Benicia City Council directs city attorney to take action against push poll
By JOHN GLIDDEN, October 3, 2018 at 5:55 pm
BENICIA — Fearing an outside group or person is attempting to negatively influence the City Council elections, councilors took action Tuesday night.
The council in closed session directed City Attorney Heather McLaughlin to contact the California Fair Political Practices Commission in response to a series of calls residents received that some say smeared one of the council candidates.
“When an outside force appears to be engaging in activities that are outside of the ordinance and not disclosing who they are — I think we have no choice but to move forward,” Vice Mayor Steve Young said in the meeting.
Several residents, including Young, have received a phone call from Research America, Inc., asking to conduct a survey about the City Council, senatorial and gubernatorial contests. However, Young says that most of the questions centered on candidates Kari Birdseye and Lionel Largaespada.
“The statements about Mr. Largaespada were uniformly positive and stated how, for example, he would use his small business background to improve the city’s economy and relations with its businesses,” Young wrote in a Sept. 20 letter published by the Benicia Independent. “The statements about Ms. Birdseye were the opposite. Among these statements were ‘She wants to shut down Valero, costing hundreds of jobs,’ and ‘She will bring radical left-wing politics to City Hall.’”
A representative with the data collection company Research America previously confirmed to the Times-Herald that the business was hired to conduct the survey by EMC. Representatives with that group didn’t return calls for comment.
McLaughlin was also directed Tuesday to contact Research America, Inc. and EMC Research about the survey, and ask for a copy of the questions asked and provide information on who paid for the poll.
At issue is the alleged failure of the companies to disclose who paid for the poll — a violation of the Benicia Municipal Code.
Many have called the survey a push poll. Such polls are meant to sway public opinion instead of recording objective information from those surveyed.
Councilman Tom Campbell also spoke during Tuesday’s meeting stating that residents support having fair elections in town.
Campbell, who spearhead a campaign reform initiative in 2009, said he got 1,200 signatures during that time with only five people expressing doubt about the initiative. The rest supported the item, he said.
“Ninety-nine percent of the people want the same thing. They want to be fairly informed of who is actually backing a candidate. They want the elections to be clean, and they want people, who spend money on elections, to disclose how much money they spent,” he said Tuesday.
Campbell further said that if Research America and EMC won’t provide answers that are necessary for the city to go to court for those answers.
By Larnie Fox, October 3, 2018
Larnie Fox, Benicia
I just got off the phone with Kari Birdseye and I am happier than ever to be supporting her bid for Benicia’s City Council. I got to know Kari this year as her teammate in Benicia’s bocce ball league. I’ve found her to be refreshingly open-minded and optimistic. Given the divisive, confusing times we are living in, I totally trust Kari to provide clear, transparent and forward-looking leadership on the Council.
Kari is a long-term thinker. She often emphasizes the difference between reactive and proactive thinking. She told me that she believes that the whole current water rate mess could have been solved in the early 2000’s if a more proactive, less divided Council had been in place. You can expect Kari to oppose deferring any more infrastructure maintenance, especially on streets and the water system.
Kari is inclusive and is a good listener. She told me that during the course of her campaign she has been hearing from many people who have been hurt by the increased water rates. Once on Council she will work hard to address the issue, especially for low-income folks and seniors on fixed incomes. You can expect her to listen carefully, take everyone’s concerns seriously, then work to implement creative, proactive solutions that will ease current problems and prevent future problems for years to come.
Kari is a consensus builder. In her job as a Strategic Communications Manager for the NRDC, she works with scientists, engineers, lawyers, the press and the public to build consensus. She can learn from and talk to anyone.
Kari is independent. She does her homework and makes her own decisions. She will not be beholden to any business, union, politician or political group. Unlike other candidates, she is taking no money from corporations or businesses. She will make her own decisions. She is not anti-refinery. She wants a better partnership with Valero, but if necessary will stand up to big oil, real estate developers or any other group to protect our long-term economic interests as well as our air, water and land.
Kari is a committed Benician. She has lived here for nearly twenty years and raised her son and daughter here. She served on the board of the Benicia Stingrays swim team for nearly a decade, and was president for two years. Her son is now a lifeguard. She’s a past Mathew Turner PTA member, and now serves on the board of the Solano County Fair. Her 96 year-old grandmother also lives in Benicia, and Kari is well aware of the issues that local seniors face.
Kari understands the value of arts and culture in Benicia, both for their economic impact and their intrinsic value – making Benicia a more interesting and inviting place.
And I like her.
Vote for Kari, and remember to thank ALL who serve, have served or are willing to serve as officials in our local democracy. Their headaches are many, and their rewards are few.
Repost from The Rolling Stone [Editor: thanks to Marilyn Bardet for alerting us to this deep and shocking analysis of Trump’s latest disaster. – R.S.]
Why Aren’t We Talking More About Trump’s Nihilism?
The White House now says we might as well pollute because global catastrophe is inevitable
By MATT TAIBBI, OCTOBER 1, 2018 12:28PM ET
President Donald Trump pauses while speaking at a campaign rally at WesBanco Arena, in Wheeling, West Virginia. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/Shutterstock
While America was consumed with the Brett Kavanaugh drama last week, the Washington Post unearthed a crazy tidbit in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) latest environmental impact statement.
The study predicts a rise in global temperatures of about four degrees Celsius, or seven degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2100. Worse, it asserts global warming is such an inevitable reality, there’s no point in reducing auto emissions, as we’re screwed anyway.
“The emissions reductions necessary to keep global emissions within this carbon budget could not be achieved solely with drastic reductions in emissions from the U.S. passenger car and light truck vehicle fleet,” is how the report put it.
To make a real difference, it adds we’d have to “move away from the use of fossil fuels,” which is “not currently technologically feasible or economically practicable.”
There’s been just a flutter of media attention about this, mostly focusing on the hypocrisy. Trump, as is his wont, has at one point or another occupied basically every inch of territory on the spectrum of global warming opinions.
Now comes this Linda Blair-style head turn. The NHTSA report deftly leaps past standard wing-nut climate denial and lands on a new nihilistic construct, in which action is useless precisely because climate change exists and is caused by fossil fuels.
The more you read of this impact statement, the weirder it seems. After the document lays out its argument for doing nothing, it runs a series of bar graphs comparing the impact of various action plans with scenarios in which the entire world did nothing (labeled the “no action” alternative).
“A textbook example of how to lie with statistics,” is how MIT professor John Sterman described it to the Post.
There’s obviously a danger at overinterpreting this paper, which mostly seems like a desperate bureaucratic attempt to square science with Trump’s determination to roll back environmental policies for his business pals.
But even as accidental symbolism, it’s powerful stuff. A policy that not only recognizes but embraces inevitable global catastrophe is the ultimate expression of Trump’s somehow under-reported nihilism.
While the press has focused in the past two years either on the president’s daily lunacies or his various scandals, the really dangerous work of Trump’s administration has gone on behind the scenes, in his systematic wreckage of the state.
Implicit in this campaign of bureaucratic dismantling has been the message that pandemonium is a price Trump is very willing to pay, in service of breaking the “disaster” of government. Many of his top appointees have been distinguished by their screw-it-all mentality.
Remember, he appointed Mick Mulvaney, a man who had once inspired a downgrade of America’s credit rating by threatening to default on the debt, to be his budget director.
He later put Mulvaney in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he fired his own 25-person advisory board — after requesting a budget of $0 and promising to fulfill the bureau’s mission “no further.”
Trump’s original EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, was best known for having used his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general to sue the EPA repeatedly and zero out the environmental-enforcement budget. Trump made a robotization enthusiast his choice for labor secretary, chose a hockey-team owner to run the Army (he withdrew, thankfully), and so on.
There are still hundreds of top federal jobs left unmanned, and some of the non-appointments seem like Nero-level acts of madness. Trump asked for 25 percent cuts to the whole State Department on the grounds that they were “prioritizing the efficient use of taxpayer resources.” But what country goes without ambassadors for years? Trump fired dozens upon inauguration and to this day still has 34 vacancies. We have no ambassador in South Africa, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, even Mexico. We’re a ghost state with nukes.
All of this is part and parcel of Trump’s doomsday message. He’s been a textbook example of Richard Hofstadter’s famed theory of paranoid politics. See if any of this (especially the line about “barricades”) sounds familiar:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization… Like religious millennialists, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days…
From Day One of Trump’s campaign, pundits have reached for traditional political explanations to describe both his behavior and his appeal. Because we’re trained to talk in terms of left and right, progress and reaction, we tried to understand him in those terms.
But Trump sold something more primal. His core message was relentless, hounding negativity, lambasting audiences with images of death and disaster.
His first campaign speech was basically a non-denominational end-times sermon, in which America was either kaput or close to it, surrounded on all sides by bloodthirsty enemies. “They kill us,” he preached. “They beat us all the time… We have nothing…”
He ranted about a system befouled by false prophets. “Politicians are all talk, no action,” he howled. “They will not bring us— believe me — to the promised land.”
The “What have you got to lose?” line he pulled out later was supposedly just a pitch to African-American voters, but all of Trump’s audiences picked up on the “it just doesn’t matter” theme. (If you want to be wigged out, check out the similarities between Trump speeches and the famed Bill Murray speech from Meatballs. Just substitute “China” for “Mohawk.”)
Obese and rotting, close enough to the physical end himself (and long ago spiritually dead), Trump essentially told his frustrated, pessimistic crowds that America was doomed anyway, so we might as well stop worrying and floor it to the end.
If that meant a trade war, environmental catastrophe, broken alliances, so be it. “Let’s just get this shit over with,” is how Trump’s unofficial campaign slogan was described in the show Horace and Pete, one of the few outlets to pick up on Trump’s Freudian death-wish rhetoric.
Trump made lots of loony promises to bring us back to the joyous Fifties (literally to Happy Days, if you go by his choice of Scott Baio as a convention speaker). But even his audiences didn’t seem to believe this fable.
The more credible promise of his campaign was a teardown of the international order, which he’s actually begun as president. Trade deals, environmental accords, the EU, NATO, he’s undercut all of them, while ripping government in half like a phone book.
He keeps inviting destruction like it’s a desirable outcome. He even pushed through legislation for “low-yield” nuclear weapons, whose only purpose is to be more theoretically usable than the other kind (although he’s wrong about this, too).
His fans even cheered when he played nuclear chicken with Kim Jong-un, tweeting that his “nuclear button” was “bigger & more powerful” than Kim’s (and “my Button works!”).
It’s easy to understand the nationalist sentiment behind reversing trade deals or backing Brexit. But what’s the populist angle on burning the planet, or nuclear war? How does hating elites explain cheering a guy on for turning nuclear diplomacy into a penis-measuring contest?
On a policy level, this apocalypse politics is pure corporate cynicism, with Trump’s big-business buddies showing a willingness to kill us all for a few dollars now.
The broader electoral pitch is just an evil version of every nuclear-age dance tune ever, “99 Luftballoons” or “1999.” The world is ending, so fuck it, let’s party. As crazy as it is, it’s a seductive message for a country steeped in hate and pessimism. Democrats still don’t understand it. Trump’s turning America into a death cult, with us as involuntary members.
Repost from the Vallejo Times-Herald [Editor: Vice Mayor Steve Young and many others who received the call have been perfectly clear about the smear tactics of the “push poll” callers who have spread misinformation and lies about candidate Kari Birdseye. Kari’s opponents have publicly raised questions about whether there even was a bias (see Largaespada’s and Strawbridge’s highlighted comments below). For a detailed and accurate description of the blatant bias, see Steve Young: Benicia voters should be wary of fake polls. Kudos to City Attorney Heather McLaughlin for looking into this. Learn the truth about Kari Birdseye at BirdseyeForBenicia.com. – R.S.]
Benicia officials looking into push poll incident
By John Glidden, October 1, 2018 at 7:01 pm
BENICIA — City Attorney Heather McLaughlin has launched an investigation into whether the city’s campaign ordinances were violated after several residents reported receiving a survey call about the current Benicia City Council candidates.
McLaughlin confirmed last week that she will be meeting with the City Council in closed session on Tuesday about possibility initiating litigation in response to the calls.
The calls came to light after Vice Mayor Steve Young wrote a letter, first posted on the Benicia Independent website, stating he received one of the calls from Research America, Inc, a data collection company which has multiple branches throughout the United States.
Young said the call originated from a Saratoga phone number, and the pollster said she would be asking questions about the City Council, senatorial and gubernatorial contests. However, Young alleges that only questions about the council were asked.
He further said that the person asked a few questions about Christina Strawbridge, and none about William Emes, however, “there were lots of questions about Lionel Largaespada and Kari Birdseye.”
“The statements about Mr. Largaespada were uniformly positive and stated how, for example, he would use his small business background to improve the City’s economy and relations with its businesses,” Young wrote. “The statements about Ms. Birdseye were the opposite. Among these statements were ‘She wants to shut down Valero, costing hundreds of jobs,’ and ‘She will bring radical left-wing politics to City Hall.’”
Young said the call was a push poll. Such polls are meant to sway public opinion instead of recording objective information from those surveyed.
Reached by phone Monday, a Research America employee, who declined to give his name, said the company was paid to “collect data as an opinion poll only.”
He also denied the poll was meant to sway voters. However, the employee confirmed EMC Research paid for the poll. A representative of the company couldn’t be reached for comment on Monday.
McLaughlin said her investigation centers on whether the pollsters disclosed who paid for the campaign poll.
“It is a little hard to say what section (the polls) are violating since we don’t know enough about the poll,” she wrote in an email, first reported by the Benicia Herald. “If the poll is paid for by a candidate there are rules for that. If it is paid for by an independent committee there are rules for that. All of it basically boils down to disclosure. They should be disclosing who is behind the poll.”
In a letter posted online, Largaespada said he had “no involvement whatsoever with this poll.”
“I do not know who is conducting it, and it was done with no input or permission from me,” he wrote. “ I have heard from many residents about the poll, and I have heard many different opinions on how it was conducted – ranging from Steve’s claim that it is biased towards me, to residents who found it equally balanced, to others who thought it was negative-sounding towards me. As with most topics, people have differing reactions and take always based on their own beliefs and opinions. ”
Largaespada said he is against push polling as it doesn’t benefit anyone.
A blog post on Birdseye’s campaign page, “When they go low, we go high,” said the campaign had nothing to do with the poll.
“However, the telephone pollster offered lies about me and flattering comments about one of the other candidates,” she wrote.
Birdseye followed up by responding to Largaespada’s comments about the poll.
“The favored candidate has publicly denied involvement. I believe him, but then he claims that the poll wasn’t necessarily biased,” she wrote. “He suggests that people hear what they want to hear. But many Benicians have reported that the push poll is an obvious attempt to smear my good name.”
Strawbridge also said she does not favor push polling.
“It has no place in our town’s election process. That said, during most of the elections I have participated in, there has been influence coming from both outside and inside Benicia. At times the facts have not always been true for or against a candidate,” Strawbridge wrote in an email to the Times-Herald on Monday. “Since I was not surveyed and there have been conflicting reports about the content of the questions , more information is needed as to the who and the what of the poll.”
She further said forums are a great way to find out where candidates stand on important issues.
Financial records submitted by the three campaigns last week to the Benicia City Clerk’s Office show that none hired EMC or Research America to conduct the poll.
BENICIA — Fearing an outside group or person is attempting to negatively influence the City Council elections, councilors took action Tuesday night.
BENICIA — City Attorney Heather McLaughlin has launched an investigation into whether the city’s campaign ordinances were violated after several residents reported receiving a survey call about the current Benicia City Council candidates.
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