Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
I'm glad I'm not commuting to work everyday. I teach online. You wouldn't believe the continuing strong demand for online classes. Kids don't want to come back on campus, and not just because they might get sick. No, they like "going to school" in their pajamas. They don't have to pay for gas, parking, and maintenance on their vehicle.
My college administration was stunned when on-campus classes were under-enrolled for the spring semester, which was supposed to be the first time everyone was fully "on-campus" since March 2020.
Didn't work out that way. Even employees aren't looking to go back if their gasoline budget balloons to $600 a month and counting.
This is very big news. It's every time now: Every time there's an election this year, Democrats will get fucking shellacked.
And the three members recalled last night weren't "liberals." They're radicals, way outside of the mainstream. While overall turnout was low at 25 percent, the percentage of Chinese-Americans voting was near 80 percent. That never happens. San Francisco's Chinese community is very hands-off toward politics, but not this time. When you fuck with the schools you're fucking with a bloc of voters who aren't going to take any shit.
S.F.'s District Attorney, Chesa Boudin --- who was raised by Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn --- will be up for recall in June. No doubt this race will be fought ferociously, and it may be tight, but once this dude gets the boot local districts throughout the entire country will be given notice: We will take you out.
San Francisco is quite familiar with earthquakes, and what happened Tuesday — the ouster of three extreme lefties from the Board of Education — was not one of those.
Earthquakes are sudden and unexpected. The result of Tuesday’s recall was neither.
The removal of board members Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga and Alison Collins was destined the moment the city’s liberal establishment, led by Mayor London Breed, joined the effort along with several discontented millionaires, who threw in loads of cash.
What happened Tuesday was more a foreshock, a warning — as if Democrats needed any more of those — that November’s midterm elections could be very bad indeed, as parents unsettled by two years of pandemic-related upheaval vent their frustrations at the polls.
The circumstances of the recall were both unique and broadly reflective.
In a place that prides itself on social justice and forward thinking, members of the school board outdid themselves by moving to strip the names of, among others, Presidents Washington and, Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein from 44 public schools.
The intent was to remediate the country’s history of injustices: George Washington owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of Native Americans, and Feinstein, as mayor in 1984, replaced a Confederate flag that had been vandalized at City Hall with a new one. The result was outrage.
In another instance of misplaced priorities, board members spent hours debating whether a father who was white and gay brought sufficient diversity to a parental advisory committee. His appointment was ultimately nixed, but there was no recovering the time that was wasted.
Perhaps most antagonizing, the board moved to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the city’s most sacred institutions, where Asian American students are the majority. (The move catalyzed the city’s Asian American community, long an important force in San Francisco politics.)
Old comments surfaced from Collins, in which she stated Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students. She apologized, then sued the school district and five fellow board members, seeking $87 million in damages, for removing her title as vice president. A judge summarily rejected the case.
All of which was too much for this famously tolerant city, as students struggled with distance learning and public schools remained closed even as others in neighboring communities reopened.
Inclusion, sensitivity and righting history’s wrongs are all well and good. But there was a strong sense that “we are not getting the basics right,” as Siva Raj, a father of two who helped launch the recall effort, put it.
He and others would have removed all seven members of the board, but only the three who were targeted were eligible for recall.
It is foolish — and one of the bad habits of political prognosticators — to overinterpret the results of any one election. To be clear, San Francisco hasn’t changed. A city that gave Joe Biden 85% support won’t be voting Republican in the lifetime of any adult within sight of Coit Tower. But the results are noteworthy precisely because the recall took place in liberal San Francisco...
San Francisco is not "liberal." It's a communist enclave, Moscow by the Bay, and the voters have had enough with this takeover by critical theory.
Leftists around the country (and Canada, in the worst way) are not learning the lessons of the 2021 elections. Democrats will pay for their snobbery and elitism. These are wealthy champagne socialists who wouldn't deign to rub shoulders with the poor and working class proletarians delivering their goods from Amazon Prime and their Door Dash dinners. Workers, truck drivers, literally front-line health care professionals, kept this country functioning through the damned pandemic/lockdown. Enough is enough.
No, not only do these clowns know "what's best" for everybody else, they don't have to live with the horrific consequences of their experiments in creating the communist utopia.
I'd like to say "take them out" in a more literal sense, but mostly I mean take them out at the ballot box.
The Democrat Party pandemic lockdown policies have set back, if not destroyed, a generation of young people, and not just school children.
I know this first hand from my oldest, 26, who moved to San Francisco to start at S.F. State in February 2020. He came back home after one semester in The City, depressed and disappointed at how isolated and inferior was his college experience compared his time at Santiago Canyon College in Orange Park Acres.
I also know this from teaching college students online for two years. I'm on my fifth semester in a transition to "remote emergency instruction" that was expected to brief and temporary. Even this semester, where my college has gone back to full in-person on-campus classes, more than 50 percent of those enrolled are taking their courses online. Indeed, the enrollment was so low in some of the campus-based classes that over two dozen were cancelled in my department alone.
You're not getting the full college experience --- and excellence in education --- with online classes. It's good for some very motivated students who thrive in the intense atmosphere of digital learning space, but in my experience, it's not for most. I'm expecting to hear soon about my class schedule for fall, where I've requested to teach all on campus. We'll see how that goes. It feels weird to even be possibly going back. I feel like I need to retrain myself, to get myself fit for teaching in person. Seriously. My lectures are quite stentorian, and I need to be in good cardio-vascular condition. I don't feel like that right now, as I haven't been physically training during the pandemic lockdown.
This summer I'll be changing my daily routine if all works out and I'm set to resume going to work everyday, like I used to for 20 years.
When students at San Jose State University returned to campus last fall after more than a year of remote learning, lecturer Damon Moon thought they would be chatty and excited to see one another. Instead, he noticed something concerning: They weren’t talking at all.
Before class, students were looking at their phones or laptops. Even in the campus cafeteria, Mr. Moon saw that most students were eating alone, sandwich in one hand, phone in the other.
“They lost the skill to have small talk,” said Mr. Moon, who teaches international business classes. To get a close-up look at this phenomenon, I spoke to Mr. Moon and his students at the university.
“When I was in elementary school or middle school, if I wanted to talk to someone new, I would go up to them and try to strike up a conversation,” said Kian Kashefi, a 19-year-old business accounting major. Now, he said, “it feels weird to talk to anybody new without first connecting on social media.”
In a prolonged pandemic that has shifted more interactions online, college students are finding it harder to strike up conversations and make friends. In the past, socializing wasn’t just a perk but also a big incentive for students choosing campus life.
College instructors worry that if they don’t do something to facilitate conversation in class, their students will be unprepared to enter the workforce. To overcome screen-reinforced social awkwardness, some even lean on smartphones and web browsers to encourage students to interact.
Researchers from three universities surveyed nearly 33,000 college students around the U.S. and found two-thirds were struggling with loneliness in the fall of 2020. More than a year later, many students, including those at San Jose State, had returned to remote instruction after winter break because of the Omicron Covid-19 surge.
Joel Figueroa, a 20-year-old business major, said that since the pandemic began he has become more nervous about talking to people. “I was much more confident in my abilities before,” he said.
While technology has enabled him to remain in touch with friends, it has undermined his in-person interactions, he said. “My connections with friends offline would definitely be deeper if we were not so attached to our devices,” he said.
Even older students I talked to, who didn’t grow up with as much technology or spend formative years in a pandemic, are finding it hard to make connections.
“I didn’t form relationships with any students when I went back to campus last fall,” said Megan Dela Rosa, a 43-year-old business major. “Everyone had their masks on and you didn’t know anyone’s comfort level.” She added, “I just went to class, got my work done and left.”
Anna Touneh transferred to San Jose State from a community college last fall. Since school began this year online, the 32-year-old said talking to students has only become more awkward.
In one class recently, small groups of students went to Zoom breakout rooms to work on an assignment. Ms. Touneh said in her group, no one had their cameras on and no one spoke. “It took me six minutes to say something,” she said. “I finally gathered the courage, but it was very meek. I said, ‘Hey, guys, so what are we supposed to be doing?’”
Runhua Yang, a 43-year-old business major, said she’s normally extroverted but the pandemic has made it more difficult to express herself. Masks have made it harder for teachers to hear her, she said, causing her to speak up less often. “If a professor doesn’t encourage participation, I stay quiet,” she said.
Parents and psychologists were already concerned that phone usage was negatively affecting social-skill development among young people, even before the pandemic, according to Danielle Ramo, chief clinical officer at BeMe Health, a mobile platform for teen mental health. In a previous job, she helped develop an app called Nod to help college students improve their social lives by challenging them to do things like smile at five new people or keep their dorm-room doors open in the evening...
Something very different is happening in San Francisco. The city is carrying out a bizarre medical experiment whereby addicts are given everything they need to maintain their addiction—cash, hot meals, shelter—in exchange for . . . almost nothing. Voters have found themselves in the strange position of paying for fentanyl, meth and crack use on public property.
You can go and witness all of this if you simply walk down Market Street and peek your head over a newly erected fence in the southwest corner of United Nations Plaza. You will see that the city is permitting people to openly use and even deal drugs in a cordoned-off area of the public square.
The city denies that they are operating a supervised drug consumption site. “This site is about getting people connected with immediate support, as well as long-term services and treatment,” a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Emergency Management told the Chronicle.
The official line is that they are running what they call a “Linkage Center” in a building next to the open drug market in the plaza. The idea is that the center is supposed to link addicts to services, including housing and rehab. When Mayor London Breed announced it, she promised it would get people into treatment so they could stop using drugs, not simply hide their use.
But city officials have told me that in the 19 days that the site has been open, just two people total went to detox so far. And they serve some 220 people per day.
“In that tent on Market Street everyone is shooting dope,” complained a senior employee of a major city service provider, speaking of the scene at the plaza. “It’s insane. All the staff standing around watching them. It’s fucking ridiculous. I don’t know how anybody thinks that helping a drug addict use drugs is helping them.”
“What’s happening is that everyone that comes in gets a meal, can use the bathroom, gets drug supplies (needles, foil, pipes) and signs up for a ‘housing assessment,” a person with firsthand information about the operation told me over text message. “But there’s no housing. So nothing happens. They just get added to a list.”
The parents whose children live on the streets are adamant that the status quo is broken. “I agree with the Linkage Center,” Gina McDonald told me. Her 24-year-old daughter Samantha is a heroin and fentanyl addict who has been on and off the streets for the last two years. “But allowing open drug use does not help. It’s handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person.”
If you appreciate groundbreaking reporting about important stories that are overlooked, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Last Thursday I returned to the Linkage Center to find out what, if anything, had changed since I first visited. I saw (and video recorded) much more drug use within the supervised drug consumption site, and much more drug dealing around it, than I had two weeks ago...
The only thing that's changed is the polls, now scaring the living shit out of our authoritarian "knowledge working" pajama-clad overlords who haven't manned the front lines of our entire freakin' economy for the last two years. Dolts. All of them.
A wave of polls taken as the Omicron variant crested across much of the United States shows new signs that the public’s resolve to combat the coronavirus pandemic is waning.
The surveys depict an increasingly frustrated and pessimistic nation that is as worried by the specter of an endless pandemic as it is fearful of the disease. While a majority of voters remain concerned about the coronavirus, the balance of recent polling suggests that the desire to return to normalcy has approached or even overtaken alarm about the virus itself.
A recent Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that 46 percent of respondents thought Americans should “learn to live with” the pandemic “and get back to normal,” while just 43 percent thought “we need to do more to vaccinate, wear masks and test.”
A Republican firm, Echelon Insights, had similar findings, reporting that 55 percent of voters thought Covid-19 should be “treated as an endemic disease that will never fully go away,” like the flu, while 38 percent said it should be “treated as a public health emergency.”
The results are especially striking at a time when coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and even deaths are near record highs. Indeed, the same polls showed that the public’s concern about the virus increased during the Omicron wave. But in a telling indication of the public’s attitudes toward the pandemic, greater worry about the virus has not translated to greater support for measures to stop its spread.
Instead, fears of the virus apparently have been outweighed by mounting frustration with the inconveniences of a pandemic that has stretched into its second year. Three-quarters of adults described themselves as tired or frustrated with the pandemic in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
Fully 70 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “it’s time we accept Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives” in a recent poll by Monmouth University. That survey found that support for vaccine mandates has dropped to just 43 percent from 53 percent in September, while support for masking and social distancing guidelines dropped to 52 percent from 63 percent over the same period.
The findings come at a possible turning point in the pandemic, as several Democratic governors announced intentions to ease some mask mandates over the next month. The growing frustration with pandemic restrictions may help explain some of those early announcements — even as cases reach record levels.
The polls create a delicate challenge for the Biden administration, which never regained its political standing since the rise of the Delta variant dashed last summer’s hopes of a return to normalcy. The growing unease with the pandemic seems to have added to the president’s political woes, and may help explain why the public disapproves of Mr. Biden’s handling of the coronavirus for the first time...
Newsom's lifting California's indoor mask mandate next week, along with now-quivering Democrat governor's around the country trying to innoculate themselves as voters' wrath this November.
In Los Angeles, schools saw a massive 130,000-student drop in daily attendance when students returned from winter break this week, the latest pandemic hit to education.
In San Diego, severe staffing shortages led school leaders to warn families of the possibility of “COVID Impact Days” similar to heat or snow days. And in Culver City, district leaders announced that they would close all schools next week to give students and staff time to “recoup and recover.”
Educators across California are in triage mode working to keep campuses open and the state’s 6 million children in class as Omicron-fueled coronavirus cases surge. Save for some notable exceptions, they are managing to do so. But staff and students are strained in new and stressful ways as yet another intense pandemic chapter unfolds at schools.
Amid outbreaks and rocketing infections, districts have closed classrooms; some teachers are trying to figure out how to adjust their lesson plans with fewer than a third of students at their desks; and administrators and other district employees are scrambling to fill in for absent staff. Only two weeks into the spring semester, many are exhausted.
“I’m frustrated for my staff, I see the wear and tear on them, " said Craig Spratt, principal of Cerritos Elementary School in Cerritos. “They’re putting on the bravest of faces. They’re providing the best routine they can for their kids and I’m just doing whatever I can to relieve them of the extra burdens so they can focus on their kids. It’s a very stressful time right now.”
A few districts have delayed the start of the spring semester or closed schools amid the surge, including Montebello Unified and the small Mammoth Unified School District, where schools were ordered closed for three weeks.
The spike in school cases has been swift and dramatic. In Los Angeles County prior to Omicron, the rate of positive cases among students and staff was “extraordinarily low” at about 0.2%, said county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer in a news briefing this week. Last week, it soared to nearly 15% — or more than 80,000 positive tests.
Health officials are investigating about two dozen school outbreaks — which were largely linked to school sports during the winter break. And Ferrer warned the surge would probably lead to more.
In L.A. Unified, average attendance through Thursday was about 67%, district officials said. All schools remained open for in-person learning and administrators left their offices to help to cover for teacher absences when substitutes could not be found.
San Pedro High School Principal Steve Gebhart said he felt the emptiness of his campus as he walked this week through the school’s quad and near the flagpole during lunch.
About 800 students out of a population of 2,650 were absent early in the week, and about 500 students were absent on Friday, he said.
Students have been hesitant to return amid overwhelming news of the coronavirus surge but started to come back as they saw that school “was safe and all the measures in place were working,” Gebhart said.
The school also had several teachers out each day but managed to cover them with certificated staff without having to combine classes, he said. Gebhart substituted in a health class Wednesday.
In San Diego, officials sent a message to families letting them know that because of the severe challenges facing schools, children would probably experience disruption during the next few weeks — whether it be a substitute, classwork in a study hall-type environment or “instructional time replaced by self-paced activities.”
“These are temporary measures required by the pandemic, and employing these strategies will allow San Diego Unified to keep classrooms open,” officials said.
As a last resort, district officials said they would work with local authorities to declare a “COVID Impact Day,” closing campuses for a day.
In Burbank, where students returned to campus on Jan. 3, attendance fell to about 75% and at least eight classrooms at five different elementary schools have had to close, said Supt. Matt Hill. The district has also leaned on office staff to fill in because of staffing shortfalls.
Districts need more flexibility and support from the state, Hill said. He wants to see the state start distributing coronavirus tests directly to families, rather than placing an additional burden on schools to hand them out. He also wants the state to provide testing clinics for districts so that hundreds of districts aren’t tasked with setting up their own.
In Culver City, district officials announced Friday that because of the spike in coronavirus cases, it would close all schools next week. The K-12 public school system, the first in the nation to issue a coronavirus student vaccination mandate, had recorded 587 student cases since Aug. 2020. Of those, 463 were reported in the last two weeks. The district has 7,100 students and 900 employees.
“Things accelerated too quickly,” Supt. Quoc Tran said. By taking a few days off, “everyone will get the chance to be distant from one another, recoup and recover and come back Monday.”
Students will be sent home with a coronavirus testing kit and they will need to show a negative test to return Jan. 24.
The surge has also led to labor strife, with teachers in San Francisco, Oakland and West Contra Costa staging actions to demand additional safety measures.
In Oakland, students also began circulating a petition echoing teachers’ safety demands. To date, it has been signed by more than 1,200 students. Ayleen Serrano, a petition organizer and a sophomore at MetWest High School, said she has felt the strain of the surge. All her classes are only half full, she said. One has only 7 students instead of 20.
“Even when there’s two or three kids missing it makes a big dent,” she said. “We also can’t learn anything because a lot of the kids, they’ll fall behind.”
Across the state, staffing shortages have led teachers and school officials to take extraordinary measures...
The word is at some schools says students who aren't sick have skipped the first two weeks of classes, and then there are all the real cases the Omicron. A *shit show* is how one teacher described things.
With California’s coronavirus surge worsening, the state has issued new recommendations for when people infected with the virus can end their isolation, guidance that is stricter than what was made earlier this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
California is now recommending that asymptomatic, coronavirus-infected people can exit isolation after the fifth day following a positive test, but only if they get a negative test result.
By contrast, the CDC’s recommendations don’t ask for a follow-up negative test; the CDC only recommends that those ending isolation continue wearing a mask around other people for five additional days.
Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the UC San Francisco Department of Medicine, praised California’s stricter guidelines. “Kudos,” Wachter wrote. “Safer than [CDC’s] version.”
Los Angeles County on Thursday reported more than 20,000 new cases, fueled in part by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
Overall, California’s reported average daily coronavirus caseload has more than quadrupled in the last two weeks — an astonishing rise that has pushed infection levels significantly higher than during the summer surge linked to the Delta variant.
“The risk for virus transmission has never been higher in our county,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Thursday.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health endorsed California’s new isolation recommendations and will codify them in its latest local mandatory health order.
The new California recommendations still largely mirror the CDC’s guidelines. Both shorten the minimum time recommended for isolation from 10 days to five for asymptomatic people.
Both the CDC and California also suggest the quarantine of people who are not up-to-date on their booster shots if they have been exposed to someone who tests positive for the coronavirus.
Officials recommend calling 911 if you have difficulty breathing, chest pain or pressure on the chest; bluish lips or face; are confused or hard to wake; or have other emergency symptoms.
The Omicron variant is believed to be two to four times as contagious as the previously dominant Delta. People who are eligible for booster shots but haven’t yet received them are at increased risk for infection.
“Data from South Africa and the United Kingdom demonstrate that vaccine effectiveness against infection for two doses of an mRNA vaccine is approximately 35%. A COVID-19 vaccine booster dose restores vaccine effectiveness against infection to 75%,” the CDC said in a statement.
Here’s a summary of California’s new guidelines to exit isolation...
As Tuesday’s powerful storm pounded Southern California, firefighters plucked a man from the Los Angeles River and searched for other possible victims, while emergency crews in Orange County rescued homeowners trapped by mudslides.
Around 7:50 a.m., fire dispatchers received a call from a man who had been swept into a small tributary of the L.A. River in Sylmar, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. Usually shallow, gentle streams, the river and its offshoots were transformed by the storm into torrents.
The man was carried about half a mile and into a tunnel that runs underground near Dronfield Avenue and Hubbard Street, said Nicholas Prange, spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department. In the darkness, he managed to grab an object to stop himself from being swept further downstream, Prange said.
“He was still on the phone with dispatchers who were relaying the message on the radio,” Prange said.
Sounding the fire engine’s horn to alert the man to their location, the rescue team checked one maintenance hole after the next until finding him.
After he was pulled to safety, the man was treated him for scrapes, cuts, bruises and hypothermia, Prange said. How he was caught in the river was not immediately clear.
Earlier Tuesday morning, bystanders reported a rollover crash on North Main Street in Chinatown near the L.A. River, according to the fire department.
Within minutes, fire crews realized the vehicle had fallen into the swollen, fast-moving river and swept away, Prange said.
Firefighters took up positions at bridges downstream as a helicopter flew in search of the vehicle and possible occupants.
After two hours, crews spotted the vehicle pinned beneath the Washington Boulevard bridge near Soto Street in South Los Angeles, about four miles downstream, Prange said. No victims were found.
Shortly afterward, firefighters saw a second car being carried by the river’s suddenly powerful current. As the water continued to rise, both vehicles became pinned against the bridge’s footing.
An hour later, a third vehicle, a gray Toyota Camry, ripped past the bridge and continued downstream into Long Beach, where it eventually came to rest, fully submerged, at the center of the river near Wardlow Road, said Capt. Jack Crabtree, spokesman for Long Beach fire.
Firefighters planned to let the waters subside before trying to pull the vehicles out of the river. It was unclear how the vehicles entered the river and whether they were operating or parked before being swept away.
The search for victims was continuing.
Elsewhere in Southern California, San Bernardino County authorities announced evacuation orders as mud and debris flows from fire-ravaged slopes threatened to damage dozens of homes and businesses in mountain and foothill communities including Oak Glen, Yucaipa, Forest Falls, and Nealey’s Corner.
There were no reports of injuries or property damage on Tuesday morning, though some roads were closed due to mudflow, said San Bernardino County fire spokesman Eric Sherwin...
BRIDGEPORT, Calif.—When Miguel Lujan needs gasoline for his truck, he gets it in Carson City, Nev., located 80 miles from his hometown. It’s worth it, the store clerk and roller-derby player says, to pay one-third less than the local average of nearly $6 a gallon.
California currently has the highest gas prices in the nation, an average of $4.70 a gallon of regular unleaded, according to AAA. Gasoline prices in the U.S. were up 50% in October from the same month last year, amid rising inflation.
The most expensive gas in California is here in Mono County, a 13,000-person tourist destination on the border with Nevada that is home to the Mammoth Mountain ski resort. The average price for a gallon of regular unleaded is $5.66, according to AAA.
In Bridgeport, a town of about 550 that serves as the county seat, the two gas stations were selling regular unleaded for $5.95 and $5.99 a gallon last week. In the nearby town of Lee Vining, which serves as a gateway to Yosemite National Park, a gallon of regular cost $6.09.
Mr. Lujan said he makes the trip to Carson City about three times a week and sometimes takes the bus to save on gas. He fills canisters, routinely keeping about 100 gallons stored in his house.
He started buying gas out of state soon after moving to Mono County four years ago. “The first year I was here, I spent more on gas than anything else,” he said.
President Biden on Wednesday called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether oil-and-gas companies are illegally keeping prices high. Outside analysts were skeptical whether the FTC will find sufficient evidence to substantiate those claims.
California has long had the highest gasoline prices in America. It has the highest tax, at nearly 67 cents a gallon, and only a few aging refineries, which sometimes go offline because of maintenance or other issues, are capable of producing gasoline that meets the state’s standards meant to reduce air pollution.
Though $5.66 represents a new high, inflated gas prices are nothing new in Mono County. Local residents and analysts attribute that to a variety of factors including its distance from population centers from which deliveries including gasoline come. Sacramento, the closest major city, is about 200 miles northeast.
Even with the high prices, gas stations are able to operate primarily because of tourists who buy gas on their way through, according to Linda Smith, a clerk at the Lee Vining Chevron station.
“They come in and complain,” Ms. Smith said of customers unhappy with the station’s prices. The most common reason she gives, she said, is that it is difficult to operate a business in a remote area that relies on seasonal tourists.
“We’re a pass-through town,” she said.
Station owners in Lee Vining and Bridgeport didn’t respond to requests for comment. Owners of gas-station franchises typically set their own prices based on factors such as wholesale costs, expenses and competition.
Some people stop at the stations in Mono County simply to gawk at the prices.
Tony Malais pulled over at the Lee Vining station Tuesday afternoon on his way back to Boise, Idaho, from Southern California. He had filled his Cadillac sedan in Northridge, outside Los Angeles, for $3.79 a gallon and hoped to make it to Nevada before needing to fill up again.
He had already stopped to take a photo of the station’s price sign on his way into California. This time he bought a soda. “I had heard it was about $5 a gallon. But I was surprised to see it over $6,” he said.
Pam Mowat, a real-estate agent who also runs a vacation and rental property business in Mono County, stopped by the Chevron on Wednesday. She said sky-high prices at the few area gas stations was a fact of life that local residents had gotten used to.
“I live here, I don’t have a choice,” said Ms. Mowat, who spent about $55 for roughly nine gallons of regular. She said she was headed to Reno later in the day, and would fill her Subaru Forester there, where AAA reported an average price of $4.20 a gallon for regular.
Rose Lierly said it isn’t just gas prices that are high in Bridgeport. Costs for nearly all supplies for Big Meadow Brewing Co., a small brewery she runs with her husband, have been on the rise in recent months.
“I used to buy [cases] of bottled water, 48 for $5.25. Now I get 32 for $5.25,” Ms. Lierly said. “It’s just because we are so remote here and freight charges are going up.” ...
Enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified School District has dropped by more than 27,000 students since last year, a decline of close to 6% — a much steeper slide than in any recent year.
The comparison is based on an annual count referred to as “norm day,” the fifth Friday of every new school year, Sept. 17 this year. Last year’s enrollment total for pre-school through 12th grade was 466,229. This year’s figure for that same date is 439,013, according to data provided by L.A. Unified that will be presented to the school board Tuesday.
Other data released by L.A. Unified indicates other potential concerns. The district estimates that between 70% and 80% of the school staff are on target to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by the district’s deadline of Oct. 15, indicating that thousands of employees face termination, which would exacerbate another problem: more than 2,000 unfilled jobs.
“We’re still seeing the impact of COVID,” said Veronica Arreguin, the district’s chief strategy officer, about the enrollment decline. Arreguin also noted that much of the decline was expected, in line with many years of dropping enrollment related to lower birth rates, families moving to more affordable areas and other factors.
Even so, the shortfall is three times what planners in the nation’s second-largest school district predicted. The district plans to act aggressively to understand what is happening and what to do about it.
“If it’s something we can change,” Arreguin said, “we need to change.”
The decline is not unique to L.A. Unified.
Enrollment dropped across the nation last year as families and school systems grappled with a pandemic that shut down in-person instruction for much of the year in most places and also prompted worried families to keep children at home when they had a choice to go back.
Statewide, enrollment in K-12 public schools fell by almost 3%, or 160,000, students last year, according to data from the California Department of Education. That was the largest drop of the last 20 years, surpassing a 1% drop between October 2008 and October 2009. More than a third of that decline was due to a lower enrollment in kindergarten.
The causes are varied, with economic factors at play — the high cost of living, including gentrification, has pushed families farther from the once-affordable urban core and also from adjacent suburbs served by L.A. Unified. Another factor has been limits on immigration, which used to funnel a steady supply of families with young children into L.A. Unified. The pandemic’s influence is difficult to pinpoint and measure.
For the 2020-21 school year, with campuses closed because of the pandemic, kindergarten enrollment declined by almost 6,000 students from the previous year, with many families dissatisfied with kindergartners having to attend class online. In a more typical year, the number of kindergarten students would have declined by about 2,000.
Unexpectedly large declines in the younger grades continued this year and, to a lesser degree, affected middle schools as well, said Tony Atienza, the district’s director of budget services and financial planning...
SACRAMENTO — Standing in an elementary school classroom in Oakland, Gov. Gavin Newsom paused when asked if he felt vindicated after voters saved his political career the night before and handed him a landslide victory in the recall election.
“I feel enlivened. I feel more energized, and I feel a deep sense of responsibility because people are counting on us and they need us. They need government, effective government,” Newsom said. “I’m also mindful of this: Challenges are in abundance in these positions.”
California voters and Newsom’s political allies stepped up to defend the governor from the GOP-led recall, delivering a win that helps pave the way to his reelection next year. Battle-tested but not bruised, the 53-year-old reaffirmed the mandate he walked into the governor’s office with three years ago after notching what appeared to be an even greater margin of victory Tuesday.
But just as wildfires, punishing drought, record homelessness, a housing shortage, a once-in-a-generation pandemic and a learning curve at the Capitol have challenged much of his term in office, Newsom returns to work facing those same problems and more.
“He has the same things to deal with today that he dealt with yesterday, minus the recall election,” said Dana Williamson, who worked as Cabinet secretary to former Gov. Jerry Brown. “I would think the election gives him a boost of confidence. He’s coming out of this in a stronger place than when he entered it, and it leveled his political playing field.”
With at least $24 million in his 2022 reelection campaign account and an activated army of union volunteers, Newsom will be a formidable incumbent when voters return to the polls next year, raising doubts that a well-known intraparty rival will step up to challenge him.
Newsom could also end up running against a cast of Republican candidates similar to the one he trounced Tuesday, some of whom have already announced their intentions to challenge him.
“There is no reelect after this,” said Dustin Corcoran, chief executive of the California Medical Assn.
Newsom’s campaign framed the recall as a proxy war against Trumpism playing out in a deep-blue state, shifting the focus off Newsom and his own record.
The governor took advantage of Larry Elder’s candidacy to contrast his leadership during the pandemic to the conservative talk show host’s promises to rescind mask mandates in schools and reverse the vaccine and testing rules Newsom ordered for healthcare workers, state employees, and teachers and school staff.
The decision to attack Elder’s position on vaccines proved smart in California and provided Newsom with an opportunity to tap into fears about the Delta variant and frustration with the unvaccinated. A recent preelection poll from the Public Policy Institute of California found strong support for requiring proof of vaccines for large outdoor events and to enter indoor businesses and predicted 80% of likely voters would be vaccinated.
“The campaign seized on that to create a simple choice for voters,” said Ace Smith, one of Newsom’s political advisors.
A week before the election, Smith argued that Sept. 14 would give Newsom “a clear mandate not only against the recall, but for sanity on something as important as public health.”
As a “final seal of approval” for his handling of the pandemic, Newsom’s triumph will also make it harder for Republicans to gain any traction during his reelection campaign with claims that he was too restrictive or took away personal freedom, said Juan Rodriguez, Newsom’s campaign manager.
The first governor in the nation to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, Newsom might be emboldened by Tuesday’s win to accelerate his approach to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
Democratic strategist Robin Swanson said many Californians, even Newsom supporters, are still frustrated from the school closures and shuttered businesses. She said the governor would be smart to acknowledge those feelings.
“People want to be heard in elections and the most gracious victors hear what their opponents say and hear what people say who didn’t vote for them,” Swanson said. “That’s how you build the sort of unity and healing that our state needs.”
In his brief election night speech, Newsom said he was humbled and grateful to the Californians who exercised their right to vote and expressed themselves “by rejecting the division, by rejecting the cynicism, by rejecting so much of the negativity that’s defined our politics in this country over the course of so many years.”
He extended more of an olive branch Wednesday...
