It is with heavy heart that we report the death of Calbuzz co-founder Phil Trounstine, who passed away peacefully at home on Monday afternoon. He was 72. Phil for decades was a fiercely intelligent, hard-charging and widely-respected member of the California politics tribe – as the longtime Political Editor of the San Jose Mercury News, the onetime Communications Director for Gov. Gray Davis (Phil never tired of telling me that Gray was at 65 percent favorable when he left the governor’s office, well before the recall) and as founder and director of the San Jose State University Poll. In 2009 ..read more

The MSM chases Caitlyn Jenner like dogs in heat and John Cox’s big bear makes it official: the attempted recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom is a circus. On Planet Earth, however, which clown in the car is most popular matters not to Prince Gavin, whose focus is on the central issue of not getting Gray Davis Disease. Yes or No on Recall, that is the question. All the rest is commentary. Calbuzz is slavering over next week’s release of gobs of juicy new data from the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley (bought and paid-for from a state government institution by the mighty, woke LA Times), bu ..read more

Recent focus on the deranged views voiced by U.S. Rep Marjorie Taylor (Marge) Greene has elevated “QAnon” to a household word. Attempting to understand precisely what “QAnon” is, however, represents a slippery and elusive task, because this shadowy, nut-case umbrella term has no universally accepted description. The best nuts and bolts description, in a grueling Calbuzz internets investigation, comes from the global crowd source scholars of Wikipedia, who write in part: QAnon[a] (/ˌkjuːəˈnɒn/) is a disproven and discredited far-right conspiracy theory[1] alleging that a se ..read more

A few months ago, when the Coronavirus pandemic was just getting real, a majority of Californians thought Gov. Gavin Newsom was doing a good job of managing the crisis. Not so much anymore. Today, only 31% of California voters give Newsom good or excellent marks for handling the “coronavirus pandemic” in a survey by Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, compared to 43% who give him poor or very poor marks. And in the poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, registered voters are split almost equally with 49% approving and 46% disapproving Newsom’s handling of the “coronaviru ..read more

For our farewell to 2020, Calbuzz was cleverly waiting for the results of the Georgia Senate races, in order to be able to more accurately discuss how 2021 would be shaping up – Democratic control of the U.S. Senate obviously would make things very different than divided government. But our best laid plans were upended when a riotous mob, incited by President Trump, attempted a coup last Wednesday, overrunning the U.S. Capitol, defiling the building, killing a cop, causing the death of four other people, hunting for the Congressional leadership and assaulting the very principle of democracy ..read more

Now we know Donald Trump’s strategy for re-election: use pure, un-distilled racism to overcome Joe Biden’s multi-national coalition. It’s George Wallace on steroids. “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens,” Trump said in his final speech to the Republican National Convention. “And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.” It’s the suburbs versus the inner city, homeo ..read more

In 1992, at the GOP national convention, Patrick Buchanan declared, “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” It was a bone-chilling call to fascism. If you were in the hall in Houston, your hair stood on end. It was a terrifying vision and it backfired: by November, Bill Clinton and Al Gore had won that war. And the rabid forces Buchanan had set loose went into hibernation for 24 years as “regular” Republican and Democratic administrations governe ..read more

Thoughtful people who have witnessed President Trump’s ignorant, incompetent, idiotic news conferences on the Coronavirus find themselves ready to slit their wrists when they see that the president’s approval rating has gone up to 49% in the latest Gallup Poll. Fear not. As Abraham Lincoln is professed to have said: You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. What we’re seeing is known in the polling and political science business as the rally effect – “the sudden and substantial increase in public approval ..read more

Dear Bernie, You are toast and we smell the burn. We are shutting you down. We are not “corporate” or “Wall Street” or “millionaires and billionaires.” We are just everyday Democrats – African-Americans and white suburbanites, college-educated and no college at all, liberals and moderates and conservatives, and we have decisively spoken. This is not a conspiracy. This is the voice of democracy telling you to stand down for the greater good. There is no “revolution.” There is, instead, a shared burning desire to rectify America’s most disastrous mistake, to oust the dangerous autocratic imbecil ..read more

After the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, Calbuzz — still committed to the United Front Against Trump (UFAT) — began to wonder if the Democrats might have to settle for the benevolent plutocrat to take out the malignant autocrat. We’ve seen some very smart and committed Democrats, like our friend Rose Kapolsinski, Barbara Boxer’s longtime chief adviser, sign up with moneybags Michael Bloomberg in desperate belief that he’s the best hope for defeating Donald Trump in November. If Biden were not viable, that would make sense. But what South Carolina proved, with Biden’s smashing vict ..read more