Stateside: Timing is everything

It’s a brave gal who launches her mayoral campaign on the eve of her city’s prophesied destruction, but lost among all the TV news items about Oakland’s preparations for impending riots and mayhem was Rebecca Kaplan’s official announcement today of her candidacy in the first instant runoff election for local offices since IRV was approved by voters several years ago. Although her announcement didn’t merit space on the local newspaper’s online Political Blotter, it did get coverage elsewhere in the online version of the paper, and also on the startup Bay Citizen.

The Bay Citizen story makes much of the fact that Kaplan is both a lesbian and a rabbi, and ponders what electoral advantage those two things might give her. In fact, her presence in the race might lead to a victory for Jean Quan, who seems the likely second choice for Kaplan voters. You can search Oakland’s Charter here, where the mechanics of IRV, or Ranked Choice Voting, are given in detail, but the gist of it is that if no one gets a majority in the first round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and the second-choice candidate on those ballots gets the votes.

Of course, wily old Perata might encourage some straw candidate to get into the race whose supporters rank him as their second choice—someone not as far right of center as Perata is, and not so well known that he or she actually has a chance of winning.

As always, the main issue in Oakland is its police force. Just last week, the City Council voted to cut 80 police jobs. But before the lay-offs, the police are working 12-hour shifts in anticipation that the imminent verdict in the trial of the BART police officer who shot an unarmed man while he was lying on the platform of the Fruitvale train station eighteen months ago will result in mayhem on the scale of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. According to some TV news reports, the National Guard and Apache helicopters are hovering on the outskirts of town ready to swoop in.

The “Things I wonder about” in this Scoop column I wrote back in January 2009, when the shooting happened, are really at the crux of the evidence that has been put before a jury in a Los Angeles courtroom over the past couple of weeks. The judge has taken first degree murder off the table for the jurors, but they are left with a range of options that could keep Mehserle in jail for decades. Or… the jury could find him innocent.

Meanwhile, back East, a bunch of alleged Russian agents have been arrested and news reports are full of wonder about the FBI’s timing, the Russian President having just visited. Actually, the bigger wonder about the timing is that just before the announcement of the arrests, trailers for the movie Salt began playing on TV. What’s the movie about? A Russian sleeper agent. Is someone in the FBI on Sony’s payroll?

--PEACE—

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

© Scoop Media