CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--Want to chat with Hillary Clinton? You can have the pleasure this coming Tuesday at the home of Seth MacFarlane. You just have to contribute thirty-three thousand, four hundred dollars. Another opportunity for that chat is to have dinner at the home of Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller. That one will set you back a hundred thousand dollars per couple. If those are a little rich for your blood, there are a couple of conversations with Tim Kaine (he's the guy running for Vice President) for anything from $2700 to $100,000. The higher priced tickets (starting at ten thousand) get you into the home of Eva Longoria who, unlike most of the others, does not seem to live in Beverly Hills. (Photo above: Hillary Clinton and George Clooney at Clinton fundraiser.)
Meanwhile, I was having the $2.99 special at Der Weinerschnitzel last night. If I had waited another day, I could have had the $1.29 special on the mini-sundae.
I'm not sure how I ended up on the email address list for all those lavish parties, but the underlying message is a little depressing. I'm all in favor of Hillary going after Trump with an advertising blitz and putting up well funded campaign HQs all over Florida and Ohio. That's the necessity. But it's too bad that Hillary's companionship in California is limited to the few people who can buy it.
I bring this recitation up for two reasons. One is to remind you of an old story from back in the George W. Bush administration. The other is to remind my fellow Californians that we are a third class state when it comes to electoral politics.
Of course it was possible at one time (anytime last year, actually) to meet all of the candidates for merely the price of a cup of coffee. All you had to do was to live in New Hampshire. They came looking for you at the local breakfast hangout. The residents of New Hampshire seem to think they have a divine right to the candidates' time and an equally divine right to choose first. The fact that winning the New Hampshire primary has become the presidential kiss of death seems to be lost on them. Nevertheless, we got to read about one New Hampshire woman who had already met with ten presidential candidates, but remained unsure.
Meanwhile, 48 other states are left in the lurch. I'm leaving Iowa out of the equation because their caucuses really do go first in the nation and at least for Republicans, the Iowa caucuses are even more of a kiss of death than the New Hampshire primary.
Want a chance to meet the candidates on the same terms as the New Englanders? Let's set the California primary for the same day as the New Hampshire primary. We don't want to define a particular date in advance, because if we do, the state of New Hampshire will move theirs up a week or three (that's their historical pattern). Instead, let's just define our primary as taking place on or before the date of any and all other states.
Or, if California voters protest that the additional election would cost a lot of money, let's just put the cost on the political parties by getting rid of our presidential primary and turning California into a caucus state. We could set our caucus date as equal to or in advance of any and all other state caucuses and primaries.
Of course the Democratic National Committee will probably resist. Let's just ignore them. They'll ultimately come around. The 2020 primary season would be a good time to give the new system a tryout. President Clinton won't have much opposition, so we can treat the 2020 California caucuses as a dry run. Then in 2024, Californians will have the pleasure of going to the local Dennys to meet with candidates Kaine, Clinton the younger, and Jerry Brown. And you'll save that hundred thousand dollars.
The story I promised you: Back when W was president, one of his top ranking officials was scheduled to do a fund raising dinner here in Los Angeles. It was a mere $2500 per person, but that's still quite a bit for us normal people. At the time, Kevin Drum was blogging for Washington Monthly, and he announced (a bit tongue in cheek, I have to imagine) that if you didn't want to pay to meet with the Bushites, you could join him for lunch at the Farmers Market over on Fairfax. The Farmers Market did extremely well that day, as most of the top bloggers of that era (and Arianna Huffington) showed up. And it was a ninety-nine point seven percent reduction in the price.
Another dog that didn't bark
School has started. This year, children entering the first grade in California are required to be up to date on their immunizations, and seventh graders are required to be up to date on whooping cough immunization. A new state law took away parents' rights to refuse vaccinations through what was known as a personal belief exemption. The PBE is no more. The only current exception is a medical condition that makes it unwise to give the injections. The law (SB277) was passed over the objections of a couple of thousand people who stalked the corridors of the state capitol and packed legislative hearings.
What's interesting about the beginning of this school year is how little public outcry we have seen. I invite the reader to try to recall a television news story about an anti-vaccination protest demonstration this school term. The subject seems to have dropped off the radar. It's the old Sherlock Holmes line (now having become a cliche) of the dog that didn't bark.
When SB277 was being debated, the opposition made it sound like it would be the imposition of fascism stirred and simmered with genocide. The more extreme opponents made a fetish of the term "vaccine injured" in their attempt to push the very-much-disproven argument that vaccines induce autism in some children. (Carefully done epidemiological studies following millions of children showed otherwise.) But still the angry parents flocked to Sacramento and carried out demonstrations in Los Angeles. Then the law was passed. The opponents tried to get the measure placed on the state ballot, but failed to gain the necessary number of signatures.
Opponents vowed to continue the fight. They filed a lawsuit, but a federal judge denied a request for an injunction. Of course the vaccine opponents pledge to continue, but the general tendency of the law is not with them.
So what is actually going on in the real world of public education? Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spokesperson Ellen Morgan points out that for one requirement -- that entering seventh graders have an up to date immunization against whooping cough -- the compliance is close to 100 percent. The department is following up on immunization records for entering first graders, which involves a lot of tedious analysis of written records, but the preliminary indication is that the district is doing extremely well.
There may be a simple answer to why the most strident anti-vaccination people are remaining fairly quiet, at least in public. The text of SB277 allowed for a reasonable accommodation for those who cannot or should not be vaccinated. This includes some children who have immune deficiencies and some children who have undergone chemotherapy recently. But the law did not specify precise limits on the ability of doctors to write exemptions. As the law was being debated in Sacramento, some doctors began to circulate the message that they would bend over backwards to help anti-vaccination families get exemptions. A few doctors wrote fairly long lists of things that might induce them to write exemptions, ranging from allergies to vaccine reactions among distant relatives.
Parents who are particularly anti-vaccine and can afford the medical bills can shop for a doctor who will write an exemption. That may be what is going on in California this year. Other parents who aren't so dogmatic probably scribbled out personal belief exemptions in the past, because they hadn't taken the time to get their kids to all the scheduled injections. School was starting, and filling out a form solved their problem.
We will probably discover that a lot of students who would have presented PBEs in the past are now getting their injections. It's simply a matter of figuring out that it is easier to take your kids to an immunization clinic or to a pediatrician than to be forced to home school your children.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
Decisions, Decisions: $10,000 to Chat with Hillary or … the $2.99 Special at Der Weinerschnitzel
