Don't call Derek Boonstra a hero. The Angelino Heights / Echo Park resident just saw a chance to improve the sad state of parking in his neighborhood — and he knows how to use Photoshop.

A few weeks ago, the 36-year-old posted his own custom parking sign on West Kensington Road near Laveta Terrace. It read: "YO: Please maximize parking. Park 2-3 feet from other vehicles; park close to the ends of curbs."

Parking woes aren't unique to his neighborhood, but Boonstra said he and other community members have been voicing their concerns about the density problem for a while now, which gets particularly bad during Dodger home stands. That included reaching out to Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch O'Farrell's office to recommend diagonal parking or permits as possible solutions, but that didn't really go anywhere.

Boonstra, who's lived in the neighborhood for 13 years, said it was the kind of idea a lot of Angelenos have probably had before. "I just happened to follow through on it first," he said.

He posted a version of his design on his neighborhood Nextdoor page "to get buy-in from my neighbors and see if they had any objections." After constructive feedback and no objections, he put his plan into action, ordering his message and placing it on a pole under the city's parking sign.

It has the basic design scheme of the standard municipal parking signage, but was done in black (Boonstra said red would have made it seem more "angry and official").

"Anyone who sees that hopefully understands that it's not an official city sign," he said. "I wanted it to be something that would clearly be kind of a joke, but also communicate an idea that was helpful, theoretically, in a non-aggressive way."

After about three weeks, Boonstra posted two more signs on nearby streets, where they were soon shared on social media. Someone posted a photo of one of the signs in a community Facebook group, so Boonstra outed himself as the sign maker in a comment. He also shared the design and the website he used to have them made, empowering his neighbors to create their own.

And while there's no scientific way to know if the signs made a difference, Boonstra said he did notice some instances of more considerate parking on the curb across his street.

"It's reasonable to park four cars there, but a couple of times ... while I had the one sign up, there were five cars parked there," he said.

But the resulting local media attention was "the beginning of the end," Boonstra explained. After a write-up in Los Angeles Magazine, local TV news picked up the story, and Boonstra suspects that's what alerted the city to the signs, which were taken down Friday morning.

"I find it all kind of absurd," he said, but clarified that he wasn't angry at the city for removing his signs.

"I kind of hoped... if they felt the need to take them down, that they would still respect that it came from a place of just trying to contribute to a solution of some kind," he said.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation enforces parking in the city, and while they did not confirm to LAist that their workers removed the signs, they did send us a section of city code, which states: "The Department may, without notice, remove every unofficial sign, signal or device placed, maintained or displayed upon any City street contrary to the provisions of the Vehicle Code or of this chapter."

Councilman O'Farrell's office did not respond to a request for comment regarding the signs and parking problems in the neighborhood.

Boonstra said he's not planning to post his custom signs again ("don't want to poke the bear too much"), but he hopes the tools and design he made publicly available could inspire others to make their neighborhoods parking positive.

"It'd be cool if someday I'm driving around the the city and see somebody else did their own thing with it," he said.

• March 4, 2019
• • 56

Any onetime Mafia investigator who listened to the Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen testify Wednesday would have immediately recognized the congressional hearing’s historical analogue — what America witnessed on Capitol Hill wasn’t so much John Dean turning on President Richard Nixon, circa 1973; it was the mobster Joseph Valachi turning on the Cosa Nostra, circa 1963.

The Valachi hearings, led by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, opened the country’s eyes for the first time to the Mafia, as the witness broke “omertà” — the code of silence — to speak in public about “this thing of ours,” Cosa Nostra. He explained just how “organized” organized crime actually was — with soldiers, capos, godfathers and even the “Commission,” the governing body of the various Mafia families.

Fighting the Mafia posed a uniquely hard challenge for investigators. Mafia families were involved in numerous distinct crimes and schemes, over yearslong periods, all for the clear benefit of its leadership, but those very leaders were tough to prosecute because they were rarely involved in the day-to-day crime. They spoke in their own code, rarely directly ordering a lieutenant to do something illegal, but instead offering oblique instructions or expressing general wishes that their lieutenants simply knew how to translate into action.

Those explosive — and arresting — hearings led to the 1970 passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, a law designed to allow prosecutors to go after enterprises that engaged in extended, organized criminality. RICO laid out certain “predicate” crimes — those that prosecutors could use to stitch together evidence of a corrupt organization and then go after everyone involved in the organization as part of an organized conspiracy. While the headline-grabbing RICO “predicates” were violent crimes like murder, kidnapping, arson and robbery, the statute also focused on crimes like fraud, obstruction of justice, money laundering and even aiding or abetting illegal immigration.

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It took prosecutors a while to figure out how to use RICO effectively, but by the mid-1980s, federal investigators in the Southern District of New York were hitting their stride under none other than the crusading United States attorney Rudy Giuliani, who as the head of the Southern District brought charges in 1985 against the heads of the city’s five dominant Mafia families.

Ever since, S.D.N.Y. prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have been the nation’s gold standard in RICO prosecutions — a fact that makes clear precisely why, after Mr. Cohen’s testimony, President Trump’s greatest legal jeopardy may not be in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

What lawmakers heard Wednesday sounded a lot like a racketeering enterprise: an organization with a few key players and numerous overlapping crimes — not just one conspiracy, but many. Even leaving aside any questions about the Mueller investigation and the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen leveled allegations that sounded like bank fraud, charity fraud and tax fraud, as well as hints of insurance fraud, obstruction of justice and suborning perjury.

The parallels between the Mafia and the Trump Organization are more than we might like to admit: After all, Mr. Cohen was labeled a “rat” by President Trump last year for agreeing to cooperate with investigators; interestingly, in the language of crime, “rats” generally aren’t seen as liars. They’re “rats” precisely because they turn state’s evidence and tell the truth, spilling the secrets of a criminal organization.

Mr. Cohen was clear about the rot at the center of his former employer: “Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day most of us knew we were coming and we were going to lie for him about something. That became the norm.”

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RICO was precisely designed to catch the godfathers and bosses at the top of these crime syndicates — people a step or two removed from the actual crimes committed, those whose will is made real, even without a direct order.

Exactly, it appears, as Mr. Trump did at the top of his family business: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates,” Mr. Cohen said. Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen said, “doesn’t give orders. He speaks in code. And I understand that code.”

What’s notable about Mr. Cohen’s comments is how they paint a consistent (and credible) pattern of Mr. Trump’s behavior: The former F.B.I. director James Comey, in testimony nearly two years ago in the wake of his firing, made almost exactly the same point and used almost exactly the same language. Mr. Trump never directly ordered him to drop the Flynn investigation, Mr. Comey said, but he made it all too clear what he wanted — the president isolated Mr. Comey, with no other ears around, and then said he hoped Mr. Comey “can let this go.” As Mr. Comey said, “I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.” He cited in his testimony then the famous example of King Henry II’s saying, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?,” a question that resulted in the murder of that very meddlesome priest, Thomas Becket.

The sheer number and breadth of the investigations into Mr. Trump’s orbit these days indicates how vulnerable the president’s family business would be to just this type of prosecution. In December, I counted 17, and since then, investigators have started an inquiry into undocumented workers at Mr. Trump’s New Jersey golf course, another crime that could be a RICO predicate; Mr. Cohen’s public testimony itself, where he certainly laid out enough evidence and bread crumbs for prosecutors to verify his allegations, mentioned enough criminal activity to build a racketeering case. Moreover, RICO allows prosecutors to wrap 10 years of racketeering activity into a single set of charges, which is to say, almost precisely the length of time — a decade — that Michael Cohen would have unparalleled insight into Mr. Trump’s operations. Similarly, many Mafia cases end up being built on wiretaps — just like, for instance, the perhaps 100 recordings Mr. Cohen says he made of people during his tenure working for Mr. Trump, recordings that federal investigators are surely poring over as part of the 290,000 documents and files they seized in their April raid last year.

Indicting the whole Trump Organization as a “corrupt enterprise” could also help prosecutors address the thorny question of whether the president can be indicted in office; they could lay out a whole pattern of criminal activity, indict numerous players — including perhaps Trump family members — and leave the president himself as a named, unindicted co-conspirator. Such an action would allow investigators to make public all the known activity for Congress and the public to consider as part of impeachment hearings or re-election. It would also activate powerful forfeiture tools for prosecutors that could allow them to seize the Trump Organization’s assets and cut off its income streams.

The irony will be that if federal prosecutors decide to move against President Trump’s empire and family together, he’ll have one man’s model to thank: his own TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who perfected the template to tackle precisely that type of criminal enterprise.

On Tuesday, the New York Times announced its content will be entirely free to anyone carrying a library card in California. Here’s how to access the news as easily as you access sunshine, Californians.

It’s not just current articles in the NYT that are available; according to The Hill, library cards also allow access to all its digital content and archives. There is already a substantial number of readers of the East coast paper in CA, so this seems to be some sort of reward:

“California is home to one of our biggest cohorts of readers, so we know that Californians value quality journalism that helps them understand not just the news that impacts their communities, but also what’s happening at the global level,” said Hannah Yang, head of subscription growth at The New York Times.

You must register with your card if you are accessing the site remotely, but if you’re in one of California’s 1,200 libraries, you can access the NYT directly without inputting your library credentials. That’s nice for anyone road tripping through!

There are instructions on how to input your information remotely here; you’ll be linked to a portal where you will have to give your card number and pin. If you’ve never logged on before, you’ll need to create an account:

For remote users, click on the Create Account button and fill out the required fields on the following page, or click on log in here if you already have an account. For users on library computers, click on log in in the upper right and log in or create an account.

And then the world, or at least the parts of it reported on by the New York Times, is your oyster.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in November. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

By Robert Barnes

Robert Barnes

Reporter covering the U.S. Supreme Court

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February 20 at 11:02 AM

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that the Constitution’s prohibition on excessive fines applies to state and local governments, limiting their abilities to impose fines and seize property.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on just her second day back on the bench after undergoing cancer surgery in December, announced the decision for the court, saying that the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause protects against government retribution.

“For good reason, the protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history: Exorbitant tolls undermine other constitutional liberties,” Ginsburg wrote. “Excessive fines can be used, for example, to retaliate against or chill the speech of political enemies. . . . Even absent a political motive, fines may be employed in a measure out of accord with the penal goals of retribution and deterrence.”

[He sold drugs and Indiana seized his car. Does the Constitution protect him?]

The court ruled in favor of Tyson Timbs of Marion, Ind., who had his $42,000 Land Rover seized after he was arrested for selling a couple hundred dollars’ worth of heroin.

He drew wide support from civil liberties organizations who want to limit civil forfeitures, which they say empower localities and law enforcement to seize property of someone suspected of a crime as a revenue stream.

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‘Your property is guilty until you prove it innocent’

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(Gabe Silverman/The Washington Post)

Some justices, too, had become worried about the state and local efforts.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a recent opinion that civil forfeitures have “become widespread and highly profitable.”

“This system — where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use — has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses,” Thomas wrote, referring to reporting by The Washington Post and the New Yorker.

[Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes]

At oral argument, Timbs’s lawyer said the case was a simple matter of “constitutional housekeeping.”

The Constitution’s Bill of Rights protects against actions of the federal government. But the Supreme Court over time has applied it to state and local governments under the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment. In 2010, for instance, the court held that the Second Amendment applied to state and local government laws on gun control.

The Eighth Amendment states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” Two of those commands — regarding bail and cruel and unusual punishments — have been deemed to apply to state and local governments. But until now, the ban on excessive fines had not been.

And the Indiana Supreme Court noted that when overturning a lower court’s ruling that the actions taken against Timbs were excessive.

Ginsburg’s opinion makes clear that the clause applies, and that it is “incorporated” under the 14th Amendment’s due process Clause. Justices Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch agreed with the outcome, but said they would have relied on a different part of the 14th Amendment.

The case is Timbs v. Indiana.

The president remains popular with Republican voters, but Weld said he would attempt to defeat him or at a minimum hurt him with a primary challenge. Weld, who was governor of Massachusetts from 1991 until 1997, left the Republican Party in 2016 to run as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential nominee. He returned to the GOP this month.

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

• Feb. 13, 2019
• • 418

However often President Trump strays from his favored political strategy, he faithfully returns to it like a dog to a bone: first, polarize the American electorate along racial, cultural and economic lines, then exploit the schisms that have supplanted the class divisions that were once central to both American and European partisan politics.

On one side of the divide are those whom the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart describe in a 2016 paper as comfortable with “an inexorable cultural escalator moving postindustrial societies steadily in a more progressive direction.” This new direction amounts to what the authors call

an intergenerational shift toward post-materialist values, such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, generating rising support for left-libertarian parties such as the Greens and other progressive movements advocating environmental protection, human rights, and gender equality.

On the other side, Norris and Inglehart write, is a counterrevolution, a

retro backlash, especially among the older generation, white men, and less educated sectors, who sense decline and actively reject the rising tide of progressive values, resent the displacement of familiar traditional norms, and provide a pool of supporters potentially vulnerable to populist appeals.

Economic distress, they argue, reinforces cultural alienation to produce fertile terrain for Trump. “Fears of economic insecurity, including the individual experience of the loss of secure, well-paid blue-collar jobs, and the collective experience of living in declining communities of the left-behinds” combine to make voters

more susceptible to the anti-establishment appeals of authoritarian-populist actors, offering simple slogans blaming “Them” for stripping prosperity, job opportunities, and public services from “Us.”

The collision of these forces has produced the emergence of an American authoritarianism. In their book, “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism,” which comes out later this week, Norris and Inglehart write that Trump has assumed leadership of this authoritarian movement,

defined as a cluster of values prioritizing collective security for the group at the expense of liberal autonomy for the individual. Authoritarian values prioritize three core components: 1) the importance of security against risks of instability and disorder (foreigners stealing our jobs, immigrants attacking our women, terrorists threatening our safety); 2) the value of group conformity to preserve conventional traditions and to guard our way of life (defending “Us” against threats to “European values”); and 3) the need for loyal obedience toward strong leaders who protect the group and its customs (“I alone can fix it," “Believe me,” “Are you on my team?").

The United States and many European countries, at various points in the last decade, have reached a critical juncture, Norris and Inglehart write: “The interwar generation, non-college graduates, the working class, white Europeans, the more religious, men and residents of rural communities” have come to feel “estranged from the silent revolution in social and moral values, left behind by cultural tides that they deeply reject.” These men and women, “until recently the politically and socially dominant group in Western cultures,” reached

a tipping point at which their hegemonic status, power and privilege is fading. Their values make them potential supporters for parties and leaders promising to restore national sovereignty (Make America Great Again), restrict immigration and multicultural diversity (Build a Wall) and defend traditional religious and conventional moral values.

The debate over whether the rise of right-wing populism is driven by cultural anxiety, racism, ethnocentricity or economic deprivation may “be somewhat artificial,” Norris and Inglehart contend because

interactive processes may possibly link these factors, if structural changes in the work force and social trends in globalized markets heighten economic insecurity, and if this, in turn, stimulates a negative backlash among traditionalists toward cultural shifts. It may not be an either/or question, but one of relative emphasis with interactive effects.

In this country, the nominally class-based politics of the New Deal fractured when working class non-college whites felt abandoned by a Democratic Party that shed its pre-civil rights, segregationist southern wing and that by the 1970s had adopted a culturally and racially liberal agenda. Over the past five decades, these white voters have formed the core of the populist right. Conversely, minorities, many of whom face the same economic hardships as working class whites, if not worse, are firmly aligned with the party of social and cultural liberalism and racial equality, the Democratic Party.

“The new cultural cleavage dividing Populists and Cosmopolitan Liberals,” Norris and Inglehart write, is “orthogonal to the classic economic class cleavage” — in other words, the new division cuts across and splits the old economic class solidarity.

Data from a preliminary American National Election Studies survey — provided to me by Matthew DeBell, a scholar at Stanford’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences — revealed the strength of this new cleavage. The survey asked 2,500 men and women to rank their feelings toward Trump on a “feeling thermometer” scale of zero, “very cold or unfavorable,” to 100, “very warm or favorable.”

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The results illustrate that the population is even more divided between those who love and those who hate Trump than we might think. Sixty-one percent had either extremely hostile or very positive feelings toward the president.

Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, analyzed the responses to the survey. He wrote me that nearly two out of five of those surveyed, 38 percent, put Trump in the coldest range, 5 degrees or lower. 23 percent, put him in the warmest range, 95 degrees or higher. If the definition of extreme is expanded to encompass those who rank Trump from 0 to 10 and from 90 to 100, the total grows to 72 percent — 44 percent at 10 degrees or lower, 28 percent 90 degrees or higher.

Abramowitz noted that “Trump is the most polarizing president in the history of ANES polling and Gallup polling.”

Not only is Trump the most polarizing president, he has monopolized public attention and managed to make himself the object of both loathing and adoration.

“The 2020 elections will certainly be all about Trump, assuming he is on the ballot and to a considerable extent even if he is not,” Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, wrote me in an email. “The 2018 election was all about Trump even though he was not on the ballot.”

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Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, elaborated on Trump’s self-generated centrality in an email:

While Democrats and Republicans were already quite polarized before Trump ran for the presidency, I don’t think there is any question that he has contributed to further polarization. It is increasingly difficult to find people who don’t feel strongly about him.

Trump, Feldman noted,

taps into some fundamental issues in contemporary American politics — race/ethnicity, social issues, nationalism — and his rhetoric — clearly designed to appeal to his base — turns off many of those who are not with him on those issues. When you do little or nothing to broaden your support beyond your core voters you will generate extreme affective reactions.

Feldman posed the question:

Will this make the 2020 election largely about Trump? To a great extent yes, though the answer to that will depend in part on who the Democratic candidate is. As we saw in 2016, negative reactions to Hillary Clinton contributed to the outcome of that election.

Feldman’s point about Clinton leads to the next question. As the Democratic selection of a nominee begins in earnest, one issue threatens the cohesion of the center-left coalition: whether the party should support expansive liberal initiatives like Medicare for All, a sharp hike in tax rates on the rich and a Green New Deal or whether it should stake out the center.

Columnists who lean toward the center themselves have been particularly sharp in their criticism of the leftward movement of the party.

“Democrats Are Boosting Trump’s Re-election Prospects,” read the headline of a National Journal article last week by Josh Kraushaar:

Their top 2020 presidential hopefuls are embracing socialist-minded economic policy, from a Green New Deal to single-payer health insurance. It’s playing right into the president’s hands.

Gerald Seib, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, wrote earlier this week that “Democrats have arrived at a moment of great opportunity, but also of great peril.”

Increasingly, he argued, the party has become

identified with policy proposals that are easy for Republicans to caricature as left-wing extremism. It is a fair bet that a majority of congressional Democrats don’t support either a 70 percent top tax rate or an across-the-board wealth tax on the richest Americans.

In addition, Seib noted, “the party is beginning to experience the consequences of a zero-tolerance attitude on perceived misbehavior.”

According to Seib, “Democrats face this question: Could they manage to scare off that center just as it has become so available?” The risk, Seib wrote,

is that centrist voters will think they see that an angry left wing taking charge. Democrats could appear to be succumbing to the national mood of anger, when the better image might be of hope.

In his State of the Union address on Feb. 5, Trump laid the groundwork for an assault on Democrats, declaring:

Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.

I asked Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts who is one of the directors of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, whether Democratic primary voters are pushing presidential candidates to take stands on issues further to the left than the general electorate would accept.

Contrary to the view of many political analysts, Schaffner countered with data suggesting that this is not the case.

“I actually don’t think Democratic primary voters are substantially more liberal than Democrats more broadly,” he wrote, adding that many of the party’s new policy initiatives are, in fact, “favored by a majority of those who voted in 2016.”

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He cited the following results from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study survey.

Who favored granting legal status to immigrants? Democratic primary voters: 79 percent support; Democrats in general: 77 percent support; all voters: 55 percent support.

Who would require minimum amounts of renewable energy? Democratic primary voters: 85 percent support; Democrats in general: 80 percent support; all voters: 61 percent support.

Ban assault rifles? Democratic primary voters: 91 percent support; Democrats in general: 84 percent support; all voters: 64 percent.

Eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders? Democratic primary voters: 84 percent support; Democrats in general: 78 percent support; all voters: 67 percent.

How about raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour? Democratic primary voters: 92 percent support; Democrats in general: 90 percent support; all voters: 65 percent.

Along similar lines, four political scientists, John Sides and Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University, and Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch of UCLA, write in a March 2018 paper, “On the Representativeness of Primary Electorates” that “primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for increasing party polarization in government.” On the contrary, they find “that primary voters are similar to rank and file voters in their party” and thus “the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole.”

Jacobson of UCSD strongly agreed, arguing that Democrats’ intense dislike of Trump will make them willing to forgive a candidate who fails to adopt all their favored policies if the candidate looks like a winner:

Most Democrats will have as their prime goal — far more important than positions taken by the candidates — making sure Trump does not have a second term.

The national election survey cited above reveals the depth of the electorate’s divisions on a range of issues in the Trump era.

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On what may prove to the crucial subject of debate over the next two — impeachment — the public is split.

The survey found that a 42.1 plurality favors impeachment, including 24.9 percent who favor it strongly. A slightly smaller 38 percent oppose impeachment, including 30 percent who oppose it strongly. 19.9 percent did not take a stand.

Americans are evenly divided in their assessment of Trump’s repeated denials that neither he nor his campaign ever coordinated with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton. According to the survey, 49.9 percent agreed with the statement “Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign probably coordinated with the Russians,” while 50.1 percent said the campaign “probably did not coordinate.”

One of Trump’s signature claims during the 2016 campaign was the promise that he would “drain the swamp” of corruption in the nation’s capital. That promise, according the public, is not holding up well.

The survey asked “Has corruption in government increased, decreased, or stayed the same since Donald Trump became president?” The result? More than half, 54 percent, said corruption has increased under Trump, including 26.6 percent who said it has increased “a great deal.” 28 percent said the level of corruption remains unchanged, and 18.4 percent said corruption had decreased. 3.1 percent said corruption had decreased “a great deal.”

Trump has railed against the Mueller investigation since it began, calling it an “illegal Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt.” Asked about the Mueller investigation, 45.1 of those surveyed said they approved, 16.6 points more than the 28.5 percent who said they disapproved, 19.7 percent “extremely strongly.” 28.4 percent had no opinion.

Trump has pushed the authoritarian envelope further than any president (or major party presidential candidate) in recent memory.

Let’s turn back to Gary Jacobson. “As long as Trump is on the scene, the nation is bound to remain deeply divided,” Jacobson writes in “Extreme Referendum: Donald Trump and the 2018 Midterm Elections,” which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Political Science Quarterly:

To the extent that he reshapes the Republican Party in his white nationalist image, these divisions will deepen further and every election, like the 2018 midterms, will be fought with both sides convinced that nothing less than the future of American democracy is at stake.

Norris and Inglehart suggest that the dependence of the populist right on older voters may lead to its steady decline as those voters die off, but they are not confident that this will happen. “It remains to be seen how resilient liberal democracy will be in Western societies, or whether it will be damaged irreparably by authoritarian populist forces” they write at the conclusion of their book. “The problem is not just Trump, nor is it just America. It reflects pervasive economic and cultural changes, for which there are no easy answers.”

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Jake Beaudin (right) and the goodmoov team, (L-R) Revell Bell (Claremont Graduate University), Pooja Nair (ArtCenter College of Design), Jonathon Markowski (ArtCenter College of Design).

A screenshot from the goodmoov app. The app provides a suggested route for drivers to incentivize them to get out of bottlenecks.

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Florida beach commissioner reprimanded for licking someone's face

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Madeira Beach City Commissioner Nancy Oakley will face consequences for licking a city manager's face, which will include paying a $5,000 fine. (Spectrum Bay News 9)

By Antonia Noori Farzan

Antonia Noori Farzan

Reporter for Morning Mix

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February 7 at 6:05 AM

It was supposed to be a fun, lighthearted alternative to typical government meetings, and one befitting a laid-back beach town. The city commission of Madeira Beach, Fla. — a coastal community of nearly 4,500 situated on a barrier island facing the Gulf of Mexico — had decided to hold a special outdoor meeting during the King of the Beach fishing tournament in November 2012. The main order of business: honoring a sister city in the Bahamas.

But things quickly got out of hand at the meeting, according to a report from the Florida Commission on Ethics. By her own admission, Nancy Oakley, a city commissioner in Madeira Beach, had done some drinking at the fishing competition. She spotted Shane Crawford, the city manager at the time, and Cheryl McGrady, his executive assistant. The two would later marry, but were in relationships with other people at the time. Oakley suspected them of having an affair.

Using expletives, she demanded McGrady, who was supposed to be acting as deputy city clerk and taking the minutes, be removed. Then, after the otherwise low-key meeting concluded, Oakley walked up to Crawford again. She allegedly licked his neck and the side of his face, slowly working her way up from his Adam’s apple, and groped him by grabbing at his crotch and buttocks.

McGrady, who had been standing there the entire time, told Oakley that her behavior was inappropriate. According to the report, Oakley threw a punch at the woman, but missed.

It wasn’t an isolated incident, Crawford told Bay News 9 last month. Oakley had a “habit of licking men that either she was attracted to or thought that she had authority over,” he said. He wrote in a 2017 complaint to the ethics board that Oakley had made unwanted advances toward other city staff, too, and that they were “not interested in enduring that type of treatment ever again.”

Oakley resigned from her position on the Madeira Beach City Commission on Tuesday, a week after the state ethics panel announced Crawford’s complaint had been upheld in a unanimous vote. She has repeatedly denied touching the former city manager inappropriately and has insisted she never licked his face or anyone else’s. But the ethics commission chose to go with the accounts of several bystanders who offered sworn testimony to the contrary and noted three other men testified Oakley had licked their faces in public without their consent.

Nancy Oakley resigned from her position on the Madeira Beach city commission days after a Florida Ethics Commission report recommended she be censured. (City of Madeira Beach)

“The act of licking a person on the face and neck is too unusual to be contrived by multiple witnesses and multiple victims,” administrative law judge Robert S. Cohen wrote in his final report. He recommended she be fined $5,000 and publicly censured by the governor for inappropriate behavior.

Oakley could not be reached for comment late Wednesday night. In her resignation letter, she continued to deny any wrongdoing and said she was only giving up her position in an attempt to quell the controversy.

“While the Commission on Ethics has made their decision, I maintain my innocence and am pursuing the paths of appeals available,” she wrote. “With that being said, it is time for us all to move on.”

Residents who spoke up at a special meeting of the Madeira Beach City Commission on Wednesday night seemed to agree. While some friends defended Oakley, who was not present, others accused her of giving the city a bad name.

“I am sick and tired of the embarrassing headlines created by the majority of this commission, and it is time for a change,” commented one woman who introduced herself as Helen Price.

Another Madeira Beach resident, Robert Preston, told the commission, “I would love to be part of a city that’s in the news for good things, not dirt and garbage.”

Though the face-licking episode allegedly took place in 2012, it took another five years for Crawford to file a complaint. According to a report prepared by the ethics commission, Crawford explained he had not initially reported Oakley for harassment because he feared he would lose his job. The following year, she chose not to run for reelection, and Crawford let the matter go, according to the Miami Herald.

After Oakley decided to seek office again in 2017, Crawford filed an official complaint. She won the race, and, in her first meeting back, suggested McGrady should be fired. A month after that, she was one of three commissioners who voted to suspend him for reasons that were not fully explained. He ultimately chose to resign rather than be fired, according to the Herald.

The investigation into Oakley’s misconduct led to a very public airing of Madeira Beach’s dirty laundry, the Tampa Bay Times reported in September. During one hearing, Oakley’s attorney began shouting at McGrady and insisting she had been having an affair with Crawford in 2012, when the two were married to different people. McGrady insisted it was untrue. Meanwhile, numerous friends of Oakley’s were called to the stand and subjected to extensive questioning about her drinking and whether she had ever been known to lick people’s faces.

Oakley testified she had drank “some beer” and possibly a cocktail before the alleged face-licking incident, the transcripts from the hearings show. She also acknowledged she had used profanity to demand that McGrady leave, explaining, “I didn’t think she needed to be there. I don’t like her. [ . . .] I think something was going on between the two of them.”

In her own testimony, McGrady told a different story, describing Oakley as “belligerent and intoxicated” and “stumbling all over the place,” while holding a Tervis tumbler filled with alcohol that she insisted be set up at her place on the dais.

“I’ve never seen anything like that in life and hopefully I’ll never see anything like it again,” she said, later explaining that she “got the impression that Commissioner Oakley was jealous of me somehow.”

Crawford also faced an ethics complaint of his own, the Times reported. His relationship with McGrady didn’t violate the city’s rules, but it did prompt the International City/County Management Association to ban him for life in 2016, after residents filed complaints. A letter to Madeira Beach’s then-mayor noted “it is highly inappropriate for a city manager to have a personal relationship with a subordinate employee,” and Crawford had recommended McGrady for raises and promotions while the two were in a relationship.

Separately, in December, the Florida Ethics Commission fined him $2,000 for accepting prohibited gifts from lobbyists, which consisted of discounted rent on condominiums he leased from local developers.

During cross-examination at one hearing, Oakley’s lawyer asked McGrady if she had ever told anyone about the alleged assault on her then-boss.

“Not about that incident, no,” McGrady replied. “I mean, she licked a lot of people, sir. So everyone kind of talked about the fact that she licked people. That’s what she did when she got drunk.”

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Joshua Trump fell asleep during the State of the Union. He isn't the first.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and more have been caught dozing off during State of the Union addresses. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)

By Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and

Cleve R. Wootson Jr.

General assignment reporter covering national and breaking news

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Eli Rosenberg

Eli Rosenberg

General assignment reporter covering national and breaking news

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February 6 at 9:52 AM

For Joshua Trump, the 11-year-old who shares a last name with a president whose approval rating hovers around 40 percent, the past few years have been a nightmare.

Other students bullied the preteen so much over his surname that he had to be home-schooled. His parents told reporters that Joshua was sad all the time, a story that found its way to the ears of the first family, who seated Joshua two seats from Melania Trump during the State of the Union address Tuesday night.

And it is from that vaunted position that Joshua got what appeared to be the best sleep of his life — an open-mouthed snoozefest uninterrupted by bipartisan applause, flashing cameras, Nancy Pelosi’s clap or the oration of the leader of the free world.

It’s unclear when, exactly, Joshua fell asleep. During President Trump’s 82-minute speech, some camera angles swept over the crowd at select moments when everyone was standing and clapping — except for the blank space where Joshua should have been.

But an alert photographer appeared to catch the unalert preteen. In the photo, he’s sitting next to Grace Eline, a 10-year-old cancer survivor who, it should be noted, is wide awake. And two seats away, in clear shake-you-awake reach, is Melania Trump.

The dozing moment was not lost on the masses, who thought of Joshua Trump’s State of the Union slumber as either:

1) A symbol of just how fed up America is with partisan gridlock and political grandstanding that literally brought Washington to a standstill or

2) Adorable.

The first lady has made combating bullying like the kind Joshua faced one of her main priorities in the White House, the thrust of her “Be Best” initiative.

In a biography of Joshua, the White House said the sixth-grader is a fan of science, art and history and hopes to pursue a career that has something to do with animals.

Today, he is also well-rested.

Avi Loeb poses in the observatory near his office in Cambridge, Mass. His theory about an alien spaceship has made the rounds in the media and caused controversy in the academic community. (Adam Glanzman/For The Washington Post)

By Avi Selk

Avi Selk

Reporter

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February 4 at 3:09 PM

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Before he started the whole alien spaceship thing last year, the chairman of Harvard University's astronomy department was known for public lectures on modesty. Personal modesty, which Avi Loeb said he learned growing up on a farm. And what Loeb calls "cosmic modesty" — the idea that it's arrogant to assume we are alone in the universe, or even a particularly special species.

You can find a poster for one of these lectures in Loeb's office today, though it's a bit lost among the clutter: photos of Loeb posing under the dome of Harvard's enormous 19th-century telescope; thank-you notes from elementary-school children; a framed interview he gave the New York Times in 2014; his books on the formation of galaxies; his face, again and again — a bespectacled man in his mid-50s with a perpetually satisfied smile.

Loeb stands beside his desk on the first morning of spring courses in a creaseless suit, stapling syllabi for his afternoon class. He points visitors to this and that on the wall. He mentions that four TV crews were in this office on the day in the fall when his spaceship theory went viral, and now five film companies are interested in making a movie about his life.

A neatly handwritten page of equations sits on the desk, on the edge closest to the guest chairs.

“Oh, this is something I did last night,” Loeb says. It’s a calculation, he explains, supporting his theory that an extraterrestrial spacecraft, or at least a piece of one, may at this moment be flying past the orbit of Jupiter.

Since publishing his controversial paper, Loeb has run a nearly nonstop media circuit, embracing the celebrity that comes from being perhaps the most academically distinguished E.T. enthusiast of his time — the top Harvard astronomer who suspects technology from another solar system just showed up at our door. And this, in turn, has left some of his peers nonplused — grumbling at what they see as a flimsy theory or bewildered as to why Harvard’s top astronomer won’t shut up about aliens.

What you can’t call Loeb is a crank. When astronomers in Hawaii stumbled across the first known interstellar object in late 2017 — a blip of light moving so fast past the sun that it could only have come from another star — Loeb had three decades of Ivy League professorship and hundreds of astronomical publications on his résumé, mostly to do with the nature of black holes and early galaxies and other subjects far from any tabloid shelf.

So when seemingly every astronomer on the planet was trying to figure out how the interstellar object (dubbed ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “scout”) got to our remote patch of Milky Way, Loeb’s extraordinarily confident suggestion that it probably came from another civilization could not be easily dismissed.

“Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua” — pronounced Oh-mooah-mooah — “is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,” Loeb wrote with his colleague Shmuel Bialy in Astrophysical Journal Letters in November — thrilling E.T. enthusiasts and upsetting the fragile orbits of space academia.

Notes on Avi Loeb’s desk. (Adam Glanzman/For The Washington Post)

"'Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it," tweeted Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, shortly after the paper published.

“A shocking example of sensationalist, ill-motivated science,” theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel wrote in Forbes. North Carolina State University astrophycisist Katie Mack suggested Loeb was trolling for publicity. “Sometimes you write a paper about something that you don’t believe to be true at all, just for the purpose of putting out there,” she told the Verge.

Most scientists besides Loeb assume ‘Oumuamua is some sort of rock, be it an asteroid ejected from some star in meltdown hundreds of millions of years ago, or an icy comet wandering the interstellar void. But it’s moving too fast for an inert rock, Loeb points out — zooming away from the sun as if something is pushing it from behind. And if it’s a comet spewing jets of steam, the limited observations astronomers made of it showed no sign.

Loeb argues that ‘Oumuamua’s behavior means it can’t be, as is commonly imagined, a clump of rock shaped like a long potato, but rather an object that’s very long and no more than 1 millimeter thick, perhaps like a kilometer-long obloid pancake — or a ship sail — so light and thin that sunlight is pushing it out of our solar system.

And while he’s not saying it’s definitely aliens, he is saying he can’t think of anything other than aliens that fits the data. And he’s saying that all over international news.

“Many people expected once there would be this publicity, I would back down,” Loeb says. “If someone shows me evidence to the contrary, I will immediately back down.”

In the meantime, he’s doubling down, hosting a Reddit AMA on “how the discovery of alien life in space will transform our life,” and constantly emailing his “friends and colleagues” with updates on all the reporters who are speaking to him.

In a matter of months, Loeb has become a one-man alternative to the dirge of terrestrial news.

“It changes your perception on reality, just knowing that we’re not alone,” he says. “We are fighting on borders, on resources. . . . It would make us feel part of planet Earth as a civilization rather than individual countries voting on Brexit.”

So now he is famous, styling himself as a truth-teller and risk-taker in an age of overly conservative, quiescent scientists.

“The mainstream approach [is] you can sort of drink your coffee in the morning and expect what you will find later on. It’s a stable lifestyle, but for me it resembles more the lifestyle of a business person rather than scientists,” he says.

“The worst thing that can happen to me is I would be relieved of my administrative duties, and that would give me even more time to focus on science,” Loeb adds. “All the titles I have, I can dial them back. In fact, I can dial myself back to the farm.”

Loeb: The existence of aliens “would make us feel part of planet earth as a civilization rather than individual countries voting on Brexit.” (Adam Glanzman/For The Washington Post)

Loeb grew up in an Israeli farming village. He would sit in the hills and read philosophy books imagining the broader universe, he says, a fascination that led him into academia and all the way to 'Oumuamua.

“I don’t have a class system in my head of academia being the elite,” he says, as he leads a reporter into the locked chamber of the Great Refractor — an enormous 19th-century telescope where he sometimes does photo ops. “I see it as a continuation of childhood curiosity — trying to understand what the world is like.”

He joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., in the late 1980s (“Where Einstein used to be,” he notes) and later took a junior position in Harvard’s astronomy department, where “for 20 years no one had been promoted from within . . . They tenured me after three years.”)

As he tells it, his life story sounds like a cerebral version of “Forrest Gump” — Loeb always single-mindedly pursuing his science and intersecting with the giants of the field, whom he regularly name-drops. Stephen Hawking had dinner at his house. Steven Spielberg once asked him for movie tips. Russian billionaire Uri Milner once walked into his office and sat on the couch and asked him to help design humanity’s first interstellar spaceship — which he is now doing, with a research budget of $100 million and the endorsement of Mark Zuckerberg and the late Hawking.

Loeb mentions casually that when he was 24 years old he got a private audience with the famed physicist Freeman Dyson — and then pauses for effect beneath the 20-foot shaft of the Great Refractor, grinning until he realizes the reporter doesn’t know who Freeman Dyson is.

[UFOs are suddenly a serious news story. You can thank the guy from Blink-182 for that.]

At midday, Loeb leaves the telescope and his office and descends to a bare white classroom to introduce the basics of astrophysics to a dozen new students.

If he’s mastered the national news interview by now, his lecture begins a bit stilted. He looks down at the table as he speaks. He asks the freshmen at this most prestigious of universities to go around the table and list their hobbies.

Ten minutes later, Loeb goes off script.

“Did anyone hear the name ‘Oumuamua?” he asks. “What did it mean?”

Almost everyone nods, and freshman Matt Jacobsen, who came to Harvard from an Iowa farm town, volunteers quietly: “There was speculation that it was from another civilization.”

“Who made that speculation?” Loeb asks, smiling.

There’s an awkward silence in the room, and then Jacobsen cries, “Was it you? Oh, my gosh!” and the professor smiles wider.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled film director Steven Spielberg’s name.

President Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House in October. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)

The news media’s collective shock that Donald Trump won in 2016 was evidence of how out of touch most reporters were with the less affluent, less educated, rural parts of the country, where white voter rage galvanized into votes that made him the 45th president. In the days after the election, there was anguished self-examination in many newsrooms and vows to cover the parts of the United States that had been mistakenly overlooked.

But more than two years later, the same question bedevils journalism: Can our tribe cover their tribe?

The president does have his amen corner on right-wing talk radio, Fox News and Breitbart, megaphones that help keep his base rock solid and reticulate his warped version of the facts and truth. But in the rest of the news media, there is little evidence that reporters have fulfilled their pledge to report on and reflect the interests and values of the people who voted for him. There have been some good dispatches from the heartland, but too often what is published amounts to the proverbial “toe touch in Appalachia.”

I was powerfully moved by a recent article in the New Yorker about journalism by LBJ biographer Robert Caro. He described how he couldn’t really understand President Lyndon B. Johnson’s native Texas Hill Country until he and his wife actually moved there from New York City for three years. The locals had a derisive name for the reporters who parachuted in and out: “portable journalists.” There are great reporters who defy this description.

The rhythm of the Internet has made spending a week reporting a story a rare luxury. But our cocooning on the liberal coasts has intensified because of other factors in the past decade. One is the virtual disappearance of local newspapers, their business models irrevocably broken by the disappearance of print advertising. The Cincinnati Post shuttered in 2007, the Kansas City Kansan two years later — just two of hundreds of local papers in Red America that have merged or closed. Researching my book “Merchants of Truth,” I interviewed reporters from the Denver Post and St. Paul Pioneer Press who were protesting outside Alden Global Capital, the Manhattan vulture firm that had acquired the papers and gutted their newsrooms.

With the possible exception of the Wall Street Journal, the most influential national papers reflect the values of the cities where they are headquartered, New York and Washington. Politico published maps of the ideological clustering of the top newsrooms. In the same article, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver pointed out, “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans.” Does this contribute to groupthink? Sure it does.

The rise of all digital news organizations has actually intensified the clustering. Almost all are in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. Some reporters never leave their screens to do on-the-ground reporting. But other outlets, including Vice News, do bring their audience up close to the different and difficult realities of life in rural America.

Reporters who have contracts with MSNBC and CNN sometimes appear on panels, wedged between Democratic partisans and prosecutors who have already judged the president guilty of grave crimes. They blend and create an appearance of bias. It’s hard for viewers to keep them straight. Twitter is just an open invitation for politically inflamed hyperbole.

On the whole, enterprise reporting on President Trump has been excellent. To cover him, reporters need to be smart about politics, policy and international affairs, but also students of criminal law and procedure. It’s a harder job than it’s ever been. Think how much less we would know about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe into Russian meddling in 2016 without the deep investigations published by the Times and The Post.

The president is a master at media manipulation, a talent gained on “The Apprentice.” So determined to dominate each news cycle, he seamlessly abandons his preference for “Fox & Friends” to give occasional interviews, such as the one he did Thursday with the Times, to the very places he has criticized in more than 1,000 tweets, including using the term “fake news” hundreds of times.

Although editors have pledged to dial back the reactive coverage that revolves around the president’s words and tweets, they remain addicted. After all, they are swimming in Trump-generated revenue, clicks and ratings. “I remain astonished by the ability of this former reality TV star to be our assignment editor,” bemoaned Kyle Pope, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.

One way out of the reactive cycle is to report the story from the places where the pro-Trump and Trump-curious live, to cover the facts and truths of their lives. The Caro approach offers a way forward for news organizations to find contributors from, or place correspondents in, the communities that support the president, to soak up the sense and sensibility of under-covered America. That way, we mix with the other tribe. The 2020 campaign, already upon us, offers a great opportunity to fulfill the pledge we made after the last election.

Getting an immediate warning on your phone that an earthquake is about to begin is now an option in the Los Angeles County area with the new ShakeAlertLA app. Finally, a use for my phone.

The app is available for download for Apple and Android phones, ABC News reports, and is capable of alerting people up to twenty seconds before a quake hits. That may not sound like much, but it can be the difference between life and death.

Previously, the system has only been available to a limited group of beta testers, and had seen some satisfactory results in 2018. The app significantly expands access to the system. Warnings are only issued when the magnitude of the quake is 5.0 or larger and when they will be felt in the Los Angeles area. The notification is fairly intense, but that may be what you need to read to get moving:

“EARTHQUAKE, EARTHQUAKE, EXPECT STRONG SHAKING. DROP, COVER, AND HOLD ON. PROTECT YOURSELF NOW!”

The app was originally developed with the intention of expanding to the entire West coast, but the federal budget for creating the sensor network was eliminated. However, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has announced plans to expand again after the alert system is tested at the regional level, according to the Curbed Los Angeles. The app was made possible in LA through a partnership with the city, the Annenberg Foundation, and AT&T.

In addition to providing a warning, the app also offers checklists for an earthquake survival kit, and what else you can do to prepare—or recover. The app doesn’t need to be open to send you a notification, but it does track your movements. It basically has to in order to know if you’re in a danger zone. If you’re able to take advantage of this service, you should.

And if you’re in an area that could use it, demand it: 20 seconds of warning might be exactly what you need. Contact local representatives; the implementation in Los Angeles couldn’t have happened without the support of LA Mayor Eric Garcetti. The Los Angeles Times also reports that Early Warnings Lab, which also works with the USGS, is hoping to release their version of a similar app called QuakeAlert to serve statewide. You can register with them to become a potential beta tester. The more people who are interested, the more likely it is that systems like these will be completed.