trade market will receive up to 50 percent fewer free pollution credits. That means they will either have to buy more allowances at auction or invest in ways to cut carbon pollution even more.

California has the toughest greenhouse gas curbs in the U.S., seeking to cut discharges to 1990 levels by 2020. The pushback from industry comes as Governor Jerry Brown and other state Democratic leaders are looking to advance those climate change policies further even as business leaders warn that lack of a national and global carbon-emission market puts companies in the state at a competitive disadvantage.

“Manufacturers are the canaries,” said Dorothy Rothrock, president of the California Manufacturers & Technology Association. “All of the costs in this system are radiating up and concentrate in manufacturing. It’s cumulative and it’s not happening anywhere else like this. California is doing it to its manufacturers in a way that no other state is contemplating.”

NYT: ‘Risks for CA are enormous’

In 2012, The New York Times offered a similar take about California’s “grand experiment”:

 The outsize goals of California’s new law, known as A.B. 32, are to lower California’s emissions to what they were in 1990 by 2020 — a reduction of roughly 30 percent — and, more broadly, to show that the [cap and trade system of selling emission rights] works and can be replicated.

The risks for California are enormous … the program could hurt the state’s fragile economy by driving out refineries, cement makers, glass factories and other businesses. Some are concerned that companies will find a way to outmaneuver the system, causing the state to fall short of its emission reduction targets.

“The worst possible thing to happen is if it fails,” said Robert N. Stavins, a Harvard economist.

The contrast with California media is pronounced. A Los Angeles Times editorial about AB 32 from last summer, for example, doesn’t even mention the law’s economic risks. Nor does this story from November about how an Indian tribe is taking advantage of one of the law’s provisions.

But the Times did acknowledge concerns that AB 32 would force the cost of gasoline higher for motorists. The effects of higher energy costs on business were not mentioned, however.

This doesn’t make much sense. A $68 billion project with no serious prospects for long-term funding — a project that won’t come close to meeting a dozen promises made to state voters to win $9.95 billion in bond seed money in 2008 — should face near-universal skepticism.

The claim that opposing such a hugely flawed initiative is based on partisan motivations, as many project defenders have alleged, doesn’t make sense just based on known, uncontested baseline facts.

One liberal who often makes this point with energy and clarity is Kevin Drum, a writer for the very liberal Mother Jones magazine and website.  Here’s a sampling of the Irvine resident’s bullet train coverage from early 2012:

Unrealistic cost projections have never been the only reason to be dubious. There were also unrealistic ridership projections, along with unrealistic estimates of what the alternatives to high-speed rail would cost. …  check this out:

‘The rail authority has relied heavily on New York-based Parsons Brinkerhoff, a contractor that helped fund the political campaign for the $9.9-billion bond measure passed by voters in 2008….In October, Parsons submitted the analysis that came up with the $171 billion, a number that initially appeared in the authority’s draft business plan released Nov. 1. In the study, Parsons first estimated how much passenger capacity the system would have at completion in 2033 and then calculated the cost for providing the same airport and highway capacity.

“Parsons said the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with 1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year. The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average.”

This is just jaw-droppingly shameless. There’s not even a pretense here of providing a reasonable, real-world traffic estimate that could be used to project the cost of alternative infrastructure. A high school sophomore who turned in work like this would get an F.

We are rapidly exiting the realm of rose-colored glasses and entering the realm of pure fantasy here. If liberals keep pushing this project forward in the face of plain evidence that its official justifications are brazenly preposterous, conservatives are going to be able to pound us year after year for wasting taxpayer money while we retreat to ever more ridiculous and self-serving defenses that make us laughingstocks in the public eye.

The not-so-high-speed rail project

Here’s Drum writing earlier this year:

Here is today’s round of non-shocking news:

“Regularly scheduled service on California’s bullet train system will not meet anticipated trip times of two hours and 40 minutes between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and are likely to take nearly a half-hour longer, a state Senate committee was told Thursday. ….

“Louis Thompson, chairman of the High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group, a state-sanctioned panel of outside experts, testified that ‘real world engineering issues’ will cause schedules for regular service to exceed the target of two hours and 40 minutes. The state might be able to demonstrate a train that could make the trip that fast, but not on scheduled service, he told lawmakers.”

And remember: not a single mile of track has been laid yet. In the space of a few years, based solely on planning documents that are almost certainly still too rosy, the cost of the project has already doubled; travel times have blown past the statutory goal; ridership estimates have been halved; and every plausible funding source has disappeared. Just imagine what will happen once they start building this thing and begin running into real-world problems.

Somebody put a stake through this project. Please. LA to San Francisco is just not a good showcase for high-speed rail. Even the true believers have to be getting cold feet by now.

If only that were true. Now let’s contrast Drum’s sober analysis with the take of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board.

It’s a gamble, and not one to be taken lightly. But gasoline isn’t going to get any cheaper in the future and the freeways aren’t going to get less clogged. We think California can find a way to get the train built. We think it can. We think it can….

Yes, the L.A. Times actually invoked “The Little Engine That Could” in defending this project. Not just dumb. Embarrassing.

The steepening drop in gasoline prices in recent weeks — spurred by soaring domestic energy production and Saudi discounts for crude oil at a time of faltering global demand — is set to provide the United States economy with a multibillion-dollar boost through the holiday season and beyond.

The windfall, experts say, comes at a critical moment, with the American economy on the upswing but facing headwinds from other quarters, including weaker exports because of slow growth overseas. Gas prices recently dropped below $3 a gallon for the first time since 2010, while crude oil prices have fallen by more than $25 a barrel since midsummer, settling on Thursday just above $74.

“If oil prices stay between $75 and $95 a barrel, we would see the kind of stimulus package that the Federal Reserve or Congress could never do,” said Douglas R. Oberhelman, the chief executive of Caterpillar, the multinational maker of heavy construction equipment.

The NYT article doesn’t talk about any raging debate over fracking’s safety. The newspaper has repeatedly acknowledged that the Obama administration considers fracking to be safe if properly regulated and has never given serious ink to the apocalyptic claims of fracking haters.

Which brings us to the Los Angeles Times. On Friday, the newspaper continued its absolutely bizarre tradition of raising safety concerns about fracking without noting that the greenest administration of all time thinks it’s safe. It comes in a story about L.A. City Council members agitating for a citywide fracking ban and finding resistance from city staffers who are skeptical that would be legal:

Councilmen Mike Bonin and Paul Koretz, who championed the ban, said in a letter Wednesday that they were “extremely disappointed” that the planning department had not drafted the rules as it was asked to do nearly nine months ago.

“Your report outlines interesting recommendations and important considerations,” Bonin and Koretz wrote to the deputy director of planning, Alan Bell.

“The council, however, asked for a draft ordinance establishing a fracking moratorium for its consideration, not a report without an ordinance attached,” the councilmen wrote. …

The Los Angeles City Council voted in February to start drafting rules that would prohibit hydraulic fracturing — commonly known as fracking — and other kinds of “well stimulation” techniques until adequate environmental safeguards are adopted by state and federal governments.

Does the LAT note that the federal government strongly believes it has “adequate environmental safeguards” in place? Nah. It has a pathetic tradition to continue. This is from CalWatchdog in May 2013:

Say what you will about The New York Times, but at least it’s not in denial about fracking the way The Los Angeles Times is.

Friday’s LAT coverage of new U.S. Interior Department rules for fracking on 756 million acres of public and Indian lands depicted the rules as being strongly objectionable to both enviros and the energy exploration industry.

The NYT coverage made the industry whining seem more pro forma and offered this essential point that the LAT couldn’t bring itself to point out:

“The 171-page proposal is the first significant regulation issued under the new interior secretary, Sally Jewell. Ms. Jewell worked in the oil industry in the late 1970s and proudly said that she fracked a few wells in Oklahoma.

“Ms. Jewell said in a conference call for reporters that the administration would continue to lease large tracts of public and Indian lands for oil and gas development and that it was critical that rules keep pace with technology.

“Anticipating criticism from environmental advocates, she said: ‘I know there are those who say fracking is dangerous and should be curtailed, full stop. That ignores the reality that it has been done for decades and has the potential for developing significant domestic resources and strengthening our economy and will be done for decades to come.’”

NYT quotes Obama Cabinet member; LAT quotes flack

The L.A. Times’ account put in the “fracking is safe and has been around forever” context by quoting an oil industry trade association spokesperson. The NYT quoted THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR!

Quite a gigantic difference. But than the LAT’s Neela Banerjee and Wes Venteicher and their editors can’t have Times’ readers knowing the Obama administration likes fracking, can they? It doesn’t fit the West L.A.-Marin County-NRDC narrative.

Pretty incredible how blatant the LAT bias is here. Can’t discomfit readers with a jarring truth.

Now, rarely enough, we’re seeing a second unified front among some dissimilar editorial boards at large state newspapers. The issue: lightly disguised attempts to manipulate the regulatory process to kill or severely damage Uber, Lyft and other innovative companies that use smart phones and individual drivers to create transportation networks that often are cheaper and easier to use than taxis, limos or other alternatives.

Here are excerpts from three editorials in the last week.

L.A. Times: Driving away innovation

Just as Silicon Valley is a hotbed for innovation, Sacramento is a hotbed for regulation. Those two impulses are clashing now over a new generation of tech companies that uses smartphone apps to connect ride-seekers with drivers. If lawmakers aren’t careful, the regulations they’re poised to impose could snuff innovation across the sharing economy.

At issue is whether the Legislature will impose a second layer of rules on companies such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar in addition to the ones the state Public Utilities Commission has been setting over the past year. To its credit, the commission recognized that these “transportation network companies” are fundamentally different from taxi companies, despite similarities in the services offered. The commission’s rules for driver and vehicle safety recognized the risks to passengers, but also that the drivers were freelancers using their own vehicles on a part-time basis, not full-time employees using cars dedicated to carrying passengers.

Nevertheless, some lawmakers allied with the taxi industry are now arguing that what’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. With little or no evidence to show that the ride-sharing services are as risky as traditional taxis, they nevertheless are pushing to make the former comply with several of the regulations that apply to the latter — or even more stringent ones.

The current version of one bill, AB 2293, proposes that ride-sharing companies carry more coverage when their drivers have no passengers than cab companies in L.A. are required to carry when their taxis are full.

Read the online version here.

The O.C. Register: Saddling rideshare services with uber-insurance

Cheering the bill is a coalition of special interests. Taxi drivers and companies, who are rapidly losing business to ridesharing companies, welcome the chance to impose higher costs on their competitors. The industry complains about regulatory disparities, yet it seeks to raise protectionist regulations on others, rather than lower its own regulations, which would open taxis up to more competition. …

There was a time when Microsoft and other tech companies were loath to stoop to lobbying the government. They were naïve enough to think that they should invest their hard-earned revenue in developing new technologies and finding better ways to serve their customers and stay ahead of their competition, rather than courting politicians. Then reality hit when the government cracked down with costly regulations and bogus antitrust charges. Now the ridesharing companies are learning this lesson.

Read the online version here.

U-T San Diego: Ridesharing bill: The stench in Sacramento

Under the bill, ridesharing companies wouldn’t just have to meet the state edict that they have $1 million commercial insurance coverage while a passenger is in their cars; they would have to have such coverage “from the moment a driver logs on to the application” linking them with a ridesharing network.

This mandate has no nexus with passenger or driver safety. Hitting a button on a smartphone and glancing at a screen while driving is an extremely common thing for drivers to do. If it were truly dangerous, our morgues would be overflowing.

That’s why it’s not the American Automobile Association or public-health lobbyists pushing AB 2293. It’s taxi and limousine companies that don’t want competition — with a huge assist from insurance companies, which love the idea of costlier coverage mandates, and trial lawyers, who expect to win bigger settlements from those required to have more expansive coverage.

I wrote the U-T editorial. Read the full thing, with the show-offy “Jungle” reference, here.

Sorry, folks — you can just be wrong. Vergara reframes the way the public looks at schools in such a fundamentally anti-teacher union way that it’s going to make some of the most familiar teacher arguments seem idiotic. For example, the frequent CTA refrain that it is “fighting for children” is going to seem laughable (or Orwellian) to anyone who has read Vergara coverage.

To those in denial — to the folks I still meet who think the CTA’s noble talking points are truly reflective of how the CTA wields its power — I’m happy to present evidence that three of the four most influential liberal newspapers in America agree with me. (The other one — the Boston Globe — may also be down on teacher unions, but I couldn’t find evidence it had written a Vergara editorial.)

N.Y. Times: ‘a new chapter in equal education struggle’

When states are sued for providing inferior education to poor and minority children, the issue is usually money — disproportionately more money for white students, less for others. A California judge has now brought another deep-rooted inequity to light: poor teaching.

In an important decision issued on Tuesday, Judge Rolf M. Treu of the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that state laws governing the hiring, firing and job security of teachers violate the California Constitution and disproportionately saddle poor and minority children with ineffective teachers.

The ruling opens a new chapter in the equal education struggle. It also underscores a shameful problem that has cast a long shadow over the lives of children, not just in California but in the rest of the country as well.

The plaintiffs in the case, Vergara vs. California, are nine public school students who charged that state laws forced districts to give tenure to teachers, regardless of whether they can do the job, making it virtually impossible to fire even the worst of them.

In a blistering decision, Judge Treu agreed: ”The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”

Washington Post: ‘groundbreaking ruling’

A judge who struck down California’slaws on teacher tenure and layoffs said the decision was based solely on the legal aspects of the case but added that he was mindful of the intense political debate about these issues. It is “beyond question,” he wrote, that there will be further political discourse. We certainly hope so. The issues about education equality laid bare by this groundbreaking ruling cry out for new ways of thinking. …

Treu … found that job protections afforded to teachers violate the rights of minority and low-income students to an equal education because they are the ones disproportionately stuck with the incompetent teachers who are hard, if not impossible, to fire. Constitutional rights in education typically have been tied to equitable funding, so the judge entered new territory by declaring a basic right to an effective teacher.

The trial featured powerful testimony about the effect of incompetent teachers on students. “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience,” the judge wrote.

Los Angeles Times:  Lawmakers ‘too deferential’ to CTA

California’s extraordinary protections for public school teachers were dealt a heavy blow Tuesday when a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled that the state’s tenure laws unconstitutionally deprive students of an adequate education. To this extent, the judge’s opinion was absolutely correct: The tenure laws are bad policy. In almost no other field of work is it remotely as hard to fire someone for incompetence, or for not doing the job at all. Lawmakers have been far too deferential to the powerful California Teachers Assn. over the years, and now they have been given a strong prod to change their ways.

I’m glad that this ruling has gotten as much coverage as it has. But it’s odd that no newspaper I could find on Nexis or Google had done an analysis piece about how this might affect the Dem coalition. How can all the party’s minority lawmakers stand proud with the CTA and CFT after this?

I truly am baffled by the absence of stories on this obvious angle. The intraparty fight pitting Asian lawmakers vs. Latino and black lawmakers over Prop. 209 has been covered by the Sacramento media. Why not this?

I have heard that some journos think my criticism is unfair and/or that I am a loopy ideologue. My response: However I feel (or however you feel) about fracking, isn’t it an obligation for California newspapers to relate how the, yunno, FEDERAL GOVERNMENT feels about its safety?

Of course it is.

This weekend, I revved up Nexis to see it the media blackout continues. I searched for stories that mentioned “California” and “fracking” from June 14, 2013, to June 14, 2014:

Times, Bee and Chronicle fracking coverage

I found 132 stories in the Los Angeles Times.

How many mentioned the Obama administration considered fracking safe?

One — a June 21, 2013 op-ed by Rock Zierman, CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Assn.

I found 124 stories in the Sacramento Bee.

How many mentioned the Obama administration considered fracking safe?

One — a March 30, 2014, op-ed by Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association.

The Bee ran a piece from McClatchy’s D.C. bureau in late November 2013 that didn’t even raise the question of fracking’s safety; it just pointed out how widely used it was and how it was transforming the economy of several states.

So I guess that one counts, giving the Bee two stories that give the Obama perspective on fracking safety.

I found 61 stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.

How many mentioned the Obama administration considered fracking safe?

Two, by staff reporter David R. Baker. Another Baker piece describes Obama as a fracking supporter.

So that gives the Chronicle three.

So there were 317 stories mentioning “California” and “fracking” for the past year, and only six mentioned that the Obama administration considers if safe — and two of those were op-eds from oil trade association executives and one was a wire story.

So only Baker’s three stories amount to staff-produced journalism on California and fracking from the state’s three most influential newspapers that noted the profoundly important fact that the greenest administration in U.S. history sides with those who say fracking is safe.

Draw your own conclusions. Sure looks like groupthink to me.

Green, please-the-Sierra-Club groupthink.