NATE COHN, NY Times: "After a long week counting mail votes out west, a Republican House majority now seems in sight.
It might still be days until the major decision desks can project that Republicans have won the 218 seats necessary to win control. But over the weekend, Democrats fell short of their targets in the late count in critical battleground districts in Arizona and California.
The sometimes good — but not good enough — results for Democrats raised the bar for what the party needs in the votes yet be counted, while making a late surge seem even less likely."
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), the long-running Democratic leader, hasn’t yet announced her plans, nor have her top two lieutenants, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) and Whip Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.).
“I’m not making any comments until this election is finished and we have a little more time to go,” Mrs. Pelosi said on ABC on Sunday. “I wish it would be faster, but it isn’t.”
TARYN LUNA, LA Times: "Donald Trump often denied that he watched CNN, but Gavin Newsom readily admits he’s a regular Fox News viewer.
And he hates what he hears about California.
The conservative cable network often criticizes the “California exodus” of residents who can’t afford to live here. Fox News host Tucker Carlson calls the state “a Third World country” that can’t keep the lights on."
JESSICA FLORES, Chronicle: "The United States Postal Service is investigating how potentially dozens of ballots went missing and were later found near a highway in the South Bay, Santa Clara County officials said Sunday.
An individual reported seeing ballots and other mail Friday near Highway 17, which cuts through San Jose to Santa Cruz, according to Santa Clara County’s Registrar of Voters. The exact location where the ballots were found was unclear, as was the number of ballots involved, although officials estimate there were one to two dozen.
The USPS was apparently in possession of the ballots when they went missing, said Steve Goltiao, a spokesperson for the county’s Registrar of Voters, in a statement."
JENAVIEVE HATCH, SacBee: "In some of California’s most conservative counties, where Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Dahle was the clear favorite over Gov. Gavin Newsom and where anti-abortion Christian conservatives are leading in partial returns, voters still showed up for abortion access by supporting Proposition 1.
The pro-choice measure, which will enshrine abortion and contraceptive access in the state constitution, was likely to pass from the beginning. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, Newsom vowed to make California an abortion sanctuary, and at a Proposition 1 election night watch party, he celebrated its passage with Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California President and CEO Jodi Hicks in Sacramento.
“It’s a point of pride, and it’s a point of principle,” he said."
LIAM GRAVVAT, Capiltol Weekly: "The impacts of California’s interminable drought are well-known. But one aspect has drawn little relatively attention — its relationship with environmental laws.
Last year was the second-driest water year on record, with all 58 California counties placed under a drought emergency proclamation, according to California’s official drought website. The map shows how the vast majority of California is suffering from moderate to extreme drought conditions.
The impacts of a water shortage ultimately will affect everyone in California as usable water continues its downward trend, says California Water Watch, which tracks the state’s water conditions. It notes that the next two decades could see California lose “10 percent of its water supplies” due to the warming climate."
MARCOS BRETON, SacBee: "When I started my journalism career more than 30 years ago, I was considered a “minority hire.”
It’s a pejorative term rooted in the backlash against affirmative action programs that have helped increase opportunities for racial and ethnic “minorities” in employment and education. The term “minority hire” is like a code for fraud. It meant you only got your job because you were a racial and ethnic minority, a reality that smacked 23-year-old me like a brick to my face.
Back then, I had little understanding of how my entry into my chosen profession coincided with efforts to make American newsrooms more reflective of their communities."
Opinion, GARRY SOUTH, Capitol Weekly: "Well, here we are, just milliseconds after the 2022 mid-term elections, and the inevitable speculation has already begun about who will run for president two years hence. Donald Trump has strongly hinted he will announce another run next week.
For Democrats, the conjecturing almost necessarily includes whether Kamala Harris will run if Pres. Joe Biden chooses to stand down. It might be a moot point, because Biden has sworn he is planning to run again in 2024 at the ripe old age of 81 — and has let drop that First Lady Jill Biden has given her assent.
But if Biden should change his mind, or — God forbid — be incapacitated in some way, the focus will instantly and understandably shift to Harris. After all, a sitting vice president is an obvious potential candidate to replace their boss, and recent history has seen plenty of them try — Al Gore in 2000, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Richard Nixon in 1960. And two former Number Twos, Joe Biden in 2020 and Walter Mondale in 1984, ran four years later to succeed the presidents with whom they served."
DAN WALTERS, CalMatters: "Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.”
Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge penned those words in his 1798 poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” to describe the plight of becalmed sailors who could die of thirst while surrounded by limitless expanses of undrinkable seawater.
In a way, it also describes California’s plight. Despite its 3,427 miles of Pacific Ocean coastline, including bays, inlets and tidal marshes, the state has an ever-widening gap between its demand for water and its supply."
MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP: "Apple is heading into a courtroom faceoff against the company behind the popular Fortnite video game, reviving a high-stakes antitrust battle over whether the digital fortress shielding the iPhone’s app store illegally enriches the world’s most valuable company while stifling competition.
Oral arguments Monday before three judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals are the latest volley in legal battle revolving around an app store that provides a wide range of products to more than 1 billion iPhones and serves as a pillar in Apple’s $2.4 trillion empire.
It’s a dispute likely to remain unresolved for a long time. After hearing Monday’s arguments in San Francisco, the appeals court isn’t expected to rule for another six months to a year. The issue is so important to both companies that the losing side is likely to take the fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, a process that could extend into 2024 or 2025."
BOB EGELKO, Chronicle: "The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s largest appellate court and one of its most liberal, is a perennial target of Republicans, who have called for breaking it up while counting on the Supreme Court to overturn its rulings. A new book by two veteran journalists says Donald Trump, while president, asked an aide to try to eliminate the San Francisco-based court.
After the appeals court ruled against one of Trump’s orders in 2018 to speed up the deportation of immigrants seeking asylum in the United States, the president told Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, “Let’s just cancel” the court, according to “The Divider,” by Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. If legislation was needed, he said, she should draft a bill to “get rid of the f—ing judges” and send it to Congress.
Nielsen, who had no authority to abolish a court, “did not bother arguing” with Trump and just ignored his demand and hoped he would forget about it, the authors wrote. She left office in April 2019 — a departure described in varying accounts as a resignation or a firing — after the president complained that his appointees were not doing enough to close the U.S.-Mexico border."
