𝗟𝗲𝗻 𝗥𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗮𝗲𝗹 𝗖𝗣𝗔

Let's clarify some facts about Chief Armstrong's firing and lawsuit. I've heard people who should know better say the Mayor had to fire him because he publicly criticized her. He never criticized Mayor Thao until after he was fired. He repeatedly criticized the Federal police overseer, Robert Warshaw, calling him corrupt. I agree with that statement. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that even though our police chiefs are "at will" employees who can be fired without cause, it can still be illegal to fire an "at will" employee if, for example, done in violation of their right to free speech or to silence their whistleblowing. The prior Police Chief won part of her wrongful termination lawsuit on similar grounds. --------------------------- Some people consider the Fed Overseer to be the holy guardian protecting us from an evil occupying OPD for over 12 years. In 2012, Mayor Quan's City Administrator, Deanna Santana, filed a complaint alleging that Overseer Robert Warshaw made "inappropriate advances" towards her in private. In consultation with the Federal judge who supervises Warshaw, the city attorney dismissed the charges. The same Federal judge sealed the records from public view. Post Me-Too, those records would not have been sealed unless both sides agreed to it. A couple of years ago, I contacted a former high-level city staffer who was at City Hall at that time. I asked her what she thought of the allegations. She replied that while she had no direct knowledge of the alleged conduct, she had always found Santana forthright. She believed Santana.

@AmazonAlexaX @AmazonHelp I'm using the Alexa email skill with Gmail. I have a contact saved with a long unique email address. When I ask Alexa to send an email to that contact, it ignores the saved address and substitutes a different one entirely. Amazon support confirmed they've never seen this before. The address is saved correctly in Gmail and works fine when sending directly. This appears to be a bug in how the Alexa skill reads email addresses from contacts. Has anyone else experienced this?

Dear @Oakland Reality check, @BarbaraLee_CA. A 35-year political career from the California Legislature to Congress may come with accolades, but a long résumé and name recognition alone will not save Oakland. There appears to be a false narrative that a long political résumé and name recognition will somehow fix the serious issues facing Oakland. Some voters may have believed that experience alone would turn this city around, but Oakland deserves more than a name or a legacy. At this point, continuing to push that idea is tone-deaf to the reality residents are living every day. Meanwhile, many people will simply blame the club for this tragedy. Yes, the business may hold some responsibility, but the conversation cannot stop there. The families of the victims should seriously consider legal action against the City of Oakland as well. When elected officials are repeatedly warned about public safety risks and fail to act, ignore dangerous conditions, or allow ongoing problems to continue, that goes beyond politics. It becomes negligence. The families who lost loved ones deserve transparency, accountability, and the truth about whether warning signs were ignored. What makes this even more troubling is the narrative being presented to the public. City leaders continue telling residents that crime is going down in Oakland, yet crime data from the @oaklandpoliceca is often months behind, sometimes three months or more. When delayed statistics are used to reassure the public, it can create a picture that does not reflect what residents and officers are actually experiencing in real time. Ask the officers yourself. Many will tell you the same thing. If the city had knowledge of ongoing safety concerns, delayed responses, or failed oversight, those failures should be examined in court. Lawsuits are sometimes the only way to force transparency. They require cities to open records, explain decisions, and confront the gaps in public safety that put lives at risk. The people of Oakland deserve leadership that prioritizes real safety over political narratives. And if that responsibility was neglected, the families who suffered unimaginable loss have every right to demand accountability, including from the city itself. #Oakland #OaklandCA #PublicSafety #OaklandCrime #Accountability #JusticeForVictims #RealityCheck

Jeremy Taylor’s phone rang. He had no idea as he answered the call that his life as he knew it would never be the same again. sfchronicle.com/bayarea/articl…

Bobby Seale, Black Panther co-founder and one-time candidate for mayor, interviewed in 2012 on leaving North Oakland. "The African-American population in Seale’s neighborhood — actually known as Santa Fe — dropped by about 30 percent in the past decade according to the census. “When I moved here in ’94, the whole block was black,” Shakur (a long time neighbor) said. “Now, there are probably" three black owners. Some people call it gentrification.” Bobby Seale, a carpenter and draftsman, improved the house and wanted to do more. But his sister wanted to sell last year. Marketing it at twice what the Seales were paid for it reflects “the same crap that got this financial debacle started in the first place,” he said. But the aging activist, who now lives in Contra Costa County with his wife of more than three decades, doesn’t begrudge the newcomers. “People move. Humans move. Power to the people, whether they’re black, white, blue, whatever.”" eastbaytimes.com/2012/03/22/bla…

@SenatorHick What is Iranian reaction to you meaningless posting? x.com/SarahMSander/s…

Committed Democrat here. I’m a hard no. My vote is Operation Epic Fury. 🇺🇸

Let’s see who grieves for that garbage.

🔥

You know the concentration of wealth in the US is bad for the economy when the WSJ reports on it. Some Republican economists have been saying this for over a decade. Article doesn't discuss the effects of AI and robotics. Those will accelerate the concentration of wealth and of income. There won't be enough billionares spending enough money to buy the products and services of businesses with fewer workers. "Billionaires prefer to be paid in shares, which are subject to capital-gains taxes when sold. But they don’t need to sell to fund their lifestyles. Billionaires use borrowed money for living expenses, pledging their shares or other assets as collateral. The interest on the debt is much lower than a capital-gains tax bill would be, and their stock portfolios can continue accumulating paper gains. A third of America’s billionaires have inherited their wealth. The ultrarich can use structures such as dynasty trusts to shield their assets from estate taxes for generations, while the step-up provision adjusts the cost basis of an inherited asset to its fair market value. Amassing assets like stocks, borrowing against them rather than selling during the owner’s lifetime, and passing them to the next generation after death is sometimes called the “buy borrow die” tax-avoidance strategy. Billionaires put less into the tax pot as a percentage of their wealth than wage earners. One working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the effective tax rate for the U.S.’s 400 wealthiest individuals is 24%—compared with 45% for top labor income earners. Wealth concentration is increasingly clear in economic data. The top fifth of wealthiest households now account for nearly 60% of personal outlays, up from 50% in the early 1990s, data from Moody’s shows" wsj.com/finance/billio… ,

Lurie is doing something good here. San Francisco is healing. He didn't start this program. He stopped it. The boom loop is beginning again.

@CommissBratton @SCPDHq @SuffolkPBA Was doing a consulting gig for then Oakland Mayor Quan the strangest assignment you ever had? We hold the world record for the longest length of Federal oversight of any police dept. But thanks for trying to help us.

Kudos to these Suffolk County cops on rescuing a deer that made its way into a bank. Our men and women in blue are here for anything the community needs! #CopsCountPoliceMatter

I’m pulling the BS card. The spin never stops a @SFBART. Staff never would give me the details of this claimed $400 million cost savings on the purchase of BART cars. Does anyone out there wanna audit this claim?

Minneapolis has used Flock for the last two years without any reported ICE access. Reportedly, there has only been mild opposition from privacy advocates.

@TalLiveEasy @EastOaklandDad Quinn Delaney got a charitable tax deduction for a lot of the money she gave to progressive non profits. Phil Dreyfuss did not get a deduction for his contributions to the recall campaigns or to the independent expenditure committee supporting me and Ken Houston in 2024.

@EastOaklandDad Quinn Delaney—not just directly, but through her Akonadi Foundation and the many nonprofits it funds.

It's interesting how no one complains about Quinn Delany spending Piedmont money on Oakland politics.

Whatever you think of Trump's kidnapping of Maduro, Trump's casual put-down of Machado, who had her presidential win stolen by Maduro, was unintentionally or intentionally very smart. By saying she "doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country" to lead Venezuela, he's removed the stigma of her being a US puppet.

I’ve finally found one position of Mondani’s that I agree with. And it even has some relevance to Oakland charter reform. Today he did a 180 to declare his support for Mayor control of NYC schools. Instead of local school boards “The buck has to stop somewhere” That's why I oppose weakening Oakland Mayor by switching back to city manager structure

@julian__gerson I see Oakland all over again...

Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as the Mayor of New York City in roughly thirteen hours. In a political moment where hope so often feels unattainable, what a joy it is to feel change arrive. Grateful to all who have built this movement, and deeply excited for all that comes next.

Waiting for the release of the financials doesn't sound right. The same outside Sacramento CPA firm has been doing the audit for years. The audit fieldwork was probably completed a couple of months ago, and the financials and footnotes drafted several weeks later. The reports would now be waiting final review by the CPA firm partner and, possibly, comments from Oakland. It would be unusual for there to be major changes from the drafts previously given to the City for comment.

Unprecedented and Inauspicious "Historically, the city has issued two reports in October and November: the annual Revenue and Expenditures (R&E) report for the previous fiscal year, and the first quarter (Q1) R&E report for the current fiscal year.1 "Finance Director Bradley Johnson told Oakland Report on December 23 that the annual R&E report was delayed in order to incorporate audited numbers from the city’s Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR). Johnson said the ACFR will be released next week, and the annual R&E report will be published mid-January. Use of audited financial data in R&E reports is a novel practice for the city." Perhaps more important than the annual report are the quarterly R&E reports that forecast current-year outcomes (FY2025-26). Johnson said that the city will not publish a Q1 R&E report this year because the first quarter data is too limited. According to Johnson, that makes financial projections unreliable for decision-making. Instead, the city will only issue the Q2 R&E report at its usual time in late February or early March." "However, the early March timing of the Q2 R&E report leaves only four months for potential spending adjustments before the fiscal year ends—very little time to impact total annual expenses if there are deficits. And the city cannot tap reserve funds to cover deficits because they were spent-out last year." oaklandreport.org/p/20251224-oak…

A 65% drop in crime at Washington Square Park following sustained NYPD enforcement is confirmation of a fundamental principle we learned decades ago: you must fix the Broken Windows. The crime-reduction miracle of the 1990s began by confronting both crime AND disorder. Quality-of-life policing matters. When disorder is ignored, serious crime follows. When it’s addressed, communities reclaim their streets and parks — and people feel safe again. nypost.com/2025/12/20/us-…

The eminently competent Lisa Grant-Dawson, Chief Business Officer of OUSD, was not fired like the Chief of Staff, or Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammel, but Grant-Dawson has now reached her limit of OUSD board fiscal bs. Grant-Dawson kept the School District out of insolvency as long as she could while getting OUSD out of state/county fiscal oversight. "While Bellino confirmed he’d not been given cause for the termination, Grant-Dawson said her decision to leave came after she and Bellino, with other colleagues, led a weekslong budget planning effort to right a $102 million budget deficit projected next year, and planned to present last Wednesday. But two days before the presentation, she said, Saddler (the interim Superintendent) revealed a different plan, crafted without the budget chief’s knowledge. “I learned on Monday morning that the superintendent sought to lead in a different direction with the budget scenarios that were ultimately presented to the board. And opted to not inform me and other colleagues in advance of her decision,” Grant-Dawson told KQED. “What I don’t participate in is side-swiping.”" Time to think about recalling all of our school board except for Mike Hutchinson and Patrice Berry. But doubt if any wealthy civic-minded people are willing to fund those recalls. kqed.org/news/12067547/…