• Gov. Jerry Brown took to MSNBC’s Meet the Press on March 26 to speak against President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall, which Brown called “ominous.” Brown was in Washington, D.C., for his first official visit to the White House since President Trump took office. “I don’t like that wall,” Brown told host Chuck Todd, who reminded Brown that he has the power to fight the president’s wall using legal action, although Brown instead hinted at a subtler approach. “We’ll be careful, we’ll be strategic, and we’re going to do the right, human, and I would even say Christian thing from my point of view.” On the show, Brown then called out Trump on his Christian values. “Trump’s supposed to be Mr. Religious Fellow, and I thought we’ve got to treat ‘the least of these’ as we would treat the Lord,” Brown said to Todd. “So I hope he would reconnect with some of these conservative evangelicals, and they’ll tell him that these are human beings, they’re children of God.” Brown compared Trump’s wall to the Berlin Wall. “When I see that 30-foot wall, are they trying to keep me in or keep them out?” Brown said on the program. “We’re not going to sit around and just play patsy and say, ‘Hey, go ahead. Lock us in. Do whatever the hell you want. Export—deport … 2 million people.’ No, we’re going to fight, and we’re going to fight very hard.”
• Remnants of the Cold War surfaced during an inquiry from Congressman Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) to Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti in a U.S. House Armed Services Committee hearing on March 28. With Russia being accused of interfering in democratic elections around the world, including in the 2016 elections in the U.S., Carbajal asked Scaparrotti what a “whole of government approach” would be in deterring a military threat from the country, according to a news release. Carbajal even called out his own branch of government—which is controlled by Republicans—for not digging deeper into the accusations. Scaparrotti replied: “We see them work politically. We see them use economics as leverage. We see them use information to influence populations—some of that is disinformation as well. For us to be effective, we have to respond across all of those domains as well. And we did this during the Cold War. As a government, we had overarching objectives with respect to the Soviet Union then, but we need overarching objectives today. It’s a very general description, but that is literally where we need to go. It’s to influence them and not to have conflict, but to avoid conflict with them.”
• On March 29, California state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) introduced Senate Bill 62, or the Affordable Senior Housing Act of 2017, which would create an affordable senior housing program within the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. In a press release, Jackson said the bill was inspired by Rona Barrett’s efforts to build the Golden Inn and Village low-income senior housing project in Solvang. Jackson said the bill is designed to encourage the building of similar projects throughout the state to prepare for the influx of aging retirees. “California must prepare itself for a tsunami of aging residents as baby boomers turn 65 and our senior population grows,” Jackson said in the release. “Projects like these won’t just serve the needs of our seniors, they will also provide jobs for caregivers and staff, and serve as an economic boon to their area.”
• California Sens. Kamala Harris (D) and Dianne Feinstein (D) both joined 44 of their colleagues urging President Donald Trump to veto a resolution that would undo consumer privacy protections enacted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that are designed to prohibit internet service providers from selling or sharing the sensitive personal data of customers without their consent. The letter signed by 46 Senate Democrats, including Harris and Feinstein, notes that if the resolution is signed into law, a consumer’s most sensitive personal data, including browser history, could be sold to the highest bidder without their knowledge. “The FCC’s rules were finalized following a lengthy and transparent rulemaking process where members of the public were able to review the rules and submitted more than 250,000 comments,” the letter reads. “S.J. Res. 34 … will not only undo this transparent process, it will prevent the FCC from ever reinstating similar consumer privacy protections in the future,” the letter stated.
This article appears in Apr 6-13, 2017.