OPINION: Theresa May, meet Silicon Valley. It’s here to stay

Sacramento Bee (CA)

June 06--Good morning. On behalf of The Sacramento Bee's editorial board, welcome to The Take, your opinion-politics newsletter. Please sign up for it here.

Jack Ohman says it's a wonder that women don't get paid more. Read his wondering cartoon here.

Our take

Editorials

Theresa May's bashing of Silicon Valley won't stop terrorists: Like British Prime Minister Theresa May, we shudder at vile material on the internet. As Californians, we also know the internet cannot be closed.

Columns

Foon Rhee: Walter Shaub Jr., the director of the Office of Government Ethics, just won a showdown with the White House. But his days are already numbered, and his tiny office has its work cut out trying to watch the Trump administration.

Karin Klein: The paintings pulled from my father-in-law's storage unit were supposed to be worth something since he had seen himself as an investor. But, in the end, their value is in the eye of the beholder.

Andrew Malcolm, McClatchy DC: Before the daily deluge of Washington political news cycles re-mires us in short-term minutiae, let's examine President Donald Trump's first foreign trip and behavior in his debut on the world stage.

Op-Eds

Kevin McCarty and Joshua Pechthalt: For-profit charter schools are ripping off California taxpayers. They exploit loopholes in California's charter school law allowing them to cheat our students and reap huge profits at taxpayer expense while often providing an inferior education.

Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla: The Delta tunnels won't help on climate change. If fisheries and wildlife are going to survive a changing climate, more water will need to flow through the estuary, not less.

Take a number: $2,000

Every dog has its day. One of the raging issues in the Florida state house is pay for highway patrol officers. It starts at less than $34,000, prompting nearly 1,000 officers to quit in recent years and resulting in 240 vacancies, according to The Tampa Bay Times. Our guess is that Florida's finest will get a bump. The paper cited pay in other Southern states: Louisiana, $47,000; and Alabama, $39,000. Texas pays $73,000, a little more like it. Out here in California, highway patrol officers' pay starts at $74,700, and rises to a base of $92,640. Thanks to a strong union, pay with overtime exceeds $113,000. And then there is the report by The Bee's Jim Miller that the Assembly's proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 includes $100,000 for retired California Highway Patrol dogs, in the form of a $2,000 retirement plan to help pay for medical costs. Talk about tossing them a bone.

Their take

East Bay Times: It won't bring anyone back, but the arrest Monday of two people behind the now infamous Oakland warehouse artists' collection known as Ghost Ship that took the lives of 36 young people in a December fire is at least a first step toward some sort of justice. There need to be more steps. Many more.

San Francisco Chronicle: California should stop shortchanging the state's recycling program. There's a simple fix: The Legislature could use existing surplus recycling revenue to increase subsidies for the centers.

L.A. Times: Stop starving California's recycling program. Legislators must include the appropriate amount to fully fund the program in the next fiscal year's budget.

Raleigh News & Observer: The U.S. Supreme Court made it official on Monday what long-suffering voters in North Carolina have known intuitively: The reactionary Republicans who rule the General Assembly do not reflect the true will of the people.

Kansas City Star: Each day last week, your fine representatives and senators of Kansas racked up a new $43,000 bill. Stew on that a bit, dear voter. Every. Single. Day. $43,000. And it's all because they failed to adequately attend to business during their regular session.

Miami Herald: This year's storm season began on the same day President Trump petulantly pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord -- a misguided move that puts this country, South Florida, in particular, at grave risk.

Lexington Herald Leader, Kentucky: There are ways that President Donald Trump could help unemployed coal miners and other Americans whose jobs are being made obsolete by changes in technology and the economy. But pulling out of the Paris climate accord is not one of them.

Syndicates' take

Eugene Robinson: I don't see political genius in the invective coming from President Donald Trump these days. I see an angry man lashing out at enemies real and imagined -- a man dangerously overwhelmed.

Michael Gerson: The president claims that a relatively modest, entirely voluntary agreement that essentially maintains the current momentum of reductions in carbon emissions would somehow destroy the American economy. It wouldn't.

Charles M. Blow: America is exiting the world stage. Donald Trump is drawing the curtains.

Paul Krugman: Today's GOP doesn't do substance; it doesn't assemble evidence, or do analysis to formulate or even to justify its policy positions.

Mailbag

"Another tax bait and switch: As an avid recycler, I have to ask just where all the plastic and aluminum can fees charged to Californians have gone." -- Liz Forsman, Sacramento

And finally,

"President Donald Trump can't be counted on to give accurate information to Americans when violent acts are unfolding abroad." That's the lede of a story from The Associated Press. When something truly awful happens on Trump's watch, and he needs to address the nation, how many of Americans will believe what he says?

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