About Last Week…

If you’ve been reading the Globe lately, you may have noticed a series of articles about eight of the ten current candidates for Los Angeles County District Attorney.

And eight of the ten will almost assuredly will be the final number.

That’s because the campaigns of current DA George Gascon and challenger – and Gascon Lite – Jeff Chemerinsky have ignored all requests for, well, anything.

Shocked?  Surprised?  Amazed?  Nah.

Gascon didn’t even show up to the candidate debate, so to expect him to chat with the Globe is the same as expecting him to put a criminal in jail – just not going to happen.

Chemerinsky did make an appearance at the debate and stood out by tempering his criticism of Gascon (the other candidates did not hold back in pointing out his dangerous deficiencies) and by using the phrase “criminal justice reform” and saying “mass incarceration doesn’t work.”

And with Gascon’s popularity lower than a cash bar at a wedding, progressive nabobs and solons and movers and shakers in LA are seriously starting to slide over to Chemerinsky’s campaign.

Word is a number of progressive groups – save George’s stalwarts in the Democratic Socialists of American clan –  in and around LA are deeply split over the Gascon/Chemerinsky issue.

It should be noted that Gascon and Jeff’s dad, the notorious dean of Berkeley Law Erwin Chemerinsky, were allies.  

Both have the same ideology when it comes to “criminal justice reform” – the ideology being to eliminate criminal justice entirely – and Erwin even served on Gascon’s “transition team” when he entered office in 2020.

Erwin was one of George’s “law enforcement accountability” advisors.

In other words, they’ve met.

To emphasize Erwin’s woke/progressive/equitarian bona fides, his Berkeley department gave ousted San Francisco District attorney (and, like Gascon, recipient of George Soros funding) Chesa Boudin a job as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the school.

Now, not every son asks their father for approval for their career decisions.  But to assume that Jeff and Erwin didn’t talk about him running against Erwin’s friend and compatriot George beggars belief.

In other words, Erwin has thrown Gascon aside.

Erwin’s connections and Jeff’s ability to honestly say he has actually put people in jail and that he would be a better DA than Gascon (ANY of the people running against him – even two thirds of the people in the phone book –  would be better) is sparking glimmers in the eyes of the moneyed glitterati who want to stay in power but are tired of Gascon:

“If we go with Jeff, he’s still a progressive so voting for him will assuage my white wealthy westside woke guilt, but it will also mean I can carry my $40,000 purse down the street without being that worried about getting mugged.”

False and selfish, but still a very appealing line of thinking to those who think that way.

The other eight candidates are obviously better by orders of magnitude than either Jeff or George.  So, just in case you missed them, here are the profiles (in no particular order) that have run over the past few weeks:

David Milton 

Judge Debra Archuletta 

Judge Craig Mitchell 

Jon Hatami 

John McKinney 

Eric Siddall 

Maria Rammirez 

Nathan Hochman 

And now moving on to the international impacts of Gascon and Boudin – the upcoming APEC conference in San Francisco.

One thing you have to give credit to Chinese state-run media for – they can write a nasty headline:

I do not speak or read Chinese, but the San Francisco Standard says that Chinese papers and websites have been hammering away at the city with headers like “Total Failure,” “Garbage City,” and “Ruined City.”

More than a whiff of truth there.

All this is in anticipation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit set to start Saturday and disrupt traffic until the end of next week.

President Biden will get to meet President Xi of China, only a couple weeks after Gavin and Xi had a bit of chin wag involving nothing of substance in Peking.

In an effort to make at least part of the city presentable to the 30,000 or so people of international import that will be arriving soon, San Francisco is creating security areas, shooing away hot dog vendors, painting public art, and opening up new shelter beds for the homeless.

City officials have also reportedly placed the single largest order for Clorox bleach in recorded history and rented every U-Haul in the Bay Area not already headed to Texas to gather up the miscreants with offers of free anything as long as they get in the truck.

Admittedly, those last two may be a bit of an exaggeration, but also may not be terribly far from the truth.

For his part, Xi will smile and nod when Biden speaks and not need a translator to realize the President of the United States is a doddering dementia patient speaking – and possibly even seeing – gibberish.

And Xi will smile even wider when he sees San Francisco and its fetid despair, the fetid despair he works constantly to spread all over America.

We’ve run this picture before, but I still can’t help but seeing this as the perfect metaphor for Xi in San Fran:

Thanks for reading the Globe!