After six years and countless public hearings, Santa Barbara’s City Council finally approved an overall plan for revamping State Street.

Unfortunately, it’s so hideously expensive, at $6-8 million a block, that no one has a realistic notion of how to pay for it.

That’s Topic A on this week’s episode of Newsmakers TV, as Ryan P. Cruz, Josh Molina and Nick Welsh join the genial host to break down the politics and policies underlying the council’s 6-to-1 vote in support of two hours worth of pretty-picture presentation slides the State St. master plan, purporting to show the future of Santa Barbara’s once-great, now-shabby main downtown corridor.

The gang also critiques Sheriff Bill Brown’s faint-hearted performance amid ongoing provocations by federal immigration agents who scorn the county’s effort to rein in ICE brutality, and election czar Joe Holland’s contempt for the Board of Supervisors, as he collects a huge salary and a pension check, all while working at home and occasionally checking in with the staff by text.

Plus: Why a local judge tossed a lawsuit from those freaky developers seeking to erect a highrise behind the Mission; Nick deciphers new U.S. Postal Service protocols while urging early mail-in voting; Josh delivers a rousing endorsement of Chelsea Lancaster; Ryan’s still rocking a Dodgers hat despite their recent lackluster play, and the host unveils a new Zoom background, courtesy of Mayor Sheila Lodge.

All this and more, right here, right now on Newsmakers TV.

Check out Episode 565 via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

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The central question in the campaign for the low-profile — but decidedly consequential — office that musters public records and runs elections in Santa Barbara County is this:

Can an incumbent with major health challenges effectively manage a $22 million department with 100 employees - via Zoom and text?

For 68-year old Joe Holland, who was first elected in 2002 to the post of County Clerk-Assessor-Recorder, the answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’:

“Is it ideal? No, but I effectively manage,” Holland told Newsmakers. “And I think my track record shows that I have effectively done it and I’m looking forward to get back in the office as soon as possible."

For 51-year old Melinda Greene, Holland’s chief deputy clerk-recorder for the past 12 years – and for all five members of the Board of Supervisors, who support her election challenge to him - however, the reaction is a resounding “no.”

“I’m showing, and he is not,” Greene said in an interview. “We need present and active leadership to provide the staff with the tools they need to deal with the challenges ahead.”

State of play. As a political matter, the choice between Holland and Greene in the June 2 election represents one of the more intriguing decisions in recent campaign history. As a policy matter, the contest carries high stakes for the community, coming at a time when the operations and integrity of local elections across the nation are under seige by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

Holland, who is afflicted with multiple sclerosis, for the past 18 months has been overseeing his department from home, and argues that he is doing so effectively, using technology tools that allow him to be reached 24 hours a day.

But Greene, who was hired by Holland 12 years ago to run the record-keeping responsibilities of the Clerk and Recorder section of the sprawling, four-division department, argues that his absence from the office is bad for workplace morale and unfair to taxpayers.

The match-up between the two is a down-ballot contest for an often overlooked office that provides significant, real-life services to local citizens: the County Clerk-Recorder is responsible for birth and death certificates, marriage licenses and documents involving real property, business filings and professional registrations; the Assessor appraises all taxable real estate and personal property; the Elections division operates all balloting in the county, from mail ballots to in-person precinct voting.

As the elected head of the department, Holland gets an annual salary of $275,511, with a benefits package worth $48,677; he also receives annual pension payments of about $43,000, to which he legally entitled under state law, for years of employment he served in the department before his election as its chief in 2002.

As Chief Deputy Clerk Recorder, Greene receives a salary of $220,205, county records show, plus a medical, pension and other benefits package of $117,762.

In an extraordinary move, all five members of the Board of Supervisors recently endorsed Greene in the race, and have chided Holland for his failure to show up in person to recent budget hearings, as he addressed them from home via Zoom.

“I’m available by phone,” he assured the supervisors. “All my division managers are able to get ahold of me instantaneously. They can call me, and I’m on it in a heartbeat.”

Teaming up with Josh Molina of the News-Press and the “Santa Barbara Talks” podcast, Newsmakers hosted both Holland and Greene on our program this week to discuss the race, the work of their office, and the contentious circumstances surrounding U.S. elections in 2026.

Key quotes from each candidate:

Joe Holland

On managing his office remotely, from home. “It’s not the ideal situation. I want to be in the office and I will be in the office (but) I have been available 24/7 for the last 18 months…Is it ideal? Like I said, no, it's not, but I'm going to change that…During that 18 months, we've conducted three elections and no voter in the county has had an issue with anything that's gone on.”

On his prognosis. “Various neurologists I've talked to, they say that my prognosis is good and I look forward forward to getting into the office soon, which may be a few weeks.”

On his opponent. “As the Chief Deputy Clerk-Recorder…she's done a very good job. So she's qualified in that respect. But across the whole department, she has absolutely no experience in conducting elections, administering elections, zero….and no experience in Assessor…I completely, 100 percent, disagree with her insinuation that the morale is bad. It’s not true.”

On election integrity. “This is nothing new with regards to what Trump or anybody else might do in this election, there’s not anything brewing locally…I’m monitoring it very, very closely. We know all the laws, we’ve gone over all the laws, we won’t have any law enforcement at a polling place, et cetera…So no, I'm not going to be turning over ballots. I'm going to follow the law and protect the ballots, but we’re not anticipating anything like that.

On state ballot initiative to require voter ID. Let me be very clear - there is no fraud whatsoever. You don't need voter ID. It works very well as it is. I think requiring voter ID voters, I am not in favor of that whatsoever.”

Check out our complete interview with Joe Holland via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. The podcast version is here (NB: Joe’s wireless was a bit balky so some audio is garbled).

Melinda Greene

On Holland’s absence. “I think if you are an elected official, you should be outward facing to the public….I'm showing, and he is not…We need present and active leadership to provide the staff with the tools they need to deal with the challenges ahead, both with budget or challenges on election integrity.”

On her qualifications. “I have dedicated my entire 30 years of career studying every possible craft I need to run this department in a technical and efficient way. I'm a certified public accountant. I'm a certified public finance officer. I'm an advanced appraiser. I'm a certified election official. I've worked in all the divisions.”

On election integrity. “What would help to alleviate people’s fears is more transparency, more communication…That’s different from me versus my incumbent… For example, many people don’t realize that this election is going to be June 2nd….So for starters, telling people, ‘you need to vote in the primary.’”

On transparency. “Ballot counting is very secure and we invite the public to watch… (Y)ou are welcome to come down election night. If you really want to see what's going on with your election, to me, the best way is to come see it in person, understand and be an observer.”

On safeguarding the ballots. “We've never had a sitting president threaten the polling sites with the National Guard. That's very different. So that does alarm me because that would not follow the law….The (law says) ‘election officials shall maintain custody.’ And there's very specific laws about chain of custody and how ballots are managed…Stay with the law and stay with my ballots. Bring my sleeping bag - protect the ballots.”

Watch our complete interview with Melinda Greene via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. The podcast version is here.

Image: League of Women Voters.

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By Robert Reich

On Wednesday, with all six Republican appointees in favor and all three Democratic appointees opposed, the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act.

In striking down a Louisiana voting map as a racial gerrymander, the court opened the door for other states to redraw their maps in ways that dilute the votes of minority voters.

But Justice Alito — writing for himself and the five other Republican appointees on the Court — did this by sleight of hand. Rather than directly strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, Alito weakened Section 2 so much he renders it almost toothless.

Alito’s sleight-of-hand. Until this decision, an assessment of whether a state violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act would begin with a simple question: Is a minority group sufficiently large and compact to form a single member district where they would have a fair chance of electing their candidate of choice?

Now, according to the test announced by Alito, plaintiffs get that chance only if a random computer model would give them that opportunity.

This is totally contrary to the history of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress amended in 1982 specifically to respond to an earlier Supreme Court decision (City of Mobile v. Bolden) in which the Court said plaintiffs had to prove discriminatory intent. Congress responded by saying that if a redistricting plan results in vote dilution—that is, has that effect — plaintiffs have proven their case.

Now Alito says that the Court must reject that 1982 law to avoid a clash with the 14th and 15th amendments. Rubbish. The ratifiers of those amendments engaged in race conscious legislation to protect former slaves. Everyone understood that those amendments permitted race consciousness in order to reverse America’s horrible history of slavery — which still has repercussions today.

Rather than be faithful to Congress’s effects test, Alito revives the intentional discrimination test:

In short, §2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.

This effectively guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It will end what has been the most successful way Black and other minority voters have gotten fair representation in Congress, state legislatures, and in local bodies. It will make all our legislative bodies whiter. It will significantly diminish protection for minority voters.

SCOTUS vs. Democracy. A Supreme Court so fundamentally hostile to the rights of minority voters places the Court at odds with democracy itself.

From now on, favoring a party is viewed as a venerable tradition in districting. And when a state favors a party in a way that significantly dilutes the votes of minorities, it’s not a section 2 violation unless minority voters would have been hurt without a redistricting plan that favors one party.

What does this means for the 2026 elections? In many states, primaries are over, or nearly so. But the decision could affect places still redistricting for 2026, including most importantly Florida. It could also affect state and local elections, from school boards and city councils to state legislatures.

Its major effect will be in 2028.

Justice Kagan’s dissent is correct. She notes that the Court is now bringing back the requirement that minority voters prove discriminatory intent — while denying it is doing so.

Bottom line. Alito knew precisely what he was doing today — make it seem as if he’s not gutting the Voting Rights Act through legal and technical gibberish, while turning it on its head.

Alito’s mission has long been to favor the white Republicans he seems to think he represents, rather than all Americans. His five Republican-appointed colleagues on the Court appear to believe the same thing.

Shame on them.

Robert Reich is a law professor, documentarian, author of 18 books and former U.S. Secretary of Labor. Subscribe to his newsletter here.

Watch: Reich discusses the Voting Rights Act decision with legal scholar Joyce Vance here.

Image: Teresa Burns Parkhurst cartoon for The New Yorker.

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Mega-kudos to David Gross, UCSB professor and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, for picking up yet another prestigious award, this one a $3 million grant presented at the “Oscars of Science.”

Our old friend Shelley Leachman, Editorial Director of The Current in the university’s news department, has the scoop:

“The Breakthrough Prize Foundation today announced physicist David J. Gross, of UC Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, among the winners of the 2026 Breakthrough Prizes, honoring scientists whose discoveries are significantly driving growth of human knowledge.

“The Breakthrough Prizes – popularly known as the “Oscars® of Science” – were created to celebrate the wonders of our scientific age…

“Gross, cited “for a lifetime of groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics, from the strong force to string theory, and for tireless advocacy for basic science worldwide, was awarded the 2026 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. “

A walk down memory lane. Back when mastodons roamed the earth, UCSB employed a future Newsmaker to “oversee” the student-run Daily Nexus, an oxymoron of a job if there ever was one, a gig which left ample free time in the workday to explore the wonders of the university.

At one point, your correspondent teamed up with UCTV to check out the marvel that is the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, where we homed in on Professor Gross, who recently had won the 2004 Nobel Prize for his work on “the strong force”; this work included the solution to the “last great remaining problem” of the Standard Model of particle physics and, oh yeah, a pioneering explanation of how the atomic nucleus works.

“Coming to Santa Barbara as a (Kavli) scholar,” one physicist who studied at the institute famously recalled, “is like joining a brotherhood in a place of worship to physicists that is as Jerusalem as to the Jews or as Mecca is to Muslims with David Gross as custodian of the holy shrine.”

Compelled by the chance to chat with the guy who knows as much as anyone on the planet about…everything…this reporter scored a sit-down with the great man, an ad hoc journalistic experiment to determine if a total science moron could gain a slight glimpse of comprehension of Gross’s personal and professional grasp of the most fundamental ideas that explain the universe.

The result, which you can view via YouTube below, or by clicking through this link, was an intriguing and engaging conversation, recently unearthed in a dusty old Newsmakers archive, in which the Smartest Man in the World patiently, cheerfully, and delightfully expounds upon the nature of reality to a luddite caveman equipped with endless dumb questions.

We hope you enjoy it.

Image: David Gross accepts the 2026 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in Santa Monica, April 18, 2026 (UC Santa Barbara News).

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By Jonathan V. Last /The Bulwark

All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.

That is Dickens describing the origins of the French Revolution. He regards the guillotine as a horror—an abomination—but believed that French society had become so dysfunctional, so disordered, that the abomination became inevitable.

Not justified, but inevitable.

I think about that passage often.

Trump mainstreamed violence. The heart of the Trump project has been mainstreaming political violence. It began in 2016 with Trump imploring his supporters to punch people they disliked. It continued with excusing the “very fine people” who rioted in Charlottesville. It morphed into explicit calls for a mob he called into assembly—and which he knew was armed—to march on the Capitol and “take back our country back” and “show strength” and “be strong.”

He later pardoned the members of this mob who had been convicted of violent crimes and even appointed one of them to a position in his administration. He ordered extralegal killings off the coast of Venezuela. His administration has referred to American citizens murdered by his regime as “domestic terrorists.” He has called his political opponents “vermin” and “enemies of the people” and said they are guilty of “treason.” He celebrates physical assaults on—and the deaths of—people he does not like. He has publicly said he might attempt to strip certain Americans of their citizenship so as to render them stateless.

He threatened genocide against a foreign population.

And then, when the culture of political violence he has willed into being comes for him, Trump is incredulous and aggrieved. As if people were not supposed to notice what he has been doing for a decade. As if violence is supposed to be a one-way street.

It reminds me a bit of the sputtering anger Trump and his supporters voiced after the pope condemned the war in Iran.

Trump and his administration had made a great show of not caring about woke rules of engagement and being alpha lethal warriors who killed without remorse. They published snuff films celebrating death and promised to commit war crimes. Again: The president himself threatened the Iranian people with genocide.

And then, when the Holy Father noticed these words and deeds and said, No bueno, Trump and his supporters were outraged.

How dare the pope notice all of the bad things he had said and done!

Violence is wrong. Full stop. It is bad that Cole Tomas Allen attempted to harm people at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It is bad that Thomas Matthew Crooks shot at Trump. It is bad that Ryan Wesley Routh planned to assault Trump.

What happened on Saturday wasn’t random or wanton or unexpected. It’s what follows from a world in which political violence is condoned and even encouraged. It will, eventually, break containment.

This is precisely why liberals warned about the dangers of Trumpism from the very start.

Because we understood that saying what Trump has said and doing what Trump has done would have terrible, unpredictable consequences.

Not a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn.

Why do we abjure political violence? It is a conditional rejection, not an absolute. The American Revolution was an exercise in political violence; so was the Civil War.

A liberal society rejects political violence because it views violence as an admission of the failure of liberalism.

Which is exactly why the forces of illiberalism revel in it. They understand that the spread of violence is an assault on the liberal order.

He hasn’t won yet. Liberalism has not failed completely in America. Not yet. The authoritarian attempt is still in the attempt phase; it has not overthrown the liberal order completely.

We are in a phase of asymmetric struggle in which Trump and his confederates will dole out—or celebrate—political violence, while the forces of liberalism must reject it not only because doing so is morally correct, but because that is the best path to political power.

To give in to political violence is to stipulate that we are in a place like the Revolution or the Civil War. That is not, as of this moment, correct. Pray we never arrive in such a place.

Jonathan V. Last is Editor of The Bulwark and writes The Triad newsletter. Subscribe here.

Image: Rioters seeking to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election lay siege to the U.S. Capitol (AP).

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On Tuesday, Supervisors Laura Capps and Roy Lee won approval for a trio of measures aimed at restraining and restricting federal immigration agents who try to seize community residents on county property or try to interfere with local elections.

One day later, three masked and heavily armed ICE agents blocked the entrance to the county jail in Santa Barbara, an action viewed by community monitors on-the-scene as an F-you provocation to local government:

“At the entrance, we were met by three ICE agents standing across the doorway, equipped with bear spray, mace, and guns,” the immigration rights group SBResiste posted on Instagram.; “the agents blocked entry and threatened to assault anyone who tried to enter,.”

On Friday, Capps and Lee spoke about the incident with Newsmakers TV, in a conversation that amplified the real-life public safety concerns underlying their legislative efforts to bring a measure of containment to uncurbed ICE operations in the county.

In our interview, the two supervisors also said that neither Sheriff Bill Brown nor elections chief Joe Holland have displayed awareness, urgency or concern sufficient to address the threats posed to Santa Barbara by the Trump Administration.

“This is a very fragile time in our community. This is not just a far-off problem in Minneapolis. This is here, this is here every day - it’s a tinderbox,” Capps said.

“We live in constant fear,” Lee added. “It’s hard to comprehend for ourselves, and my kids, that because of how you look, and the color of your skin, you could be victims.”

Amid ongoing actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents assigned to the Administration’s mass deportation campaign, the legislative package from Capps and Lee represents a case study of how elected officials locally, around the state and across the nation are struggling to craft legal means of protecting community members in standing up to the cruelty, brutality and randomness of the federal government.

Check out our conversation with Laura Capps and Roy Lee via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Watch more:

Here is Newsmakers’s recent in-depth and detailed interview with Sheriff Bill Brown about his department’s actions, and inactions, in response to federal immigration raids.

Image: On Wednesday, three masked ICE agents blocked community monitors from entering the county jail in Santa Barbara (Edhat).

(Editor’s note: Author and opinion columnist Thomas Edsall, one of the foremost political journalists of his generation, has a well-earned reputation for deeply reported analysis. In this piece, a gift article from the New York Times, he offers a clear and insightful evaluation of the damage Donald Trump has done in less than two years of his second term, and how political scientists and historians assess the harm. -jr).

By Thomas B. Edsall /The New York Times

The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.

It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to core democratic customs and traditions, from the legal system to universities, from innocent targets of fraud to those duped into believing vaccines do more harm than good.

One way to bring home the depth of Trump’s callousness is to look at a specific case. In May 2025, Anjee Davis, the chief executive of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News:

“We have a member who is being treated for Stage IV colorectal cancer. She had just qualified to enter a clinical trial that was going to be her last-chance effort to slow the spread of her cancer.

Her trial was about to start when N.I.H. funding was pulled overnight, and the trial was canceled.”

Davis replied to my inquiry about the case by email. “This patient has since passed away without receiving the clinical trial she was counting on,” she wrote.

“What we will never know,” Davis added, “is whether that trial could have given her more time with her children.”

Toting up the damage. I have described in earlier columns bits and pieces of Trump’s destructiveness, but the list grows daily.

Projections suggest there will be millions of dead men, women and children as a result of his budget cuts, which were made without direct Congressional approval. A study published in The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, found that Trump administration cuts in U.S.A.I.D. funding “would result in approximately 1,776,539 all-age deaths and 689,900 deaths in children younger than 5 years” in 2025 alone.

“Over the remainder of the period,” the study continues, “the complete defunding of U.S.A.I.D. would cause an estimated 2,450,000 all-age deaths annually, leading to a total of 14,051,750 excess all-age deaths and 4,537,157 excess under-5 deaths by 2030.”

There are the fraud victims who will never get court-ordered restitution because Trump pardoned the guilty. In a June 2025 report, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found that “Trump’s pardons cheat victims out of an astounding $1.3 billion in restitution and fines, allowing fraudsters, tax evaders, drug traffickers to keep ill-gotten gains.”

It doesn’t stop there. America can thank the president for environmental deregulation that could sicken and kill people by the tens or even hundreds of thousands.

Everything happens in such a rapid and scattershot way with Trump that it is easy to forget what happened as recently as last year.

An Associated Press investigation published in 2025 found that Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency was seeking to eliminate or weaken “at least 30 major rules that seek to protect air and water and reduce emissions that cause climate change.”

If successful, the E.P.A. would gut pollution rules that were estimated, according to The Associated Press, to save “more than 30,000 lives annually.”

At the same time, the administration has been canceling funding for lifesaving scientific and medical research. In November, JAMA Internal Medicine published “Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health.”

It said that “in the first half of 2025, the N.I.H. terminated grants supporting 383 unique clinical trials, affecting 74,311 individuals.”

In an accompanying commentary, two researchers, Dr. Teva D. Brender and Dr. Cary P. Gross, wrote about the JAMA study:

“There is a more direct and sobering impact of premature and scientifically unjustifiable trial terminations: the violation of foundational ethical principles of human participant research.

First and foremost, it is betrayal of the fundamental principles of informed consent for research” and “participants who have been exposed to an intervention in the context of a trial may be harmed by its premature withdrawal or inadequate follow-up and monitoring for adverse effects.”

In the October 2025 issue of Nature Medicine, Marianne Guenot reported that “at least 148 clinical trials have been impacted, with over 138,000 patients due to be enrolled or already enrolled,” as a result of cancellations. The word “impacted” falls far short of what’s needed to describe the plight of those 138,000 patients.

In their steadfast disregard for scientific study, Trump and his appointees have purposely elevated unfounded fears of vaccines, effectively guaranteeing more childhood illness and infection epidemics.

In addition to policies inducing sickness and death, Trump has undermined America’s ability to compete with China on clean energy. In September, CarbonCredits.com, an energy news platform, published “The A.I. Energy War: How China’s Solar and Nuclear Outshine the U.S.,” summing up the problem nicely.

• “China is on track for 1,400 GW, while the U.S. will reach only about 350 GW.”

• “China plans to add 212 gigawatts of solar and 51 GW of wind, compared to less than 100 GW combined” in the United States.

• “Offshore wind: China already has 42.7 gigawatts installed, compared with the U.S.’s Empire Wind project (816 megawatts in Phase 1, with a potential expansion to 2.1 gigawatts).”

Trump makes no secret of his disdain for renewable energy and the concept of climate change. In a speech in September to the U.N. General Assembly, the president said climate change, is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He added:

“All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country’s fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.”

Alienating allies. Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO, his tariffs, not to mention his endless carping against and routine faulting of European leaders, have alienated allies who have stood with us for more than seven decades.

Over the Trump years, European views of America have nose-dived.

On April 8, Politico published the results of a survey under the headline “More Europeans See U.S. as Threat Than China.” The survey found:

“Only 12 percent of those polled in March in Poland, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy saw America as a close ally while 36 percent saw it as a threat. By contrast, China was seen as a threat by 29 percent of those polled across the six countries.”

Trump has assaulted the integrity of the presidency, turning the White House into a corrupt enterprise, pardoning donors as his family’s companies receive millions through cryptocurrency purchases from foreign companies and crypto operators subject to U.S. regulation.

Trump’s agenda reaches far into the private sector.

Trump and his regulatory appointees cleared the way for his conservative allies Larry Ellison and Ellison’s son, David, to acquire CBS, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, along with the streaming service Paramount+.

If, as expected, Trump regulators approve their acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the Ellison media empire will grow further to include HBO Max, CNN and Warner Bros.

Consequential, indeed. I asked Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author of “The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism,” which will be published in May, to assess — without regard to merit — how consequential the Trump presidency will be.

On this measure he placed Trump in the Top 5 of American presidents, alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, noting, however, that “Trump’s consequences have been aggressive efforts to unravel the ideas of the other four presidents.”

Kettl listed some of the same permanent or semi-permanent Trump legacies that I already described, but he added a few:

“He’s driven a deep divide into the country: between the states, between migrants and many others, between classes and between the intellectual elite and the rest of the country.

He’s slashed the size of the federal bureaucracy and made federal jobs much less attractive. It will be a very, very long time until college students will trust the federal government with their careers.

He’s fundamentally undermined the idea of an annual budget process and the concept of a balanced federal budget. These ideas were teetering before his presidency, but the Trump administration gave up on any pretense of seeking balance or an annual spending plan.”

Michael Bailey, a political scientist at Georgetown, prefaced his assessment of Trump’s consequentiality by pointedly noting that he would rank Trump “as easily the worst president in U.S. history. The corruption and damage to long-term U.S. institutions and reputation are far beyond anything we’ve seen before,” including Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and Rutherford Hayes.

As for being consequential, Bailey continued, Trump has been “highly consequential in an overwhelmingly negative way. He will leave a lasting negative legacy.”

Bailey listed three of these legacies: “The erosion of trust in the U.S. by European and Asian allies; the erosion of U.S. dominance of higher education; and huge budget deficits (not only due to Trump, but exacerbated by him).”

Kate Shaw, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, cited “Trump’s violation of numerous statutes passed by Congress” to note:

“It’s not that particular decisions to violate statutes can’t be undone or reversed; many, perhaps even most, can. But the combination of the president’s numerous and flagrant statutory violations and Congress’s failure to challenge those violations has created a permission structure for future presidents to disregard statutes any time they find those statutes inconvenient.”

Gary Jacobson, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California-San Diego, expanded the case against Trump:

“He has done serious damage to many aspects of American government and politics that will be difficult and costly and, in some cases, impossible to undo.

“The mass firing of dedicated and experienced civil servants has made government dumber and weaker and will make it harder to attract talented replacements even if the next administration wants to make it smarter and more effective.

“The damage to scientific and medical research, the environment, relations with allies and trading partners, disaster preparedness, consumer safety, higher education, military leadership, civil rights, etc. will take years to repair even in cases where that is possible.”

It is already clear, Jacobson continued, that “Trump is among the most consequential presidents in U.S. history, and not in a good way.”

In an email replying to my questions, Barbara Walter, a professor of international affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California-San Diego, wrote:

“To flag one thing that belongs on your permanent list that likely won’t show up in the obvious places: norms.

“American democracy remained strong for so long because both its political parties and its presidents respected a set of unwritten rules.”

Adding that while formal checks “were essential, the oil that would grease the wheels of democracy would be norms,” Walter continued. Trump “has shown that you can violate them and survive politically. He’s torn down the invisible wall that kept the worst impulses of political life in check, and once that’s torn down, a new, ugly world emerges.”

Yphtach Lelkes, a professor at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, shares Walter’s concerns, writing by email:

“I’m less confident about which specific policies or institutions belong on which list than I am about the broader effect on norms. My guess is that this is where Trump’s longest shadow will fall.

“Norms take a long time to develop because they rest on habits of restraint and on the expectation that violations will be punished. But they can disappear quickly once it becomes clear that punishment is not coming.”

As a result, Lelkes wrote, “Trump’s most consequential legacy may be less any single policy than the lesson he taught politicians: Norms can be broken, repeatedly and openly, without necessarily paying much of a price.”

Restoring trust. While Trump’s norm violations amount to a major assault on American democracy, I am less convinced than Walter or Lelkes of the long-lasting damage.

In 2028, the Democratic presidential nominee and Democratic congressional candidates will all run on repudiating Trump, and even if a Democratic president is tempted to resort to arbitrary, Trump-like exercises of power, Democratic members of the House and Senate will be under strong pressure to put a halt to it.

Even Republicans in Congress, who have been spineless under Trump, would rise in fury if a Democratic president followed Trump’s example.

That doesn’t, however, mean that all will be well. The problem created by norm violations is less that they will become permanently accepted and more that it will take time — years and years — to restore the trust in government that Trump squandered.

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan‘s Ford School, addressed just this point in an email:

“Trump might be an empowered executive, but the effect is to weaken American government in any situation where people are asked to place trust in the long-term credibility of U.S. government commitments. This applies to private businesses, government employees and international allies.

“As Trump has created an environment where private businesses, universities or civil society can be threatened by the president, such organizations can assume that traditional norms of equal-handed application of the law, due process and fair treatment that they once took for granted no longer hold.

“For example, if the president says ‘My executive order allows me to fire civil servants for whatever reason I please,’ how much does it matter if another president reverses it, because in the long-run potential civil servants know they no longer have job stability?”

The Supreme Court has been complicit in the undermining of trust, Moynihan argued:

“By allowing Trump to claim these powers, the Supreme Court is weakening the ability of a future president or Congress to repair the damage he is doing today. If the court goes all in on unitary executive theory, it weakens the ability of Congress to bind the president from doing bad things.”

By eroding America’s government credibility and soft power, Moynihan concluded, “Trump can be both a hugely consequential president and a deeply damaging one.”

All of which points to one more indelible bequeathal: the stain on America left by the record.

Voters in this country twice elected a president with no ethics, no empathy and no end to his narcissism.

This op-ed ran was published in April 21 editions of the New York Times. Subscribe here.

Photo illustration: Salon.

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By Cheri Rae

In 2019, an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times set a reading revolution in motion.

In the article, education journalist Emily Hanford focused the attention of teachers, administrators and policy-makers on the state of Mississippi—yes, Mississippi. She detailed how the poor southern state had shown significant progress in improving reading scores in national testing results. More than any other state.

Hanford detailed how the perennially low-achieving state had systematically instituted radical changes in its entire approach to literacy instruction, with significant investment in retraining educators and administrators as well as strict measures of accountability in curriculum implementation to make unprecedented progress.

What became known as the “Mississippi Miracle” seemed easy enough to emulate by simply changing curriculum. Politicians of every persuasion, hoping for a quick fix to address low literacy, introduced science-of-reading legislation in at least 40 states (including California), instructing educators to adopt curriculum based on science.

Unfortunately, well-meaning policy-makers and educators didn’t quite understand the assignment, nor did they do their homework to learn enough about the extent of the hard work done in Mississippi.

The lesson that looms is that there are no shortcuts in reforming reading instruction—not in Mississippi or anywhere else.

As struggles with literacy endure in the Santa Barbara Unified School District - three years after adopting a new, science-based curriculum - barely over half of its students are reading at grade level.

And a series of new reports and commentaries by one of the architects of the Mississippi Miracle point to some of the specific reasons why our local schools are still failing students: Successful implementation of the new curriculum requires a comprehensive approach based on proven principles and accountability at every level.

Miracle workers. The “miracle” in teaching kids how to read took more than a decade to accomplish, and went far beyond a change in instructional materials.

It included strong, experienced leadership and an unwavering embrace of Mississippi’s four policy pillars: 1) standards, testing, and accountability; 2) consequences for poor performance; 3) evidence-informed instructional policy; 4) support for implementation.

Since that widely-read piece appeared in the Times, Emily Hanford has evolved, from a respected education reporter to a deeply knowledgeable and highly influential literacy leader who is widely quoted for her expertise.

In the course of reporting on reading, she has had a great influence on changing hearts and minds about what works, what doesn’t, and why. Her podcast, “Sold a Story,” is required listening for anyone who wants to understand the complexity of reading instruction.

Now, another expert in literacy instruction has come forward, who also has a lot to teach about Mississippi’s comprehensive approach.

Meet Rachel Canter, the founder of the educational policy and advocacy organization, Mississippi First. She was one of the architects of the policy reforms that significantly improved reading instruction in Mississippi, and currently serves as the head of education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.

She speaks with authority about what other states and districts are missing when they don’t fully grasp the breadth and depth of the commitment to change: It’s the hard, sustained work on all fronts that made all the difference in converting the perpetually bottom-dwelling state into the nation’s literacy leader.

Canter has recently shared her expertise in a series of reports, articles and interviews focused on the complexity and commitment that resulted in her home state’s transformational work in literacy.

“Mississippi’s progress is neither a miracle nor a myth, as some skeptics have insisted - it’s been a two-decade marathon,” she’s said.

She recently issued a 20-page report on the “Mississippi Marathon,” as she prefers to call it. In an article in the April issue of The Atlantic, “States are Learning the Wrong Lesson from the ‘Mississippi Miracle,’” Canter worries that other states have not gone far enough in emulating Mississippi’s success, and details how they need to do much more than simply change curriculum.

Flaws in California’s reforms. In her piece, Canter notes that California “passed a ‘landmark’ bill in 2025, framed as the fruits of a years-long to help more children learn to read. The state budget also funds science-of-reading training grants and some literacy coaches statewide.”

She also points out the flaws in the Golden State’s legislation: “But a lack of accountability presages failure for California’s big reform,” adding that, “California has also begun screening students for literacy difficulties, but only at the start of each year from kindergarten through second grade.”

District-Level Implementation. In a recent interview with the San Francisco Standard, Canter addressed concerns that reading scores in the San Francisco Unified School District— which adopted a Science of Reading curriculum in 2022 —are far from miraculous. Its school board recently extended by one year its ambitious goal of 70 percent reading proficiency among third-graders by 2027.

The first line of the article summarized the dilemma: “The San Francisco Unified School District spent millions overhauling the way its youngest students learn to read. Two years later, roughly half of third graders still can’t.”

SFSUD is not alone. Santa Barbara Unified has the same issue.

It’s been three years since SBUSD adopted its science of reading-based curriculum and offered optional teacher training in the intensive professional development program known as LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling).

The most current national test results for Santa Barbara Unified reveal that just 51.88 percent of elementary students in the district meet state standards in English Language Arts.

Canter’s observations about San Francisco Unified’s concerns about their disappointing results pinpoints areas that apply locally as well:

• Educators: “Are teachers being coached and by whom? How bought in are school administrators? Who is responsible for making sure teachers actually use the materials?” In San Francisco, an estimated one-third of teachers are not using the new curriculum, which she terms a “red flag.” She adds, “The question is why, and who is responsible for fixing that. But the deeper problem is in classrooms that are using the curriculum. Why haven’t we gotten to the change in student work we want to see?”

• School board: “Are board members looking at achievement data at every single meeting? Because if they’re not, they’re missing their most important job.” She continues, “I want to know immediately what the plan is. I want to know what coaching looks like, how administrators are holding teachers accountable, and what teachers say they need differently. And what is the consequence if we don’t meet these goals?”

• Equity in literacy: “When people tell me they deeply care about equity, and then they’re not willing to hold adults accountable for solving the problem, they don’t deeply care about equity. I want to see the action. What are you willing to do? Who are you willing to hold accountable?”

• Literacy leadership: “What are we all going to do, and how are we going to hold ourselves accountable?” She adds, “The easiest way not to make too many people mad is to say the right things and do nothing, but that’s why kids can’t read.”

While Canter offers Mississippi as a model, she cautions, “The formula is easy to understand and hard, but possible, to follow: coherence in policy design, careful implementation work, collective leadership, and persistence, persistence, persistence.”

Local concerns. For a community know around the world for its exceptionalism in so many areas, this headline from the district’s website seems hardly possible: “Santa Barbara Unified Celebrates Test Score Growth: Literacy Rate Moves above 51%”

What that means is that half the students still cannot read. Suggesting that these test scores are remarkable or soaring is misleading at best. Fifty percent literacy proficiency is not an expected part of the highly touted and much-envied “Santa Barbara lifestyle.”

This collective shrug about low literacy has been the norm in the district for more than a generation. I remember a decade ago when district administrators tied to explain away poor reading results by pointing to what they called, “pockets of hope.”

For half of our children, those pockets remain empty and hope unfulfilled.

Here in Santa Barbara, we might boast a world-class university, but it’s off-limits to half the kids who graduate from our schools.

SBUSD’s adoption, in 2023, of a new curriculum based on the science of reading was a step in the right direction.

And the recent decision to require LETRS training for some elementary teachers is commendable. That intensive course of study is essential for educators and administrators to understand how the brain learns to read and why this research-proven instructional approach works. Developed by respected researcher Dr. Louisa Moats, it is one of the cornerstones for districts making progress. (In a local example, Peabody Charter School—which has required the training since 2022—boasts 71 percent literacy proficiency.)

The comments offered and questions posed by Canter are a good place to start in an evaluation of SBUSD’s approach to reading instruction. And many more arise:

For example:

• State-mandated screening of reading difficulties is limited to grades K-2; what about screening for students in higher grades?

• Or those who display characteristics of dyslexia in any grade?

• What does remedial reading instruction look like for students in junior high and high school?

• What is the role of Special Education in all this?

• Where are the funding sources for the training and coaching?

• What are the concerns expressed by classroom teachers and administrators about their implementation-related challenges—and how are they addressed?

• What is the role of parents and of community members in supporting the district’s plans for literacy improvement?

A complete list would be much longer, but meaningful improvement requires analysis of at least these concerns, careful evaluation and candid discussion of the results.

Although the SBUSD school board has adopted literacy as a priority for the district, many questions remain about what exactly that means. But without clear, time-limited goals, strategies for achieving them, or measurements of accountability, it seems like more than a wish than a clear plan for success.

Bottom line. Literacy leadership is complex, and the message from Mississippi is that there are no miracles. The southern state’s successful route to meaningful improvement, however, can serve as a template if district leadership commits to comprehensive reform.

Two current school board seats—occupied by trustees Gabe Escobedo and Rose Munoz—will expire in December. Any candidate who runs ought to embrace a clear-eyed commitment to emulate the hard work accomplished in Mississippi—and then do it.

Reading is a right, not a privilege; it’s the public school’s responsibility to teach the skill that truly is fundamental.

As as the celebrated literacy expert Dr. Moats says, “we need to be outraged” about the current status quo.

Time was when one of my favorite SBUSD administrators—now long-gone—asserted, “Teaching all our students to read before graduation is a moral imperative.” That is a worthy, if belated, goal.

Cheri Rae, director of The Dyslexia Project, is a founding member of the Santa Barbara Reading Coalition (www.SBReads.org).

Image: The Dyslexia Project.

Further Reading

Oct. 10, 2018. “Why SBUSD Falls Short on Reading.”

Sept. 25, 2021. “Literacy Denial: As the Climate Changes on Reading Instruction, We Must Respect the Science.”

May 25, 2022. “SB County’s 50% Student Proficiency is a Scandal.” (with Monie DeWit).

March 21, 2023. “Pigs Fly: SBUSD Finally Pivot from ‘Balanced Literacy’ to ‘Science of Reading.” (with Monie DeWit).

Oct. 8, 2024. “Dispatch from DyslexiaLand: The Ongoing Struggle for the Right to Read.”

Happy 100th heavenly anniversary to Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, aka Queen Elizabeth II, born a century ago today.

Widely viewed as a ceremonial, if not trivial, world figure, the queen in fact wielded consequential and historic influence and power throughout her 70-year reign, via political and personal relationships with 13 U.S. presidents - an untold story revealed in a terrific, new book by celebrated national political reporter Susan Page.

On Thursday, Page’s author tour for “Elizabeth and Her Presidents” brings her to Santa Barbara, where she’ll be speaking, answering questions and signing books at the Community Environmental Council’s Environmental Hub from 6-8 p.m.

The event, sponsored by the News-Press in collaboration with the Santa Barbara Literary Festival and Voice News, is free but requires an RSVP here.

Susan’s day job is Washington Bureau Chief for USA Today; having followed, admired and respected her coverage of national politics for decades, Newsmakers is delighted to have been invited to lead the Q&A portion of the evening.

Her new book, the fourth she’s written about formidable women who struggled, persevered, and triumphed in arenas dominated by men, is stylishly written and exhaustively reported, packed with disclosures, anecdotes, and extraordinary nuggets of global history - not least behind-the-scenes true tales of the queen’s memorable 1983 visit to Santa Barbara and Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo (where, following a luncheon of tacos, enchiladas and chiles rellenos. she complimented her hosts on the “used beans”).

It also will be a treat to hear Susan’s take on broader political matters: having covered eight White House administrations and 12 presidential campaigns, she brings uncommon experience, insight and judgment to the, um, challenge of understanding the nation and the world in the Trump Era.

See Joy Martin’s News-Press takeout for more about Susan, the book and the event.

Image: Susan Page (Hannah Gaber).

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(Editor’s note: Amid a series of violent operations carried out locally by federal immigration agents, followed by a News-Press investigation that showed the scope and number of arrests in and around county jails is much higher than previously reported by Sheriff Bill Brown, demands have grown for Santa Barbara public officials to do more to protect community members. Today, we’re publishing an op-ed by Supervisors Laura Capps and Roy Lee that explains a new policy package they are introducing to address some of these concerns. /jr).

By Supervisor Laura Capps and Supervisor Roy Lee

For far too long, we have witnessed the devastating impacts of aggressive federal immigration enforcement – led by ICE – intensify across Santa Barbara County. We have heard directly from residents, families, educators, and business owners about the fear, disruption, trauma and instability these operations are causing.

Parents are afraid to take their children to school. Workers are avoiding public spaces. Businesses are losing customers. People are forgoing medical appointments. Entire neighborhoods are living with a level of anxiety that no community should have to endure.

Let’s be clear: however one may feel about the broader national debate on immigration policies, the way these enforcement actions are being carried out is harming our community and making us less safe.

And as local elected leaders, we have a responsibility to respond.

Three-part policy. That is why we are proposing a three-part policy in direct response to ongoing ICE operations in and around our county.

Our approach is grounded in three core responsibilities:

• Protecting the use of county property from federal immigration enforcement;

• Safeguarding our elections;

• Maintaining local control over land-use decisions that may involve the future building of detention centers.

First, we are proposing to prohibit the unauthorized use of county-owned property for federal immigration enforcement activities—including using public spaces as staging areas, processing locations, or operational bases—except in cases involving judicial warrants or the enforcement of criminal law.

We have seen reports of ICE agents using public spaces, including the campus of Santa Barbara City College, to stage enforcement actions without notice.

This is unacceptable. Public institutions—our colleges, our service centers, our parking lots, our community spaces—should not be used as launch points for operations that sow fear and chaos.

When ICE uses familiar public places in this way, it is intended to send a chilling message: that nowhere is safe. That is not a message we are willing to allow. We have jurisdiction over county property.

Second, we are taking action to safeguard the integrity of our elections and protect ballots once they are cast. In today’s political climate, we cannot ignore the dangerous intersection between immigration enforcement and voting rights.

Baseless claims about undocumented voting, combined with threats to “take over” elections, have created real concern that federal enforcement could be used—intentionally or not—as a tool of voter intimidation.

Elections are run by our county, and our county alone. That means we need to double down on the communications necessary for our voters to feel assured that their voices are heard.

Every voter deserves to cast a ballot without fear. Our proposal strengthens poll monitoring, expands civic participation, and ensures that clear “Know Your Rights” voter information is widely available. Protecting the right to vote means more than securing ballots—it means ensuring people feel safe enough to show up in the first place.

Finally, we are directing the County to evaluate its authority—within the law—to prohibit the siting, expansion, or operation of immigration detention or enforcement facilities in unincorporated Santa Barbara County.

With increased federal funding flowing to ICE and a renewed push to expand detention capacity, communities just like ours are facing proposals for new or expanded facilities.

We believe Santa Barbara County should not become a hub for a system that has too often operated without transparency, accountability, or regard for local impact. If such proposals arise, our community deserves a voice—and we intend to ensure that voice is heard.

Bottom line. Taken together, these actions reflect a clear principle: we will not allow federal immigration enforcement to operate unchecked in ways that harm our residents, undermine our democracy, or bypass local decision-making

Santa Barbara County is strongest when people feel secure, included, and able to participate fully in civic life. Tragically that is no longer the case for a significant portion of our community.

So we must do all we can to protect our constitutional rights and the fabric of our society. We believe those are goals worth standing up for.

The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors will discuss this policy at the Tuesday, April 21st hearing.

Laura Capps represents the Second District, and Roy Lee the First District, on the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors.

Image: ICE agents spray monitor Beth Goodman on the Eastside in January.

In an interview from Washington, Rep. Salud Carbajal assailed Donald Trump’s military action in Iran as “an illegal war” that puts American lives at risk and shatters U.S. alliances abroad, while fueling inflation and high gas prices at home.

Previewing Democratic messaging for the midterm elections, the five-term congressman from Santa Barbara on Wednesday described Trump variously as “unhinged,” “bonkers,” and afflicted by “dementia” as he called for administration officials to remove the president via the 25th Amendment. Carbajal also harshly criticized Republican House and Senate members for “abdicating” their constitutional power to decide whether to put the nation at war.

“Clearly this is an illegal, unsanctioned war that is costing us $1 billion a day,” he told Newsmakers. “This president is unhinged, and regrettably my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are letting him run amok.”

While offering his most extensive comments to date on the war, Trump’s proposed military budget and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Carbajal also discussed state and local policy and political matters, from the controversy over Sable Offshore Corp. oil operations, to his disgraced House colleague Eric Swalwell, and his own re-election race.

Carbajal, who faces three underfunded challengers, reported $3.2 million cash on hand in his latest filing with the Federal Election Commission; in our interview, he said Democrats are poised to take control of the House in the November elections and that a political “wave is coming” that could be large enough to flip the Senate as well.

He also bristled at recent criticism of him by one challenger, Republican rival Bob Smith, and refused to commit to a debate before the November run-off election.

“I’m not going to give Mr. Smith a forum where he can spew lies,” Carbajal said. “I will give it consideration, as I always have, but if Mr. Smith keeps doubling down on lies, I’m not going to give him a platform to continue doing that. I think debating him would only give him that forum.”

Excerpts from the interview:

On Iran. On a day when 10,000 additional U.S. troops were dispatched to the region, Carbajal termed Trump’s military action “a war of choice,” and complained that, “This guy has not put forth any credible plan, rhyme, or reason for doing what he did.”

“He’s been all over the map and has given 17 different reasons for the war. He hasn’t put forward a plan. All he did was go in, create chaos, make assumptions, and give the American people falsehoods. And now he’s dealing with the implications of that — including 13 service members dead, over 290 wounded, skyrocketing gas prices, and an exacerbated affordability crisis. That’s what this guy has done.”

On congressional Republicans. “They have been bending over backwards to support this president, not to call him on the carpet, not to stop his derelict and reprehensible behavior — often illegal things he’s done.”

“Congress is the only body that can authorize a war,” he said. “And clearly this Republican Congress has abdicated its proper responsibility of putting checks and balances on this president.”

On Israel leading Trump into war. “This president is easily manipulated, and certainly previous presidents have never agreed to take this approach — especially in this reckless way. He didn’t even give consideration to how the Strait of Hormuz would be impacted. He didn’t bring our allies along. He didn’t bring the American people along. This has just been chaos unfolding before our eyes.”

On Defense spending. Carbajal emphasized that he would not support the $1.5 trillion Department of Defense budget proposed by Trump. “Nobody in their right mind is going to vote for that — it’s ridiculous, and he’s proposing to cut domestic programs across the board: healthcare, research, education, transportation.” He also expressed strong opposition to a $200 billion supplemental budget request earmarked for the Iran war: “I’m voting against that yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”

On Eric Swalwell. Amid the sexual assault and harassment scandal that forced fellow California Democrat Eric Swalwell from office and to quit his campaign for governor, Carbajal said, “I didn’t know him very well” and had socialized with the congressman “maybe one time in the nine years I’ve been here.” While calling Swalwell’s conduct “reprehensible” and possibly illegal, Carbajal tap danced on whether he would support a Republican-led effort to revoke Swalwell’s government pension.

On the governor’s race. In the wake of Swalwell’s withdrawal, Carbajal underscored his earlier endorsement of former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a longtime ally and mentor: “Over the past three days, it’s my understanding that his star has risen and is rising. So he’s certainly amongst the individuals that are peaking towards the top…he’s certainly somebody who’s very well qualified.”

On offshore oil. As Sable Offshore has resumed pumping oil through a disputed pipeline, Carbajal said he is “hopeful and optimistic” that a lawsuit filed by the state attorney general — along with other administrative and local legal action — will halt operations that were approved by the White House. He offered no new legislative approaches for stopping the company.

On Re-election. Carbajal pushed back against comments made by Smith, the sole Republican among three challengers running for his seat in the June primary; the top two finishers advance to the November general election.

Smith recently called Carbajal “the most invisible congressman in the history of Congress.” After initially saying he would “not dignify Mr. Smith’s comments,” Carbajal defended his policy record and called the critique “ludicrous.”

“Anytime you run for this office, you can expect people to lie, distort, and exaggerate, because they’re desperate — they want attention,” the incumbent said.

He refused to pledge he would debate Smith if the Republican advances to the runoff, suggesting he would not.

“Mr. Smith needs to just be honest with the public and stick to facts,” Carbajal said.

Smith responds. Smith’s FEC report shows that he’s collected $164,000 for his campaign, including a $20,000 personal loan, and had $56,100 cash on hand as of March 31.

In response to Carbajal’s comments, Smith described the incumbent as a political mediocrity who is “a likable guy” who has not delivered “results.”

“After five terms, he is not a ranking member on a full committee or on any Appropriations, none of his sponsored bills have passed both houses, aside from one that dedicated a post office,” Smith said, adding that, “It feels like someone who is along for the ride until a maxed-out pension. Either get in the starting lineup as a senior congressman or step aside for more capable leadership.”

He also portrayed Carbajal’s position on debating him as hypocritical: “The same person who participates in protests about defending democracy now suggests he should not have to debate his fact-checked record to voters,” Smith said.

Check out our complete interview with Salud Carbajal via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

From Cape Ivy Flies to the Cultured Abalone Farm and Coastal Cleanup Days, to Channel Islands Restoration, cardboard pizza box recycling and Chumash Casino zero waste practices, the Central Coast is packed with people who’ve found practical, if imaginative, ways to protect the environment and build climate resilience.

Even as the shadow of the Trump Administration’s oil grab looms over the 56th annual celebration of Earth Day in Santa Barbara, there remains much to celebrate in the birthplace of the environmental movement.

In their third annual “Green Guide” magazine, Santa Barbara Independent Editor Marianne Partridge and Vicki Riskin, founder and president of Blue Dot Living publications, highlight a raft of solution-focused folks, non-profits and businesses that, day in and day, are doing real work that makes a difference.

On a special Earth Day episode, Marianne and Vicky return to Newsmakers TV for a conversation with the genial host about what’s inside this year’s issue of their collaborative venture — as well as the outside political threats that pose risks to the climate and a sustainable environment, starting with Trump’s corrupt approval of the Sable Offshore Corp.’s pipeline transport of offshore oil through the county.

The 52-page, well-designed and well-written “Green Guide” represents a joint venture by the two editors, a testament to the passion and commitment they bring to the job of environmental journalism.

Check out our conversation with Marianne Partridge and Vicki Riskin via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Clarification: The link to the Santa Barbara Literary Festival in Tuesday’s post about the event was broken This is the correct link to the affair.

On May 2 and 3, the first Santa Barbara Literary Festival is set to roll out through the streets of downtown — from the Lobero and Alhecama theaters, to the Karpeles Manuscript and Main Public libraries, the Hilton Beachfront and Kimpton Canary hotels, and many points in between.

A sprawling, strolling event packed with literary stars, the weekend fest is the brainchild of Leslie Zemeckis, three-time author, four-time documentarian, part-time podcaster and book columnist, and full-time force of nature.

“It is a celebration of storytellers of all genres, from screenwriters to inspirational speakers, to bestselling authors that are coming in from all over town, along with our local authors,” Zemeckis told Newsmakers TV this week.

“My model was really, one - Roger Durling’s a dear friend, and I love what he’s done with the Film Festival. And I thought, why can’t we do something like that with books?” she said. “And the L.A. Times, of course, their book fair is a big inspiration.

“So it was kind of combining those two ideas,” Zemeckis added. “Santa Barbara’s a no-brainer. It’s a destination point. My authors (whom she’s interviewed on her podcast, The Plotpoint), when I contacted them, were like, ‘yes, we’d love to come.’

“So it’s happening.”

‘Fabulously ambitious’. In her preview of the festival, SB Independent Arts, Culture and Community Leslie Dinaberg aptly described it as a “fabulously ambitious undertaking,” undertaken by Zemeckis and partner-in-planning Lorissa Reinhart as a “true labor of love.”

Zemeckis has traveled widely to visit book festivals, and returned from the San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, convinced that a similar celebration was a natural for her home town.

“By going to all these festivals, I saw what you needed,” she said in our conversation.

“You need the keynotes (and) you need to involve the community. That’s why the idea of doing it in downtown Santa Barbara, in various places, is really exciting, because you get the Lobero, you get the Library Plaza, and people won’t be inside in a conference room all day,” she added. “People will be walking the streets. It’s going to be very walkable. And you can also stop and get a coffee or go to a local restaurant and really just show the beauty of this place.”

Dinaberg’s piece supplies a substantive survey of the dozens of writers and panels to be on offer, the festival website offers complete information on scheduling and tickets, and our conversation with Leslie provides a behind-the-scenes at the event’s origin story - and the literary passion of its chief organizer.

“I get up with my coffee - I read. I read in the bathtub. I read before I go to bed. I take a book. After this, I have a doctor’s appointment. I’ll take a book,” Zemeckis said. “I read all the time in little pieces while I’m going to school full-time.”

Check out our full conversation with Leslie Zemeckis about the Santa Barbara Literary Festival via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

P.S. Newsmakers’ genial host will be a volunteer moderator for a festival panel that features an all-star lineup of OG journalists discussing the life and times of Rolling Stone, in honor of a A Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine, a new book about the first 10 years of the publication by panelist Peter Richardson.

Check out our interview with Randy Rowse vis YouTube above, or by clicking through this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Randy Rowse shook up the local political landscape on Monday, announcing that he will not seek re-election as Santa Barbara Mayor.

A few hours after releasing a written statement, the mayor answered questions about his startling decision in a Newsmakers TV interview, portraying it as motivated by purely personal reasons — while also acknowledging frustration with “an intractable majority” of liberal colleagues on City Council.

As a political matter, the sudden and surprising move by the incumbent mayor — who asserted several months that he would seek a second term and still had “passion” for the job — makes progressive council member Kristen Sneddon the front-runner for the mayor’s job, while also boosting the chances of fellow council representative Eric Friedman, a frequent ally of Rowse, whose politics tend to be more moderate.

“This is about me - this is about personal reasons,” Randy told Newsmakers. “It has nothing to do with any issue. It has nothing to do with any other person…It was a very personal decision. There’s a lot of things in life that I set aside for a while and it’s time to go do those now.”

The ‘intractable minority.’ The 71-year old Rowse, elected mayor in 2021 after previously serving nine years as a council member, has long made clear that while he relishes the governance duties of the job, he loathes campaigning and what it takes to get elected, an attitude he again displayed in our conversation.

“I’ve always said, if you run into somebody who says they like campaigning, then you want to maintain eye contact and back away slowly and hold onto your wallet because those people just ain’t right,” he said. “My decision has been noodling for a long time…and frankly, the idea of starting up a campaign, asking people for money, it’s a necessary evil, but I’m just ready to step aside.”

Increasingly, Rowse has been on the short end of 4-to-3 votes on key City Council issues, as a four-member liberal bloc, which solidified with the 2024 defeat of former council member Alejandra Gutierrez by tenants rights activist Wendy Santamaria, has prevailed on issues from budget to housing and, most significantly, rent control.

The liberals earlier passed a rent freeze, and now are crafting sweeping “rent stabilization” legislation; along the way, debate and discourse on the matter has grown more heated and less civil, as demonstrated at last week’s meeting on the issue, when Rowse was subjected to ad hominem attacks and F-bombs during public comment.

“No, no, it has nothing to do with that at all,” he replied when asked about the role of the rent debate on his decision.

“Although as a citizen, now I'll be free to throw the F-bombs,” he joked. “No, I think that, no, it really doesn't. It has nothing to do with it. These issues are going to remain.”

A moment later, however, he also took aim at “an intractable majority (on council) that have been deciding these issues.”

“Unfortunately, the majority is very, very thin. It’s a four-three majority. You saw a four-three budget last year, which has never happened. This big issue of rent control is four-three,” he added. “So I don’t particularly believe that good policy is decided with very narrow margins like that. If it’s a good policy, at least six or seven of us should probably think it’s a good policy and gets hammered out.”

At last week’s meeting, Rowse was the sole member of council who expressed support for an idea floated by the city’s consultant on the matter - that the question of rent control be put on the ballot and left to a citywide vote.

“People are upset about the idea of rent control,” he said. “They’re upset about not having a choice in the matter. And everybody I’ve talked to really thinks if we’re going to do this, we better put it on the ballot and see if we really want to do this.”

“So I think that when you have a very thin majority like we do right now doing very major policy things, it really is a whole city thing to be concerned about and vote on,” he added. “Rent control could really change the profile of the entire city. And so I think the only real way to decide this would be to go to the ballot box and let everybody decide on it.”

State of play. The final deadline to run for mayor — and for three open council seats being vacated by the termed-out Sneddon, Friedman and Meagan Harmon - is not until this summer, so time remains for other candidates to emerge. Former Santa Barbara Unified School Board President Wendy Sims Moten, for example, is among other contenders who may run.

As for now, however, Sneddon’s well-defined base of support among the local Democratic Party organization and mobilized tenants rights groups, along with an active fundraising operation, advance her standing in the race from chief challenger to front-runner, with Friedman left to try to consolidate the center-left/center-right portion of SB’s electorate that put Rowse in office five years ago.

Asked if he now would endorse Friedman in the mayor’s race, Rowse said he has not spoken to him about it yet; it’s a safe bet that he won’t be endorsing Sneddon.

“I haven’t really talked to Eric about his campaign or my campaign or anybody’s campaign,” the mayor said. “This decision was made by me and me alone without any other discussion. So at some point we’ll probably all sit down and talk about this and what the future is, but I have a ton of respect for Eric.”

Bottom line. It was in an earlier Newsmakers interview, in June of last year, when Rowse first stated his intention to seek a second term, saying, “I still have a real passion about the city, and I have a real passion about its future.”

Asked about those comments yesterday, he insisted, “I haven’t lost a passion for the city.

“I spent nine years as a council member and five years now as mayor, and I think it’s just time,” he said. “I’ve got other things I want to do in my life. However, there’s a lot of things I want to be involved in with the city.

“I think on some issues I may even be more influential on the outside than I may on the inside. So no, I intend to stay involved with the city,” he added. “I have absolutely as much passion for the city as ever.”

(Editor’s note: Sunday’s overwhelming victory in Hungary of liberal democrat Peter Magyar's Tisza Party, over the entrenched authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, is a seismic global political event that not only sent shock waves throughout Europe and Russia, but also reverberates strongly in the U.S. The election result is a blow to Donald Trump's radical right-wing project, because Orbán had long been regarded by the MAGA movement as a trailblazer, and served as a model for Trump’s “Project 2025” second term policy agenda - witness Vice President J.D. Vance’s 11th hour flight to Budapest in a failed and humiliating bid to shore up their movement’s ally. In this gift article from The Atlantic, author and East and Central European expert Anne Applebaum explains the implications. /jr).

By Anne Applebaum /The Atlantic

In the end, the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, required not just an ordinary election campaign or new messaging but rather the construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement. And by building exactly that, Hungary’s opposition changed politics around the world.

Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people.

As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that.

“Real” people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

Overcoming obstacles. Péter Magyar, the opposition leader and likely next Hungarian prime minister, has now won by a substantial margin, giving him and his party, Tisza, a constitutional majority.

To do so, they had to overcome obstacles not usually present in European democracies.

After 16 years of what Orbán himself described as an illiberal regime, the Hungarian leader’s political party, Fidesz, had come to control much of the judiciary, bureaucracy, and universities, as well as a group of oligarchic companies that in turn controlled a good chunk of the economy.

Orbán used his control of the state to build an extraordinary web of international illiberal and far-right supporters, and funding mechanisms to support some of them.

In the last weeks of the campaign, these friends and beneficiaries rallied round. Orbán received visits or verbal support from Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Benjamin Netanyahu, Marine Le Pen (the leader of the French far right), Alice Weidel (the leader of the German far right), and other illiberal leaders from Argentina, Poland, Slovakia, Brazil, and more. Both Hungarian and American news organizations reported that a Russian intelligence team had set up in Budapest to amplify Orbán’s social-media campaign, and perhaps to stage provocations.

By contrast, Magyar had very little access to Hungarian media, the overwhelming majority of which is owned either by the state or by Fidesz oligarchs.

He and his party had limited access even to billboard space, both because they had less money than the ruling party and because many advertising spaces are controlled by the government.

Tisza leaders and supporters faced personal obstacles as well. A year ago, I met a Tisza politician who told me that his wife had lost her job and his friends began to stay away after he announced his support for Magyar. Tisza’s database was at one point hacked and posted online, apparently to encourage harassment of party members. Even three weeks ago, many Tisza leaders in Budapest would speak only off the record.

Fighting back on the ground. Magyar and his team fought back on the ground.

Knowing he could not win if he stuck to Budapest and other large cities, Magyar has been traveling the country since 2024, visiting small towns and villages, many more than once. In the last few days of the campaign, he was holding five or six election meetings every day.

He avoided the themes that Orbán chose to promote—global politics, the war in Ukraine, the conspiracy that Ukraine was somehow colluding against or might even invade Hungary—and focused his campaign speeches and social media on the economy, health care, and schools.

As a former member of Fidesz himself, he was able to speak with extra conviction about Fidesz’s corruption. He portrayed himself as a part of the European, democratic, law-abiding center-right. He waved a lot of Hungarian flags, as did his supporters.

Despite enormous restrictions and both financial and political pressure, the tiny number of journalists who were still able to report in Hungary also made a difference.

In the past few weeks, the investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi, along with his colleagues at the website Direkt26, one of the few independent outlets in the country, patiently debunked Orbán’s anti-Ukrainian propaganda, producing leaked transcripts and audio that revealed Orbán and his foreign minister colluding with Putin and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

These tapes exposed what Panyi described to me as the “big lie that Orbán was a sovereigntist prime minister.” Indeed: Orbán boasted and talked a big game about Hungarian traditions and Hungarian nationalism, but when he spoke on the phone with the Russian leader, he described himself as a mouse and Putin as a lion.

For years Orbán has claimed to be fighting shadowy foreign forces—George Soros, the European Union, migrants—but in fact he was himself dependent on foreigners all along.

‘Russians, go home.’ Those stories resonated, especially with younger Hungarians. At a rock concert in Heroes’ Square in central Budapest on Friday, tens of thousands of them started chanting “Russians, go home”—the same chant that their grandparents used when Soviet soldiers invaded their country in 1956.

Although results are not final, Tisza appears to have won more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. That would give Magyar a constitutional majority that should allow him to pick apart some of the damage that Orbán has done to the Hungarian constitution and to public life.

In his victory speech, he called for the resignation of the president, the prosecutor general, the president of the constitutional court, and other institutions. He said he would rejoin the European legal system. In response, according to one witness, Hungarians at his rally chanted, “Europe, Europe, Europe.”

Nobody is pretending this will be easy.

Fidesz still dominates many Hungarian institutions and businesses, and the party’s friends and supporters will do their best to undermine a Tisza government. Orbán also leaves behind a fiscal mess, which the analyst Dalibor Rohac suggests Orbán might be happy to abandon while plotting his comeback.

“Letting the opposition deal with the economic fallout of the last 16 years might well facilitate Orbán’s return to power in the future,” Rohac wrote earlier this week. Some in the opposition are still expecting dirty tricks in the next days and weeks, before Orbán formally hands over power.

Bottom line. But whatever happens next, this election represents a real turning point.

For most European governments, this result is a relief: We can’t know yet what kind of government Tisza will create, but it won’t be one that functions as Russia’s puppet in Europe, blocking EU funding for Ukraine or European sanctions on Russia.

Nor will it be a regime that serves as a model for Americans or Europeans who want to capture their own states, or take apart their own checks and balances, or impose their own illiberal ideologies on people who don’t accept them.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of “Autocracy, Inc.,” “Twilight of Democracy,” “Red Famine,” and “Gulag.”

Image: Supporters of Peter Magyar and the Tizsa Party celebrate in Budapest on Sunday (Associated Press).

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A majority of the Board of Supervisors expressed surprise and outrage after Lillian Perlmutter last week revealed the number of ICE arrests in and around Santa Barbara County jails is many times higher than Sheriff Bill Brown has been reporting.

Since then, crickets.

Perlmutter joins our all-star panel on this week’s episode of Newsmakers TV, and explains how supes in other counties, including L.A., passed legislation to prohibit all transfers from sheriff’s custody to ICE without a judicial warrant; such measures have prevented the kind of wink-and-nod kind of local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration agents apparently in progress in Santa Barbara, despite state law limiting cooperation with ICE.

Callie Fausey breaks down another high stakes, inter-governmental conflict, this one between the feds, who just awarded the utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric Co. authority to operate the disputed Diablo Canyon nuclear plant until 2045, and California government, which previously moved to shut it down in 2030.

And Josh Molina sorts through the multiple layers of political implications that emerged from Tuesday night’s epic City Council meeting, focused on the push for sweeping rent control in the city of Santa Barbara, which has triggered a federal lawsuit and re-shaped the November race for mayor and three other council seats.

Plus: the genial host rants about Oscar Gutierrez dragging religion in City Hall debates as he twiddled his little handheld fidget device. There were no injuries.

All this and more, right here, right now on Newsmakers TV.

Check out Episode 556 via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

By Catherine Rampell /The Bulwark

A lot of people are getting rich off the Trump presidency. Donald Trump himself tops the list, of course, but it also includes his kids and in-laws; other grifting nepo-babies; cabinet members (as well as their staff and children), senior aides; and other well-connected friends, investors, and firms.

You know who isn’t on that list?

You.

Yes, you, dear reader—at least assuming you’re not among the small community of courtiers sucking public funds dry. Instead, in virtually every way imaginable, Trump has made it easier for all those insiders to profit and, in turn, rip you off. If you bet on or invest in anything Trump might influence and you don’t have inside information, you’re a chump.

As the expression goes: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Trading on inside information. The recent rash of curiously well-timed trades in prediction markets is one example of how those who have drawn up chairs to Trump’s banquet table appear to be feasting at public expense.

For example, there was the Polymarket account that banked over half a million dollars by betting on Iran strikes and the, ahem, departure of the ayatollah shortly before our military started dropping bombs. Other ‘lucky’ betting-market accounts, created right before the United States invaded Venezuela, engaged only in Venezuela-related bets, and somehow made perfect predictions every time, the Financial Times reported.

Similarly, just this week, a group of newly created Polymarket accounts “made highly specific, well-timed bets on whether the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7,” Politico found.

These kinds of trades have raised concerns about not only insider-trading based on confidential or classified information, but also the incentives they create for as-yet-unmade decisions. How do we know officials are crafting policy based on what’s best for the national interest rather than what produces the biggest payday?

The risk of public fleecing based on private (or classified) data is not unique to prediction markets. There has been suspicious trading activity in more traditional financial markets, too.

Last month, minutes before Trump posted a market-moving post about his supposedly “productive” talks with Iran, someone (or someones, or some entity) placed bets worth half a billion dollars in oil markets.

“My gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is really abnormal,” a portfolio manager told the FT. “It’s Monday morning, there’s no important data today, there aren’t any Fed speakers you’d want to front run. It’s an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk. . . . Somebody just got a lot richer.”

This kind of insider trading is not some victimless crime. When traders front-run a market-moving Trump post, or a military announcement, or some other confidential or classified information, they’re taking money from all the other investors who didn’t have access to that inside information. Put another way: They’re taking money from your 401(k). Or your teachers’ pension funds. Or mom-and-pop investors. Again, all the chumps and suckers who don’t have a direct line to the president.

Less white collar enforcement, more white collar victims. Of course insider trading antedates the Trump administration and has produced its fair share of political scandals in the past. But at least historically federal law enforcement usually tried to crack down on it, along with other white-collar crimes. That is . . . somewhat less true today.

Now, in fairness, Justice Department white-collar prosecutions have been trending downward more or less since the 1990s, with occasional spurts of enforcement (such as right after the 2008 financial crisis). But the Trump administration just hit an all-time low in white-collar prosecutions this past fiscal year, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

The Trump administration has dropped 145 major enforcement actions against corporations that it inherited from the Biden administration. And under Trump the head of the Department of Justice criminal division issued a directive last year to turn “a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement” and divert more resources to bigger administration priorities, like immigration-law violations.

Trump has outlined the same approach through executive orders, including one that called for “fighting overcriminalization in federal regulations.” Another EO essentially adopted higher tolerance for the lucrative nexus between white-collar crime and international bribery—directing the DOJ to temporarily pause Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations and enforcement in order to develop a new strategy that safeguards “American economic competitiveness.” Trump has also been trying—with mixed success—to dismantle the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Meanwhile, his administration has taken actions that would subject many more people to the riskier markets or predatory acts that these laws and agencies were meant to protect against. Last week the Labor Department proposed a new rule encouraging mom-and-pop investors to stash their 401(k) money in riskier “alternative” assets, such as crypto and private credit . . . right as the opaque and tenuous private credit market may be about to collapse.

Hey, when you run out of greater fools, it can be helpful to mint more of them. Someone needs to be left holding the bag.

Pardon me. But Trump is not merely content to block prosecutions of new fraudsters. He wants to clear the records of those already found guilty.

He has pardoned or commuted the sentences of dozens of people convicted of fraud and other financial crimes, such as Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder of the crypto exchange Binance¹; Joseph Schwartz, a former nursing-home owner; Wanda Vázquez Garced, the former governor of Puerto Rico; former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.); EV startup founder Trevor Milton (represented by Pam Bondi’s brother); and billionaire former English football club owner Joe Lewis, who had previously pleaded guilty to insider trading charges.

“Over half of Trump’s 88 individual pardons are for white-collar offenses, with money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud among the most frequent crimes the president has wiped clean,” according to an NBC News analysis from January.

NBC found that the 88 pardon recipients in 2025 had been ordered to pay more than $298 million in fines and restitution—and it’s unclear if the victims will ever receive it. Those being stiffed of their compensation include individual investors, as well as larger groups of victims such as the Oglala Sioux Tribe. (The Crime Victims Fund, created under Ronald Reagan in 1984, has been shortchanged, too.)

But the universe of victims is broader than the direct marks of the criminals whom Trump has pardoned. That’s because this kind of damage to the rule of law undermines faith in the broader market, by destroying trust that promised transactions or restitutions (including those put in place by our judicial system) will be honored.

As I wrote back in 2024, when some commentators argued that Trump’s felonious misrepresentations to banks and insurers were “victimless” crimes because those institutions still got their money in the end:

In a capitalist society, laws against fraud exist to protect not only the direct victims of fraud but also the overall integrity of the marketplace.

The reason we outlaw fraud, among other misbehavior, is to facilitate trust in business transactions. If I sign a contract to pay money in exchange for some service, I want to be confident that the promised service will be delivered. Or that if it isn’t, there will be legal consequences — regardless of the other party’s fame, wealth or political connections.

This level of trust, bolstered by the law, is why companies generally prefer to invest in the United States rather than a “Venezuela” or “Cuba.” The rule of law makes it easier to do business, not harder. The only people who benefit from the freedom to commit fraud are those who commit fraud.

Bottom line. Allowing well-connected sleazebags to lie and cheat hurts lenders, insurers, investors, customers, and others. But it also hurts the competitors of those sleazebags—and, in the long run, anyone else who happens to be engaging in commerce, too.

In this way, turning a blind eye to lawbreaking—whether via insider trading on classified information in newfangled prediction markets, or more traditional defrauding of investors or Uncle Sam—corrodes our markets because it encourages more lawbreaking.

It invites recidivism from those who’ve already been pardoned—as was the case with Adriana Camberos, who recently received her second grant of clemency from Trump (in January he pardoned her for a fraud unrelated to the fraud for which he released her from prison during his first term).

But it also encourages more lawbreaking by everyone else. It compromises our democracy but also our collective morality. Because, after all, who wants to be the only chump left not cheating?

Financial journalist Catherine Rampell, Economics Editor of the Bulwark, writes the “Receipts” newsletter. Subscribe here.

Image: New York Times.

By Joyce Vance /Civil Discourse

On Tuesday morning, in a social media post, the President of the United States signaled his intent to violate the rules of war, which prohibit targeting civilians. He didn’t speak of attacking military targets. Instead, he threatened to wipe out an entire people, an entire civilization. It “will die tonight,” Trump wrote.

As former Iraq War Commander, retired Major General Paul D. Eaton wrote later in the day, “Wiping out an entire civilization is the definition of genocide. Any order given to that effect must be refused by every service member up and down the chain — period.”

The Geneva Conventions, to which we are a signatory along with 196 other nation-states, form the basis for international humanitarian law, the goal of which is “to maintain some humanity in armed conflicts, saving lives and reducing suffering.”

That law is binding, and violations can be investigated and prosecuted as war crimes.

Trump breaking the law, even bragging about it, is nothing new. But this time, there are serious consequences, outside of his control, that he could come up against.

A reprieve, of sorts. On Tuesday afternoon, I flew home, spending several hours in the air with no Wi-Fi. Not even texts got through. Trump’s Iran deadline was approaching. And I realized that there were real reasons to fear that the world would be different by the time we landed. That this no-guardrails presidency could have taken us to an entirely predictable endpoint.

Instead, we got a reprieve of sorts. A ceasefire. (Albeit, as experts have noted, on terms favorable to Iran, which has demonstrated its ability to survive a joint attack by the U.S. and Israel and made clear its ability to use the Strait of Hormuz as a bargaining chip. Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist regime has not been toppled. The status of its enriched uranium is unclear.)

But really, how many more wake-up calls can the country, can Trump’s party ignore?

How many more people, in our own military, in countries we attack, American citizens protesting peacefully on our own streets, people abroad who rely on American programs that are suddenly withdrawn, will die? How much more of this do we have to tolerate so MAGA can continue to worship its idol, who rules from an altar built of greed?

The Founding Fathers created our divided branches, rule of law-based system of government, because they understood that men were not angels.

That’s why Donald Trump’s contempt for the rule of law is so alarming. Contempt for the rule of law is contempt for our way of life. Preserving the rule of law means we don’t have a king; it holds corruption at bay, and it forbids a president from running the country like it’s the mob.

And so, Trump’s distaste for it is a distaste for democracy itself, and that is something the country has never fully reckoned with. Trump’s party certainly hasn’t. At his core, he is anti-democratic.

Trump has never been afraid to express any of it, certainly not his belief that he is above the law. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he famously said in the Access Hollywood tape, and his wife explained it away as locker room talk. We have always known who he is because he does not pretend to be otherwise. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he told us.

A moment for choosing. No one should be surprised that the enfant terrible is threatening to take down an entire civilization.

The law is clear, but what is the law to Trump? It has never mattered.

He doesn’t care about targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure. He’s not concerned with the consequences; he’s promised them—the destruction of a civilization. It’s not new. It’s just an extension of what the Republican Party has let him get away with up until now, utter disregard for the law, as it applies to him.

To all the people who were willing to ignore Trump’s flaws for whatever reason—self interest, adjacency to power, a desire to be seen as tough guy— this is the moment to acknowledge that you were wrong and to try and make what amends you can.

It’s time to back away from the edge of the cliff that is the destruction of a civilian population. Really, it’s past time, but there is still some time left. Members of the military who are serving in harm’s way, at the whim of this petty little man, deserve it. They should not remain unprotected because Republicans in Congress can’t muster the grit to do their jobs.

It’s time to look in the mirror and decide whether we still like what we see. Can we live with this? Can we live with what our children and our grandchildren will think about us? That’s why so many of us have been working so hard to restore this democracy. Congress, which hasn’t done its job, needs to step up, and that largely means members of the president’s party.

Where the cowards of Congress? Members of the military, and especially leaders, take an oath to uphold the Constitution. Their oath requires that they not obey illegal orders. That was the whole point of the video six members of Congress made, reminding people serving in the military of their duty.

On Tuesday, Michigan Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin warned that if Trump’s threat against Iran was carried out, it would “violate the law of armed conflict as laid out in the Geneva Conventions.” It’s wrong for Congress to abandon the military when it needs protection from a president who was on the verge of doing and ordering the unthinkable, and could easily go there again. Enough.

We are at war in Iran while Congress is out of session—and out of town.

The war started on February 28, 38 days ago. The War Powers Act gives the president 90 days to withdraw deployed troops absent a Congressional authorization of the use of military force—the withdrawal must start at the 60 day mark and be complete by day 90. Congress should be present. Congress should act.

What military lawyers say. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Civilians. Human beings.

Writing for Just Security, two former military lawyers weighed in. Margaret M. Donovan served in the Army as a Captain in the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps. Retired Lt. Col Rachel E. VanLandingham served in the Air Force as Chief, International Law at HQ US Central Command, advising on the law of armed conflict during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

They started by reviewing Trump’s comments on social media and in the press and concluding:

“Such rhetorical statements – if followed through – would amount to the most serious war crimes – and thus the president’s statements place servicemembers in a profoundly challenging situation. As former uniformed military lawyers who advised targeting operations, we know the president’s words run counter to decades of legal training of military personnel and risk placing our warfighters on a path of no return.”

Bombing energy facilities and other critical infrastructure is a clear violation of the law of war. But that’s what Trump threatened. That led Donovan and VanLandingham to write:

“His comments are blatant expressions that he is willing to turn the United States into a rogue State like Iran and Russia, one that rejects the fundamental legal restraints that protect innocent non-combatants like children, and the Iranian civilian population itself.”

Kamala Harris’ assessment:

“The President of the United States is threatening to commit war crimes and wipe out a “whole civilization” — all because he started a disastrous war of his own making and had no plan and no strategy for how to end it.”

Republican Congressman Nate Moran got there:

“So, let me be clear: I do not support the destruction of a ‘whole civilization.’ That is not who we are, and it is not consistent with the principles that have long guided America.

I have and will continue to support a strong national defense—one that is focused, disciplined, and firmly rooted in protecting the safety and security of the American people. But, how we protect the lives of the innocent is just as important as how we engage the enemy.

America is great because America is good.”

Have they no shame? It’s not that difficult—except for Trump supporters.

And that continues to be one of the lasting mysteries of this era. Why is it so difficult for a party that claimed it always did the right thing, the moral majority, the law and order party, to actually do the right thing when the chips are down and the moment demands it?

Far too many other Republicans couldn’t do what Moran did.

Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst, a military veteran who is not running for reelection, defended Trump: “It’s an ongoing operation, and if he needs leverage, he’s using that leverage.” She justified attacks on civilian resources like bridges and power plants because they are “being used by the military, there’s no doubt.”

Nebraska Republican Representative Don Bacon got as far as saying he wasn’t thrilled with Trump’s “vulgar and profane” language, but when it came to whether Trump’s threats violated the rules of war, he waffled, “There’s mixed opinions on it. I got mixed feelings on it.”

Louisiana Republican Representative Clay Higgins encouraged Trump to “hit” the Iranians “harder than ever Mr. President. Hit them so hard, the Angels in Heaven nod in wonder.”

And so on. Some people have no shame.

This piece is excerpted from a post by law professor and former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance in her “Civil Discourse” newsletter. Subscribe here.

Cartoon by Steve Sack in The Week.

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Lillian Perlmutter’s must-read News-Press investigation of federal immigration arrests in and around Santa Barbara County jails presents extensive evidence that Sheriff Bill Brown is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of California’s landmark “sanctuary state” immigration law.

Meticulously constructed, Perlmutter’s piece combined original documentary reporting, a meta-analysis of previous studies of the ICE arrest issue and first-person interviews, demonstrating that Brown in public statements has systematically underplayed the true scope of federal apprehensions of immigrants being released from county jails.

While informing the Board of Supervisors and state government of only those immigrants his department formally “transferred” to ICE, Brown has been substantially less transparent about the far larger number taken into custody in the lobbies or parking lots of the jails, some with at least the implicit knowledge of the SBSD.

Perlmutter reports:

The California Values Act, a state law often known as SB 54, was intended to prevent migrants from fearing police. It prohibits local law enforcement from transferring anyone into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents unless the person has already been convicted of a felony or certain serious misdemeanors.

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office says that in 2025, it transferred 12 people to ICE under the tenets of SB 54. The Sheriff’s Office says a qualifying inmate is notified about the transfer, and when the time comes, is taken to a secure set of doors known as a “sally port,” where an ICE vehicle is waiting.

But dozens more people have been arrested in the lobbies and parking lots of county jails in the past year, including many for whom ICE records do not disclose any conviction, much less a conviction that meets the SB 54 threshold, a Santa Barbara News-Press investigation has found.

While the official number of transfers for the year was 12, federal data suggests in 2025, ICE arrested more than eight times that number at Santa Barbara County jails. (emph. ours).

It’s striking that Brown, normally accessible to local reporters, did not respond to multiple interview requests, according to the News-Press. While it might be assumed that the sheriff himself would like to present his perspective in such a high-profile, comprehensive and long-in-the-works report, he instead dispatched a subordinate to answer questions, but only by email.

As a media matter, Perlmutter’s investigation is significant, not only in advancing local understanding of perhaps the most urgent issue facing Santa Barbara, but also in providing a proof-of-concept case study of the kind of in-depth, enterprise journalism the publishers of the new News-Press promised when the media outlet re-launched.

40 years of Indy independent journalism. Don’t miss the just-opened Faulkner Gallery exhibit, “Covering 40 Years,” which displays 150 covers of the Santa Barbara Independent, drawn from some 2,000 editions of the paper published since its founding.

The exhibit represents a time capsule of the culture, sociology, economics, politics, arts, history and entertainment scene of Santa Barbara over the past four decades. Along the way, it also shows how some local stories become news that stays news: witness a section of a half-dozen or so hung covers that limn community clashes with the oil industry, circling round, from polluted waters, to short-lived triumph of the environmental movement, and back to the recent resurgence of offshore drilling and transportation in SB county.

Newsmakers had little trouble selecting our personal most memorable front page: For their April 26, 2007 edition, Editor in Chief Marianne Partridge and Executive Editor Nick Welsh scrapped their planned cover on deadline, substituting “Have You No Shame, Mrs. McCaw?” a high-impact front that heralded a package of news and commentary on late-breaking developments in the ongoing meltdown of the old News-Press.

The dearly-departed morning paper a few days before had directed a vicious and malicious smear at me, their former editor. The Indy’s response shone a bright light on the falsity of that slander and, in the process, illuminated and shifted the community’s understanding of the critical issues of journalistic ethics and practice underpinning the roiling local newspaper dispute.

Alas, no one knew it at the time, but the then-novel spectacle of a billionaire owner betraying the public trust by using a news organization to benefit their personal interests while punishing their enemies would become all too familiar in the two decades that followed.

We read this stuff so you don’t have to. SB Current, the right-wing fever swamp site heavily populated by MAGA fanboys, xenophobes and Christian nationalists, is typically a toxic stew of predictable Trump propaganda, Crusades-level religious fanaticism and delusional rants attacking the substantial majority of rational Santa Barbara citizens who oppose the cruelty and corruption of the mob boss president.

Occasionally, however, they do get something right.

Last week, the Current published “When Leadership Forgets Who It Serves,” the headline on a thoughtful op-ed by former City Council member Alejandra Gutierrez.

In her 2024 bid for re-election, Gutierrez lost a nail-biter election to left-wing tenant activist Wendy Santamaria, a high-stakes contest that resulted in the balance of power flipping on council on several key issues, most notably rent control.

In her piece, Alejandra recounted how she was dumped by the local Democratic Party - which backed her 2019 election as she ousted Dem-enemy incumbent Jason Dominguez - because of her “independence” on that and other issues during her first-year term:

For years, Democrats have held the majority in this county. With that majority comes responsibility. Yet many of the same issues regularly highlighted today—housing, cost of living, and public safety—are challenges that have existed for years. Voters deserve to ask: if these solutions are so urgent now, why weren’t they addressed when there was already the power to act?

Content aside, the most noteworthy aspect of the piece is that, following the Current’s publication of it on the morning of March 28, both Noozhawk, that afternoon, and the Independent, two days later, followed the pro-Trump outlet’s lead and reprinted the Gutierrez piece.

Back in the day, before the last Ice Age, it was a point of pride among editorial page editors to require exclusive rights to opinion pieces they published from outside writers; in Santa Barbara that guideline is observed mainly in the breach, but it was still surprising to find two well-established publications following the editorial judgment of a soporific start-up permeated with right-wing agitprop.

In this case, SB Current got the scoop.

Montage: Nameplates of (L-R) Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara News-Press, SB Current; Photo: the author and Independent columnist Starshine Roshell stand before the famed “Have You No Shame” cover at the opening of the “Covering 40 Years” exhibit at the Faulkner Gallery (Nick Welsh photo).