Law + Policy

The title of UC Berkeley criminologist Franklin Zimring’s book, When Police Kill, released by Harvard University Press this week, is as stark as its mission is simple: to conduct a comprehensive study of police use of lethal force in the United States.

The rapid fire train wreck-a-day strategy of the Trump administration has left some people breathless and others queasy. Flogging a travel ban designed to exclude Muslims, provoking China, insulting Australia, staring down Iran, comparing Russia to the United States, and locally, floating a question of pulling federal funding from Cal due to inadequate “free speech protections” for far-right pundit Milo Yiannopoulos—whew. It’s enough to leave you wondering who or what’s on first.

They wrong. They’re rigged. They’re partisan. They’re worthless.

Polls took as vicious a drubbing as civility and real news in the latest election. And they’re still drawing withering abuse from Donald Trump and his supporters, who maintain that surveys showing that he is highly unpopular are lies, perfidious lies. Trump, in fact, continues to promote a narrative that we are living in a post-poll world, that polls are not only inaccurate but passé; nobody cares about them.

No state did Obamacare quite like California.

Here, we built our own state-insurance market. Here, we got a jumpstart on shifting low-income residents onto Medi-Cal (the state’s Medicaid program) as early as 2010. Here, insurance policies were standardized, consumer protections were tightened, and multi-lingual, statewide PR campaigns were kicked into overdrive. While other, redder states dragged their institutional heels, California took to the Affordable Care Act with gusto.

Most of the people who follow the President of the United States wherever he goes are there to protect his life. But Hope Hall has a different job: to document it.

For the last six years, she’s been Barack Obama’s presidential videographer (think of her as the national fly on the wall). She doesn’t shoot videos for the official record; that’s the job of the White House Communications Agency, which documents every public event in which the President participates. Her assignment is to film the President in his more informal moments.

The on-again-off-again détente between the outgoing and incoming administrations was off before apparently being on again—at least, as of this writing—with The Donald tweeting last week, “Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. Thought it was going to be a smooth transition - NOT!” only to reverse himself a few hours later when he told reporters that the transition was going “very, very smoothly.”

So has it always been this awkward?