Brown asks Trump to visit rail project
Ever the cordial host, Gov. Jerry Brown invited President Trump to take a side trip during his visit to California Tuesday. Brown’s offer: Come to Fresno to check out high-speed rail.
“You see, in California, we are focused on building bridges, not walls,” Brown wrote in a letter to Trump on Monday that he also posted on Twitter, perhaps to better ensure the president saw it in time.
“After you’ve examined your wall prototypes on the border, I invite you to head north to the Central Valley — the heart of California,” Brown wrote. “Here in cities like Fresno and Madera more than a dozen bridges and viaducts are being built for the nation’s first and only highspeed rail line. We are already putting 1,700 Americans to work.”
Unmentioned in Brown’s note: The high-speed rail line is expected to cost $77.3 billion — $13 billion more than estimates from just two years ago — and the project is four years behind schedule. Perhaps high-speed rail isn’t the best example to show how California’s economy is, as Brown puts it, “thriving.” Also unmentioned is that the 8.7 percent unemployment rate in Fresno County is nearly twice the state and national averages.
No word from the White House yet about whether Trump has accepted the invitation.
— Joe Garofoli
Democrats duke it out: The news Monday wasn’t just that state Treasurer John Chiang was endorsed by the Southern California, 20,000-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 36. It was that for the second time in the past few days, Chiang took a swing at a fellow Democrat, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
“One of the reasons Chiang was endorsed over rival Antonio Villaraigosa was because of the many anti-labor and anti-union policies Villaraigosa pushed as mayor,” Chiang’s campaign said Monday in a news release. “Villaraigosa laid off city employees, tried to hike the retirement age for newly hired city workers and crossed picket lines, resulting in union leaders and members calling him a ‘scab,’ a ‘union buster,’ and even comparing the former mayor to Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, saying the two were ‘separated at birth.’ ”
The Chiang campaign, which has been stuck in the middle of the pack in most polls, has turned more aggressive in recent days — particularly toward Villaraigosa, who was in a virtual tie with Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom in a January survey by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Replied Villaraigosa spokesman Luis Vizcaino Monday: “Antonio Villaraigosa is proud to be endorsed by Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters and United Farm Workers, along with Congresswoman Karen Bass, Los Angeles Supervisor Sheila Kuehl and Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson because they agree — we need a governor focused every day on economic opportunity and equality.”
— Joe Garofoli
Gingrich checks in: Former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich weighed in on California’s gubernatorial race Monday, endorsing business executive John Cox of San Diego County.
“John has excellent reform ideas that will rein in the corrupting influence of special interest money and return control of government to the people,” Gingrich said of his fellow Republican.
While the endorsement may not be all that surprising — after all, Cox was the California finance chairman for Gingrich’s 2012 presidential run — don’t forget that Gingrich also has lavishly praised another California gubernatorial candidate: Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Well, not Newsom exactly, but Newsom’s 2013 book, “Citizenville,” on how to use technology to improve government. Gingrich said “the book is a blueprint for a Republican Party focused on a better future for all Americans, with more freedom, more prosperity and lower cost.”
Reaction from the Newsom camp on the endorsement: “LOL.”