Viewpoints: The Status Quo Isn’t Working. We Need A Wildfire Prevention Plan.
Also, following the shooting in a California bar, opinion writers weigh in on how to reduce gun violence.
San Jose Mercury News:
Newsom Must Seek California Summit On Wildfires
The devastation caused by California’s wildfires demands dramatic, immediate action. The status quo in forest management isn’t working. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom should invite federal and state leaders for a California Summit on Wildfires on Jan. 8, the day after his inauguration. The goal: forge a comprehensive wildfire prevention plan that can be implemented in 2019. Taking immediate action will stamp the governor as a man of action and offers the best chance the state has to fix a deadly crisis. (11/13)
McClatchy:
How We Can Slow California’s Fires
The Camp Fire has claimed more than 50 victims, and we continue to look for those who are missing. The Tubbs Fire, around Santa Rosa, killed 22 in 2017. Mudslides following the Thomas Fire in Southern California killed 20 people last year. Just months ago, seven people perished in the Carr Fire in Redding. There are nearly 9,000 firefighters battling blazes this week in Malibu and Butte County. Californians are anxious. And with our attention fixed on Paradise, we wonder: who’s going to be next? (11/15)
San Jose Mercury News:
Hold PG&E Accountable For California Wildfires
Californians will have to wait to discover the cause of the tragic Camp Fire that has claimed at least 48 lives and burned nearly the entire city of Paradise. But they shouldn’t have to wait to make PG&E more accountable for the utility’s failure to properly maintain its equipment. It’s unacceptable that the Legislature continues to enable a utility business model that favors putting profits before safety. Enough is enough. (11/15)
Orange County Register:
California’s Predictably Blue Midterm Elections – And What It Means For You
As any devoted follower of the political left’s playbook should [know, San Francisco] has adopted a government health care system for the poor, Healthy San Francisco. The program places a financial burden on the small businesses that collect fees to fund it, and their customers who are taxed with passed-on costs. Now imagine such a program operating statewide. Costs would be enormous. There’s no coincidence that the program was signed into law by [Gov.-elect Gavin] Newsom, an unapologetic proponent of a single-payer health care system modeled after Healthy San Francisco that would surely break the state if implemented. (Kerry Jackson, 11/14)
Los Angeles Times:
To Stop Mass Shootings, Put Tighter Restrictions On Semiautomatic Guns
Recent history shows that mass killings in the U.S. don’t follow a single script. But there is one common element shared by many of these tragedies: legal access to semiautomatic guns. Domestic terrorists such as the mass shooters in Thousand Oaks, Pittsburgh and Parkland, Fla., come from different demographic backgrounds and have different characteristics. Few reforms are likely to stop them all. But all three killers used semiautomatic guns, which research has shown are more lethal on average in terrorist attacks than explosives or other weapons. And all three managed to kill and injure more people than the terrorist who mailed homemade pipe bombs to high-profile targets in October. (Benjamin Bahney, 11/15)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Mass Shootings — When The ‘War On Terror’ Comes Home
Even as gun control advocates celebrated election gains last week, the country was in the grip of terror following mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Thousand Oaks. This terrorism is not purely a domestic phenomenon, but a product of America’s relationship with the world: Terrorism in American life is inseparable from American violence in the world. (Priya Satia, 11/14)
Los Angeles Times:
The Sooner We Build Housing For Homeless People, The Sooner They Can Get Off The Sidewalk
Building housing is a long, slow affair. It’s even slower when developers are building housing for homeless people. Just cobbling together financing from myriad sources can take up to two years, and then there’s the permitting, the political haggling, the inevitable negotiations with neighbors. So it’s encouraging to see two different attempts to speed up this lumbering process. (11/14)
Sacramento Bee:
Sacramento Finally Helping The Homeless. Why Are We Still Fighting?
No one in Sacramento, for example, wants people to be homeless, living in a tent under a bridge, in an alley or along the American River Parkway. But not everyone is eager to have a pop-up Sprung emergency shelter in his or her neighborhood, as [Mayor Darrell] Steinberg has warned could be in the works when he announces a list of potential sites next month. And no one wants to see families and elderly tenants on fixed incomes priced out of their apartments and forced onto the streets — or into cheaper parts of the city, displacing other residents. Everyone wants more affordable housing. But, given the abject failure of Proposition 10 to free cities from the restrictions of the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, it’s clear not everyone is OK with rent control as a solution. (Erika D. Smith, 11/12)
Los Angeles Times:
Americans Are So Stubbornly Inactive, Public Health Advocates Are Getting Desperate
Public heath advocates appear to be getting desperate over the state of Americans’ inactivity. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Monday released a new set of physical activity guidelines and they are ... ah ... interesting. Instead of prescribing the standard block of sustained physical activity — previously at least 10 minutes at a time — the government is now urging Americans to, you know, move around more during the day and sit less. (Mariel Garza, 11/14)
Los Angeles Times:
Half Of All Underage Smokers Choose Menthols. We Need To Kick Kools To The Curb
Anti-smoking advocates say that a rule banning menthol cigarettes, provided it is not watered down or undermined, would be the most important tobacco reduction action the FDA has ever taken. Today, about a quarter of all the cigarettes sold are mentholated. Half of all smokers under 18 choose menthols, according to the FDA, perhaps because the light minty taste makes it easier to ignore the health-destroying damage done with each inhalation — and also because advertisements for menthol cigarettes are especially common in publications targeted to young people. (11/13)
Los Angeles Times:
A Texas Abortion Procedure Ban Is Unnecessary, Full Of Theatrics And Harmful To Women
The Texas state Legislature has been relentless in its efforts to stop women from exercising their legal right to an abortion. When the Supreme Court tossed out the state’s onerous requirements for abortion clinics and providers in 2016, the statehouse just kept churning out other restrictions, both absurd (such as the requirement that fetal remains be buried or cremated, which has also been struck down) and serious. The 5th Circuit should see a restriction on this common and safe second-trimester procedure as onerous and unlawful, and uphold the injunction. (11/12)