Our team has a Facebook presence and we are grateful to all who follow us as we release our Views of the Week and periodic analysis on it for the Facebook Community. The most recent Facebook fiasco was discussed by Trevor Noah and his "Bar Scene" was hilarious--but emblematic of the challenge Facebook faces as it made almost 40 Billion Dollars monetizing all the data:
Wednesday, June 6, 2018
Notations On Our World (Special Mid-Week Edition): On #Primary2018
California and seven other States held primaries last night. Our home state of California had its' open primary and the Democrats based on our assessment are in an interesting position going into the general elections.
Our Editor was on the road in our Orange County Community and produced this Visual Essay which we are pleased to feature:
The Team at the Daily 202 provided a snapshot of the primaries which we just received at our Virtual Newsroom:
Our Editor was on the road in our Orange County Community and produced this Visual Essay which we are pleased to feature:
The Team at the Daily 202 provided a snapshot of the primaries which we just received at our Virtual Newsroom:
-- It cost millions of bucks, but Democrats appear to have avoided their nightmare of getting locked out of competitive House races in California. The state’s quirky jungle primary system means the top two finishers face each other in November, and the national party apparatus mobilized to make sure a Democrat finished in the top two. California is notoriously slow at counting ballots, so several races have not been called yet and it may take days to know the final results, but with nearly every precinct counted in Orange County, Democrats are confident this morning they’ll have a nominee in all the winnable races in SoCal. “In California’s 39th, 48th and 49th congressional districts, Democrats at least ended the night in second place,” Dave Weigel reports. “In the 39th, lottery winner and Navy veteran Gil Cisneros led a Republican candidate in the battle for the No. 2 spot by more than 3,000 votes. In Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s 48th, two Democrats — Hans Keirstead and Harley Rouda — were battling for second place, both were roughly 1,000 votes ahead of Republican Scott Baugh. And in the 49th, Democrats Mike Levin, Sara Jacobs and Doug Applegate were more than 3,000 votes ahead of the nearest Republican.”
-- Democrats need to flip 23 seats to win the House in November, and California and New Jersey alone could theoretically get them about a third of the way there. Democrats are credibly targeting a half dozen of the 14 Republican-held House seats in the Golden State.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows. Roby’s rebuke of the president nearly two years ago now – for, let’s not forget, saying he can get away with groping women because he’s a celebrity and boasting about making passes at a married woman (while he himself was married to Melania) – drove Trump loyalists into the arms of a longtime Democrat who voted to make Nancy Pelosi the speaker of the House and only recently became a Republican. Roby has been a reliable conservative vote, and she’s bent over backwards to emphasize her fealty to Trump’s agenda, specifically on tax cuts and the border wall. In California, Cox was able to get the second spot because Trump came out strongly and repeatedly for him on Twitter. This is toxic in a general election out West, but it helped gin up GOP turnout. Cox, an accountant, previously lost three elections in Illinois and a random presidential bid. Ironically, Cox didn’t support Trump either in 2016. But now he’s an outspoken booster. “It wasn’t Donald Trump who made California the highest tax state in the country,” he said last night. -- Speaking of taxes, a Democratic state senator in Orange County got recalled over his vote for a new gas tax. Freshman Josh Newman went down because he supported a 12-cent-per-gallon tax. The race wasn’t even close. The recall passed by 20 points. This means that Democrats have lost their supermajority in the state legislature, at least until the end of the year. That’s not a huge deal because there’s not really much else on the agenda. But it’s a reminder that taxes can be a super potent issue. Republican strategists still hope to use the national tax bill passed in December as a winning issue in the midterms, warning that people’s taxes could go up if Democrats win the House. 
Judge Aaron Persky poses for a photo with a lawn sign opposing his recall in Los Altos Hills, Calif. (Jeff Chiu/AP)
-- For the first time in 87 years, a California judge was recalledfrom the bench thanks to the #MeToo movement. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to just six months in jail after his conviction for sexually assaulting an unconscious student. The case became a cause celebre for sexual assault survivors.Persky, 56, had served on the court since 2003. He argued that it would set a bad precedent to remove a judge from office over a decision that was lawful. His supporters warned that ousting Persky would prompt judges elsewhere to impose lengthier sentences for sex crimes so they can keep their seats. For victims and their advocates, that sounds just fine. The recall campaign was chaired by Stanford Law Professor Michele Dauber, and many students at Stanford – where the assault took place – got engaged in local politics for the first time.
Debra Haaland, who won the Democratic primary for Lujan Grisham’s seat, may become the first Native American woman to ever serve in Congress. If Lujan Grisham wins, and she is the front-runner despite a few damaging stories in the past few days, it would be the first time in U.S. history that a woman has succeeded another woman as governor. South Dakota Rep. Kristi Noem won the GOP primary for governor, putting her on a glide path to becoming her state’s first female governor. And a 28-year-old state legislator in Iowa, Abby Finkenauer, won the Democratic nomination to take on vulnerable GOP Rep. Rod Blum in a battleground district. She would be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
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Monday, June 4, 2018
Notations On Our World (Weekly Edition): Out & About In Our World....
Tomorrow is Primary Day here in California and throughout the United States. The on-going debate over the weekend as the President's unlimited powers were discussed and his own attacks on the Russia Probe ensued has aroused a lot of passions on all sides no doubt. The President's Lead Lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, again made the rounds of the US Public Affairs Show this past Sunday and tried to advance the President's Views exemplified by this appearance on ABC's this week. This is also as the UN came out with a devastating report on the Trump Adminstration Policies and its' impact on Children. We look forward to sharing perspective on this with a special focus on what transpired in Orange County which we believe is a window of what potentially to expect as the November Elections Loom. The Heritage's Daily Signal noted profound concerns about the reality of the policies pursued by the President as well:
Trump’s Budget: $984 Billion Deficit Next Year
"The current fiscal path is unsustainable," says President Trump, "and future generations deserve better." But his budget doesn't reflect that.
In addition, there was this from the ADL on current appointments at the National Security Council:
Fred Fleitz most recently served as the senior vice president for policy and programs at the Center for Security Policy, an extreme, hawkish think tank that promotes the false conspiracy theory America is under threat from “Islamization” and that the implementation of Islamic law is imminent. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said Fleitz’s role with CSP “should automatically disqualify him from a position that deals with America’s most essential foreign policy and national security interests.”
Read more
Around our Community, though, it was a very challenging weekend as our community was faced with a profound challenge as some 250 Acres burnt away threatening Soka University and residences throughout Laguna Beach and Aliso Viejo:
We commend all the first responders who forcefully were at the forefront of response to the fires. Our community is blessed beyond words by their valiant efforts on a consistent basis.
Beyond the shores of America over this weekend, we were also assessing the on-going situation in Iran as especially in light of a hard-hitting editorial written in the New York Times by the former Foreign Minister and Iran's Ambassadors' to Washington Under the late Shah, Ardheshir Zahedi on how the latest moves by the Trump Administration which was one of the most viewed articles of all places--the Islamic Republic News Agency. This was also as The President was exposed ordering his Minister of Communication to begin the process of blocking the likes of Telegram--the messaging App--despite his public pronouncements to uphold Freedom in the Country as his weakness continues to be exposed--and as over 100 leading artists boycotted his invite to a Ramadan Event:
This is also as Turkey's elections loom with profound results throughout the region. There is also of course the on-going Tariff war that saw all members of the G-7 coming out forcefully underscored by what the Canadian Prime Minister noted in this interview on NBC's Meet the Press:
It is bound to be quite a week in Our World as we note this from the Financial Times' Edward Luce:
Edward Luce: Launching a simultaneous trade war against America’s allies and adversaries conforms to no known international rules of logic. https://t.co/GqwLs90B8f— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) May 31, 2018
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