Nancy Calls the Shots In California
“Blessed to have her leadership,” Gov. Newsom says of Nancy Pelosi, during coronavirus crackdown.
“We believe the virus will impact about 56 percent of California’s population,” California governor Gavin Newsom said in a press conference last Thursday. So the governor was ordering all residents of Californians to stay home, except for essential services, and the order would remain in force until further notice.
“In addition,” Newsom said, “I want to thank Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We had a very long conversation today. Talk about meeting the moment. We are so blessed to have her leadership in California. She’s very familiar to northern Californians, certainly familiar to me as a former mayor of San Francisco.” In reality, Newsom’s relationship with Pelosi goes back a lot farther.
William Newsom, Gavin’s grandfather, helped Pat Brown win the 1943 race for San Francisco district attorney. In 1960, Governor Pat Brown awarded the concession for the Squaw Valley Winter Olympics to William Newsom and John Pelosi. In 1963, John’s son Paul married Nancy D’Alesandro, daughter of congressman and Baltimore mayor Thomas D’Alesandro. In 1969 Paul and Nancy Pelosi moved to San Francisco, where Paul’s brother Ron was a San Francisco supervisor. Ron married William Newsom’s daughter Barbara, and until they divorced Nancy Pelosi was Gavin Newsom’s aunt by marriage.
In 1975, governor Jerry Brown appointed Gavin Newsom’s father to a judgeship in Placer County, and in 1978 to the state Court of Appeal. Newsom admires Jerry Brown but for leadership now looks to Nancy Pelosi, a woman on the far reaches of the left.
In 2001, long after Stalinist thug Harry Bridges was exposed as a Soviet agent, Nancy Pelosi praised Bridges in the Congressional Record as “arguably the most significant labor leader of the twentieth century.” Pelosi was also a big fan of Vincent Hallinan, Bridges’ lawyer and the 1952 candidate for president of the Progressive Party, a Communist front. The progressive Democrat Pelosi is also a vicious partisan and that trend emerges in Gavin Newsom.
In an interview with Politico last year, Newsom said Republicans would go into “the waste bin of history.” He referenced “the experience and temperament of Speaker Pelosi” a woman with “better sense than a lot of folks.” Newsom also announced a commitment to “universal health care,” and to make that happen, the governor is exploiting the coronavirus crisis.
Newsom’s Executive Order N-25-20, issued on March 12, “readies state to commandeer hotels and medical facilities to isolate and treat COVID-19 patients,” and also “readies the state to commandeer property for temporary residences and medical facilities for quarantining, isolating or treating individuals.” As Milton Friedman observed, temporary government measures have a tendency to become permanent.
Newsom’s budget provides nearly $100 million for the health care of foreign nationals illegally present in the United States. Newsom has not announced support for stepping up cooperation with federal border enforcement that would prevent carriers of coronavirus and other contagions from entering the United States. Likewise, it remains unclear whether the state’s sanctuary law would allow carriers to defy quarantine measures.
Like Nancy Pelosi, who invokes the “spark of divinity” in MS-13 gang members, Gavin Newsom has a soft spot for convicted murderers. Last year he reprieved all 737 of them on California’s death row. In similar style, his coronavirus crackdown cuts criminals a huge break.
The state department of corrections, headed by Newsom appointee Ralph Diaz, is barring family members of crime victims from attending parole hearings. The family members, and prosecutors, must appear by phone or video conference but inmates’ attorneys can appear in person. This ban, allegedly based on virus fears, will prevent victims’ families from confronting murderers face to face.
Doris Tate, mother of slain actress Sharon Tate, frequently appeared at parole hearings to keep Charles Manson and his followers in prison. The department did not indicate when family members of crime victims would again be allowed to appear in person at parole hearings.
Meanwhile, according to California health officials, the day before Newsom’s “stay home” edict, there were nearly 699 confirmed cases of coronavirus in California. In a state of 40 million, that amounts to about .0000175 percent of the population. Gov. Newsom, not a scientist, did not explain how he knew 56 percent of the population, more than 22 million people, would eventually come down with the virus.
Newsom did say he had been on the phone with the House Speaker, so if Californians thought Nancy Pelosi was calling the shots it would be hard to blame them. For her part, Speaker Pelosi may have more in mind than, as they discussed, “what will be needed over the course of the next few months.”
As Tad Friend noted in the New Yorker, Newsom is forward looking and like his hero Bobby Kennedy, “Newsom seeks to embody Kennedy’s grainy glamour, to provide moral clarity in a bewildering hour.” The governor wears Ermenegildo Zegna shirts and his hair is “lacquered with Oribe gel,” but Nancy Pelosi may be grooming her boy for a run at the White House in 2024.
In the meantime, as Newsom said Thursday, “We are so blessed to have her leadership in California.”
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