About Last Week… Flying Abortionists, Anyone?

Last week, Gavin Newsom –  before heading off to Georgia to get trounced (take that Sacramento Bee!) by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – announced the creation of the $20 million dollar state Reproductive Health Services Corps (RHSC).

The money is meant to help “diversify” the health care employee-base, teach pharmacists about something you would think they already know about, and to plug “provider gaps in underserved areas.”

It is this last element that is the most intriguing and has the most possibilities for the greatest direct public impact of the RHSC. 

By the way, the name was clearly chosen very intentionally as “Corps” always sound so noble, don’t they?  The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Peace Corps are both good things, right?  I guess this would be the Civilian Reduction Corps…but I digress.

But just imagine:  to reach “underserved areas” the RHSC rolls out a program akin to the RFDS – the Royal Flying Doctors Service that brings medical care to the Outback in Australia.

You are standing in a field outside of Fresno and you hear something in the sky and you turn your eyes upward.

“Look!  It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  No, it’s an abortionist!”

Headlines could abound:  “Imperial County Carpet Bombed with Condoms,” or “Puberty Blockers Airlifted to Isolated Boy Scout Camp,” or even “RHSC Parachutes Crates of “Gender Queer” onto Inyo.”

More terrestrially, the RHSC could take old mosquito DDT fogger trucks out of mothballs and start driving them through neighborhoods, leaving clouds of hormones in their wake.   To ensure equity, one side of the street would get estrogen, the other testosterone.

The possibilities boggle the mind.

Speaking of mindboggling, the reaction to Thursday’s Newsom/DeSantis debate was, well, mindboggling.

The Los Angeles Times and the SacBee vehemently declared Newsom the winner while simultaneously calling the whole idea stupid and incredibly biased anyway.

The Times even went so far as to write this:  

“Newsom was on the defensive for much of the debate as Hannity focused on taxes, crime, late-term abortions, California’s high gas prices and other topics on which conservatives believe they have the upper hand politically.”

In other words, how dare you ask the governor of a state plagued by crime and homelessness and taxes about crime and homelessness and taxes: don’t you know those are Republican issues that only wild-eyed Trumpian whackos care about? For shame.

Most of the national media went along with this kind of take on the debate, even though anyone watching could plainly see – “How Dare You Believe Your Lyin’ Eyes?” that Newsom didn’t answer the questions and when he did speak he made absurd claims and told straight-up lies.

Newsom said he looked forward to the “fact checkers” taking apart the debate. But something interesting happened – they didn’t bother.  Only PolitiFact and the New York Times bothered to fact check the debate – CNN, USA Today, AP, FactCheck.org, Reuters, NPR, etc. all passed on the opportunity to, um, prove Newsom right.

Well, if you can’t say anything nice…

PolitiFact, surprisingly and to its credit, actually pointed out Newsom’s fablications. While they passed on a number of whoppers, they did, for one, note that Newsom calling DeSantis a “lockdown governor” was transcendently absurd.

“Newsom borrowed a page from former President Donald Trump’s playbook by misleadingly portraying DeSantis as a lockdown leader. Newsom’s comments focused on DeSantis’ actions in the pandemic’s first few weeks, when nearly all governors operated in lockstep,” wrote PolitiFact.  “Newsom omits that DeSantis reopen earlier than most governors in the spring of 2020.”

As to the New York Times, it deployed California-based and Newsom fan girl Shawn Hubler to check the debate.

Hubler claimed California did better during the pandemic, a lie, and said essentially the same number of people are moving from Florida to California as the other way around, utterly missing the actual question raised:  why are people moving out of California to “red states” – states, plural.

“(A)s for Californians leaving “in droves,” to be clear, there are still 39 million people in California,” Hubler wrote. “And the outflow to Florida last year wouldn’t fill the Florida Gators’ football stadium.”

It should be noted that Hubler – in response to Newsom being called “slick,” actually posted the following during the debate:

“Newsom actually is not slick in person. He tends to be pretty sincere and nerdy.” 

You can practically see her writing “Mr. Gavin and Mrs. Shawn Newsom XOXOX” in big hearts with arrows through them over and over again on her notebook in history class.

DeSantis’ use of the San Francisco “poop map” also engendered a few interesting responses, with many media outlets dismissing it because, in part, it was out of date.

First, no city should ever have a need for a “poop map” in the first place – can we at least agree on that, no matter that it was three years old?

Second, the maker of the “poop map,” Open the Books, was so pleased it was mentioned in the debate that it updated the map.

It does not help San Francisco’s case:

Brownout in the Bay Area! 💩
OpenTheBooks updated our San Francisco poop map. Here's what we found: https://t.co/Au7JfDFxgq#TruthMatters #GovernmentTransparency #FiscalAccountability #OpenGovernment #SanFrancisco #PoopMap pic.twitter.com/AYCSpqZxtp

— OpenTheBooks (@open_the_books) December 1, 2023

Also not helping San Francisco’s case is their little tiny rental problem.

Prior to the crushing pandemic response, the commercial rental vacancy rate was (Trump was president, by the way) about 3%, which is in fact really zero when you figure in run-of-the-mill natural “we’re moving to a better location to serve you!” churn.

It is now 35% – twice the national rate – and is heading to 40% next year (when, by the way, Biden will still be president.)

Sure, work from home and the destructive pandemic response played a role in the demise, but to say they make up the lion’s share of the blame is to ignore things like, well, the “poop map.”

The tech layoffs are a big factor, too, but the general state of fetid decay of the city really doesn’t help.

Note – four years ago, the national rate was about 11% and, again, San Francisco’s was functionally zero. It is the highest it’s ever been, it outstrips every other city in the country by a noticeable amount, and rent has fallen to below the national average.

Think about that – it is now officially cheap to rent an office in San Francisco.

Now there’s a sentence that hasn’t been typed in a forever.

Thanks for reading the Globe!