Robert Kennedy Jr.’s fundamental belief, other than his past main plank of thinking that the tens of millions of lives saved by the miracle of medical vaccines in the last century are all part of some dangerous conspiratorial fraud.

Whatever, would be the proper response to such nonsense, except that this guy thinks he ought to be president.

But, again, it’s sometimes the down-ticket nonsense on a candidate’s list of priorities that bothers. For me, it’s akin to  discovering a couple of small lies that a candidate for office told me during this spring’s endorsement season. If they were lying about the little stuff, what about the big?

RFK Jr. is bad news — already knew that.

Just another entitled, not particularly bright spoiler. At least Ralph Nader and Ross Perot were very smart spoilers.

But somehow, when I read recently that Kennedy was going out of his way to protest the removal of Confederate statues from Southern city parks where they have stood too long as an unforgivable insult to the descendants of enslaved Americans, the bad news got worse.

“I have a visceral reaction against the attacks on those statues,” Kennedy said on a podcast hosted by Tim Pool, apparently a right-wing commentator.

Cliche-watch: to take them down is “destroying history.”

He went on to cite “heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves,” The New York Times report.

But then, asked to name a hero of his own from the Southern side in the Civil War, he cited Robert E. Lee — who very much did “own” slaves.

Well, he said,  “if we want to find people who are completely virtuous on every issue throughout history, we would erase all of history.”

It is at this point in the discussion of Confederate monuments, thousands of which remain in Dixie along with the several prominent ones that have been removed, that it is well to remember when most of them were erected.

It was by no means right after the Civil War.

They were a long time coming.

They were mostly proposed and created during the long effort from the 1890s into the 1920s to create the myth of the Lost Cause in the American South.

It was all nothing more than propaganda to counter the fact that the plantations and the economic success of the agrarian South had been entirely built on the backs of enslaved human beings.

And the son of Bobby Kennedy — who sent federal troops to the University of Mississippi to enforce a federal court order admitting James Meredith, an African American, to what had previously been a segregated school — defends the propagandist history of the Lost Cause?

That Americans would vote for such a person shows that matters are worse than we think.

Larry Wilson is a member of the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

It took 15 years for any school district outside of the South to do anything about it. And in those cases where districts in the formerly Confederate states did try, it didn’t go so well. It wasn’t Brown v. — it was Gov. George Wallace and his German shepherds of Alabama, and elsewhere, v. any Black kids going to school with their own.

The first district outside of Dixie that tried de facto racial desegregation via busing was in my hometown of Pasadena, in 1971.

District administrators had stopped drawing elementary, junior high and high school boundaries to intentionally keep the Black kids and the White kids — along with the Latino, and the Asian-American kids — apart. They just pretended it was cool to ignore the segregation by neighborhood.

My elementary, Arthur Amos Noyes, had 365 students. In my K-5 years, every single one of them was White. By 6th grade, one African-American girl had moved into the northeast Altadena neighborhood.

Now, that middle-class area is actually fairly well integrated, the old racial covenants lifted. But that’s another story.

Our junior high, Eliot — named after the guy who invented junior highs, Harvard educator Charles Eliot — was quite well integrated, “naturally.”

But in my first year of high school, by court order, we were the first cohort to be bused, not to the formerly mostly White Pasadena High School, but to the formerly mostly Black John Muir High School, alma mater of Jackie Robinson.

Most of us — all, actually; I don’t recall a single complainer in my class — were down with it. Muir was equidistant from our homes. A bus arrived to take us to campus so our moms didn’t have to drive us there.

But rather than settled law, this turned out to be a matter of dispute. Integrationist school boards, led by the great Al Lowe, a Chinese-American businessman, brought us together. The next election cycle an anti-busing board majority would be elected. The equally great superintendent, Ray Cortines, an integrationist, kept getting hired and fired by different boards.

It was my first experience of politics. Only experience, really. Pre-journalism, I could join the fray. We marched on the Ed Center in protest when they tried to fire Ray. I gave a perfectly awful speech at the microphone, which I will forever remember to my chagrin likened integration to Wonder Bread, which “built strong bodies, 12 ways.”

I had known Ray, who also grew up in Pasadena, since he was interim principal at Muir. He went on to be superintendent in San Jose, San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles. Still know him. Ran into him in line at Total Wine the other day. He’s in his 90s, fit as a fiddle, buying a case of chardonnay.

He’s fine. I’m fine. But we lost. By which I mean, the schools in Pasadena are segregated as ever. I gave a talk to a Muir class last month and on the order of 90% of the students were African American.

We lost to, first, White flight. Then the private schools, formerly only populated by the upper classes, multiplied. Pasadena is said to have a higher percentage of students in private school than anywhere in the country.

“School integration exists as little more than an idea in America right now, a little more than a memory,” Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina told the Associated Press. “It’s actually an idea that a pretty good majority of Americans think is a good idea. But that’s all.”

I wish it were different, but looks like it will never be.

Larry Wilson is on the So Larry Wilson is on the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com uthern California ɫ����̳ Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

You know what would make the California Republican Party float, and fly across the water’s surface like an America’s Cup hydrofoil?

Running more candidates like Pete McCloskey.

McCloskey, who died last week at 96, was the kind of politician the moribund current CGOP can only dream of.

Born in Southern California — Loma Linda — he represented the Palo Alto area in Congress from 1967 to 1982. After graduating from South Pasadena High, he attended Oxy, then Caltech, then graduated from Stanford and Stanford Law School. From Wikipedia: “He served in the Korean War as a member of the United States Marine Corps. For his service, he was awarded the Navy Cross and the Silver Star. He won election to the House of Representatives in 1967, defeating Shirley Temple in the Republican primary. He co-authored the 1973 Endangered Species Act. He unsuccessfully challenged President Richard Nixon in the 1972 Republican primaries on an anti-Vietnam War platform and was the first member of Congress to publicly call for President Nixon’s resignation after the Saturday Night Massacre.”

He wasn’t just a Republican. His family was Grand Old Party since his great-grandfather escaped the Great Irish Famine in 1853 and came to California’s Central Valley as farmers near Merced. He won two Purple Hearts in Korea, and volunteered for Vietnam. Though he, with the rest of reasonable Americans, turned against that war, he didn’t retire from the Marine Reserves, as a colonel, until 1974.

It’s well to remember that what we consider a liberal part of California, the San Francisco Peninsula, wasn’t so progressive in an earlier era. He later said that he thought he “was the first Republican elected opposing the war” despite the fact that his “constituency, two to one, favored the war in 1967.” In early 1975, he went to see for himself the effects of the U.S. bombing in Cambodia, and said afterward that his country had committed “greater evil than we have done to any country in the world.” Pro-choice, he was also co-chair of the first Earth Day in 1970.

He was by no means perfect as a politician, by my lights. There was a mean almost anti-Semitic streak. After the Israeli bombing of an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, he said, “We have to respect the views of our Jewish citizens, but not be controlled by them.” Defending his remarks later, he said, “There is a strong Jewish lobby … I do not understand why the Jewish community should resent it being labeled as such. They are a very effective lobby.” The Anti-Defamation League properly hounded him. We all have our Achilles’ heel.

But where is the otherwise principled, iconoclastic, independent-thinking California Republican — liberal on social issues, conservative fiscally — who could get elected to statewide office in our state today? It’s not Steve Garvey.

Where are the party leaders who would search out such a candidate? If they found one, they might also find that moderate Democrats and independents would flock to someone who wasn’t knee-jerk progressive on every issue, who could stand up to the public employee unions, who had in fact met a tax and a bond issue that he didn’t like.

Instead, today’s GOP candidates stay in the MAGA mold in a state that finds such weird ill-educated reactionary populism anathema, bemoaning “the Democratic supermajority,” standing no chance of returning to the majority themselves.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

Really three buildings patched together over many decades, Times Mirror Square took up the entire block between Spring, Broadway, First and Second. It was an amazing maze, and the old and the new edifices were patched together with doors and hallways that sometimes it seemed only we copy kids knew every inch of, and the ways to get from here to there fastest. In a way, we were also the only ones with a reason, an excuse, to go everywhere and interact with everyone, from the massive machinery of the press room on the first floor to Otis Chandler’s publisher’s suite in the penthouse facing on to First, as what we did was literally carry copy — written on typewriters, unfurled from the carriages by the sometimes cigar-smoking crusty old reporters, who actually would yell “Copy!” and expect us to be there to convey it within seconds to some editor somewhere else in the building.

Or, if it was a long take, and said editor or typesetter was far away, we’d glue together a number of the pages, roll them up and place them in pneumatic tubes that whisked them around the place. It was steam punk, it was the movie “Brazil” in real life, and from time to time it was a lot of fun. You got to visit with some amazing people, and sometimes, as the great books editor Art Seidenbaum several times did for me, they’d toss you an assignment and your own byline would be in print. You felt you had some small part in the daily miracle that was putting out a great newspaper.

Susan soon moved on to become a superb reporter for UPI, the wire-service rival of the AP. Then Susan went to law school, and now does something perhaps even more important than plain journalism: Her practice  is in protecting journalists’ First Amendment rights.

She directs the Press Freedom Project at UC Irvine, and when working reporters were arrested while doing their job during the recent Gaza war protests at UCLA, she jumped into the fray and demanded their release.

And while they were in detention, she warned coppers holding journalist Sean Beckner-Carmitchel that it would be illegal for them to search any of his recording devices.

“Sean had the right to film police even if police had set up police lines or even if they had declared a curfew,” Susan said in an interview with the L.A. Times. “It appears he was arrested for simply filming UCLA police conducting arrests or completing arrests of students in a public parking lot,” Seager said. “The arrest of Sean is illegal, period. He wasn’t interfering with police.”

I’m so proud of Susan’s work, and of a May 1 editorial written by my colleagues at UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian after four Daily Bruin reporters were assaulted by the counter-protesters at UCLA, pushed to the ground and pepper-sprayed: “We call on UCLA’s administration to protect their student journalists. It is the community’s duty to safeguard the students who are putting themselves in harm’s way to keep them informed.”

Still nice, most days, to be in an important line of work.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

And media-cranky of me.

And I do celebrate the fact that — 10 years after it first said it was going to do so — the part of the government that operates out of Washington, D.C. last week brought the entire front range of the mountains that make a big wall between our San Gabriel Valley and the High Desert into the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument.

But it is apparently my (cranky) job and mine alone to at least make note of the fact that right up until the day that President Barack Obama coptered into the SGV and signed the monument into law on a fine fall morning in 2014, those 106,000 acres were in the monument.

Someone, somehow, removed that acreage with some kind of slash of a pen just before the signing. As I wrote at the time, placed outside the monument’s boundaries was literally all of the magnificent purple mountains’ majesty that you can see from the Crescenta Valley, La Canada Flintridge, Altadena, Pasadena, Sierra Madre — and from further down the hill into all the western SGV. All of it. Mt. Wilson, Mt. Lowe, the Upper Arroyo Seco, the Angeles Crest Highway — which forms many Angelenos’ entire impression of the mountain range, when they go out for a Sunday drive — was left out of the monument. As were all of the trails and roads blazed back in the Great Hiking Age at the turn of the last century, when nature lovers including the great John Muir flocked to Pasadena and environs for the quality of the amble.

It’s not at all clear if Obama knew about the last-minute subtraction. And the reason it’s not clear is that the federal government has declined to answer my questions about it for precisely a decade.

But we’re just supposed to forget that and applaud the “addition.” OK: Two cheers for democracy.

Longtime readers might recall that  I took an investigatory — well, sight-seeing at least — drive up Highway 2 myself to see if I could figure out what the reason was for drawing the part of the mountains most people know out of the monument, After a look-see, I posited what may be the reason. At the time there was a huge Southern California Edison construction project in the mountains above Tujunga, involving big helicopters and large crews building towers for power lines heading down from the desert. It was unattractive to say the least — not befitting a National Monument. I guessed that some bigwig from the Forest Service, which operates the monument, came by for a tour and made the change at the last sec.

Guess was all I could do, because no bureaucrat would ever answer my simple question. Just another pesky taxpayer making a query that it turned out they didn’t have to respond to. And now they’ve done the right thing, 10 years after, in the fight to better protect our natural resources. Done it for no reason that they have to say.

Wednesday at random

In a timely visit, considering the news of the new $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers in California, Ryan Sinnet, co-founder of Miso Robotics, had members of Civitas, the Pasadena civic organization, into the company’s Green Street test kitchen last week for drinks and samples of French fries and hamburgers made by the machines that someday will be our masters. Flippy cooked the fries, BurgerBot by Cucina grilled the burgers, PopID was set to take orders. Fascinating. Cuisine not quite up to the level Mike serves up at Pie ‘n Burger, but what is? Sinnet, who was a Caltech undergrad and has a doctorate in robotics, told us about how amazingly complicated creating a robot to do kitchen tasks turns out to be. At first he and colleagues just thought, tears-wise, how cool it would be to create a machine that could just chop onions. Then they got more ambitious, and built more machines, and created the Caliburger chain. Now the company is focused on marketing to other burger joints, and has their equipment in 400 White Castles in the Midwest and in some Jack in the Box stores. Ryan shared the first message they got when the word first came out about Miso’s fast-food plans: “I like how the goal of robotics is to eliminate human interaction at every level. Sorry no one talked to you in high school, nerds!”

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com

Its student owner didn’t bring it to camp as protection against the rain; it was dry in Westwood. No, the brolly brandisher just grabbed the thing, its deep yellow nylon canopy the same color as the fancy Champagne’s famous label, as she ran out her dorm-room door, late for the demo, just in case the Blue Meanies broke with the tear gas.

Little did she know as well the irony that would be created when L.A. Times photographer Michael Blackshire captured her unfurled umbrella advert for a $78 bottle of bubbly for Thursday’s front page, pictured next to a preppy tennis racket in the makeshift barricade as the keffiyeh-wearers found themselves under attack from the Israeli-flag wielders.

What a damn mess. What a bunch of pedants on both sides. How malleable, how brilliantly unprofound, is the mind of the 19-year-old. Smartypants to a person — you don’t get into UCLA, the most applied-to university in the nation, without having been top of your class, a grind — and yet how susceptible they are to that suddenly resurrected 1968 term “outside agitators.”

Given the chance, said older political counselors would have advised the young Bruin against sporting the umbrella Mom brought back from France last summer. But accidents will happen in the sudden scrum of righteousness.

Neither the kids suddenly so knowledgeable about the plight of the Gazans nor the young backers of anything Israeli are thinking or acting with any subtlety in this fraught national moment.  They can’t pull back from their single focus and answer the question a congressman asked of the pro-Palestinian protesters outside last week’s White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington: “What about how China is treating the Uyghurs? What of the ethnic killings in Sudan?”

Why aren’t they protesting the gunning down last week of Ghufran Mahdi Sawadi in Baghdad for the crime of being a TikTok star who wears tight clothing and dances on camera?

Because they’re not thinking straight, or for themselves.

I’m not saying that they are wrong to protest the inexcusable methods with which the government of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has prosecuted its war against Hamas, resulting in the tragic deaths of tens of thousands of innocents in the wake of the inexcusable Oct. 7 slaughter of 1,200 Israeli civilians.

But if they had studied what genocide means — the attempt to destroy an entire group of people, as the Nazis tried to do to the Jews, and the Ottoman Empire tried to do to the Armenians — they would know that while this is another horror show in the awful history of insane wars, genocide it is not.

Though they had never heard the saying “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” until quite recently, they are happy to chant it, again without quite taking in what it means: the dismantling of Israel.

Young people will be young people. But take care in what you do and say. The other day on the way to a campus meeting I walked past the pro-Palestinian camp in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. Later that day I saw a photo of Mario Savio addressing a Free Speech Movement crowd in 1964 in the exact same spot, standing on a car. He’d taken his shoes off so as not to damage it. Smart man, playing the long game.

Larry Wilson is a member of the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

Well, never mind. But here in the springiest of the spring months, the time has also come for al fresco dining to get a boost, and thanks to a decision in late April by the Pasadena Planning Commission, it looks like it’s going to be happily easier going forward to nosh out of doors in the Crown City.

The commission “voted unanimously to propose that the City Council codify three emergency measures that streamlined the review process for restaurateurs who added amenities during the pandemic to enhance dining accessibility for patrons,” as new west San Gabriel Valley staff writer Teresa Liu reported in these pages.

As we have been celebrating for years on this page, the red-tape cutting for restaurateurs has been one of the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning with when cities around the country began allowing the taking of formerly restricted sidewalk and parking-space areas for outdoor seating back when it was suddenly against the rules to dine indoors for understandable health reasons.

Remember how exciting that was? After being locked up at home for months on end, with only those weirdo pandemic picnics in our yards with family and friends allowed for entertaining, being able to eat outside with service from some of our favorite restaurants felt as if a key ritual of human life was finally available to us again.

I’ll never forget having a birthday party for our daughter a couple of years ago on the table in the garden and when it came time to blow out the candles on her cake she craftily waved her hands about, creating a little breeze, to put out the flames rather than breathing all over the communal desert.

So resourceful, smart people can be.

So it’s a rare blessing to find that with the dangers diminishing, local cities are not returning to all their (dumb in the first place) restrictions that bureaucrats for reasons unfathomable to me love to put up, instead embracing a kind of New Orleans-style openness.

I don’t think we’ve quite come to Crescent City-style bar window service of bourbon on crushed ice in to-go cups to wander around our downtowns with, though hope springs eternal.

But, under the recommendations, which still have to be and should soon be approved by the City Council as well, restaurants can continue to operate an outdoor dining area on private property without the obligation to replace or add parking spaces, Teresa reports.

And here’s one of my favorite parts: “In addition, restaurants (including fast-food establishments) and bakeries are allowed to install walk-up windows using a by-right process. This means owners don’t have to obtain a minor conditional-use permit or CUP approval, a process that typically requires a public hearing and could span four to six months.”

“By right” is one of the sweetest terms in the city-planning vocabulary. It means that you have an automatic ability to do something — build a house or an ADU of a certain size, for instance — rather than having to petition to do so, or getting your insufferable neighbor’s approval.

I like the comment from Commissioner, and soon to be Councilman, Rick Cole: “There’s a certain degree of friction that happens in a city, and we keep erecting more and more complicated barriers, particularly (when) most of the restaurants in our city are locally-owned. To start a restaurant in this city and have a go, it’s a huge undertaking.”

An undertaking that our city halls continually make harder, and vastly more expensive. Until they don’t, and get it right.

Wednesday at random

Fully realizing that ficus trees have nasty habits, and mammoth sidewalk-slinging roots, and drop staining purple berries, which customers step on and drag into stores, I am yet always with the fig trees, so happy for their shade, and am fascinated that after all these years of covering the controversy over them in Uptown Whittier, the fight goes on, the (mostly) leafy citizens vs. the (mostly) chainsaw-happy council. Classic! And a perfect subject yesterday for new columnist Mike Sprague, who covered the city for decades as a reporter, and now gets to weigh in. Welcome back, Mike.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com

But I have a different question: Why is no one apprehended on charges of espionage ever a spy?

I mean, I know why. It wouldn’t do to just say, “Ya got me, Russkie! Toss me in the gulag and kiss my frosty heinie goodbye!”

Whenever I hear of an American journalist or businessman nabbed in Moscow on clearly spurious charges, and their employers and friends scream bloody murder about it, of course I believe, because I want to believe, in their innocence.

I’m just saying: But someone’s a spy. Plenty of them, if you read spy novels.

The old Mad magazine comic strip I grew up reading was “Spy vs. Spy,” not “Non-Spy vs. Non-Spy.”

Over the years, I’ve met a couple of people now retired from a career in the CIA. But of course, according to them, they were just paper-pushers, analysts. “Strictly state-side, don’t you know. No, none of the cloak-and-dagger stuff I’m afraid. Rather boring, in fact.”

Maybe. Again, that’s because no one, apparently, is a spy. And yet there are spies.

And, as a recent article in the Harvard Crimson noted, there are accepted international rules and even laws on practically everything, including war, but few regulating espionage during times of peace.

Spying is the world’s “second oldest profession,” said Asaf Lubin, but it is often overlooked at international law schools. Lubin is a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, where he co-teaches a seminar on intelligence and international law. “Every other area of state practice, from the law of the seas to the law of outer space to human rights law to the laws of war, gets a session devoted to it,” he said. “Yet no one talks about intelligence despite its enormous influence.”

And in 2016, a CNN story said that in the United States alone, “one expert estimates that there are about 100,000 foreign agents working for at least 60 to 80 nations — all spying on America.”

Not only are there spies — the country is just lousy with them!

Then, last year, a new leak showed how we were surveilling the capitals of Egypt, South Korea, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates — all allies.

We might berate Beijing for its in retrospect rather incredibly clumsy spy balloon that floated over much of the U.S. last year before being shot down in a kind of opera-bouffe operation. But it’s all Spy vs. Spy, all the time, it would seem.

Le Carre was of course a spy before he wrote spy novels. The perfect spy, perhaps, to steal from one of his titles. And the reason he was perfect is that he was the son of a famous con man. He grew up with deceit as a model. And he got out before he got caught, and had to deny being a spy.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

He happened to mention that not only is he needing to leave the Legislature because of term limits — a California politician can stay 12 years in Sacramento — but this is his 36th consecutive year of being in elective office.

That’s because before his dozen in the state Capitol he was on the Pasadena City Council for 24 years, including a term as mayor, and I have been covering him as a reporter, an editorial page editor, the editor of the local paper and now a columnist and editorial writer all those decades.

Bit of a wow moment for the both of us.

Chris is a super-sweet guy, a great father and husband, a real mensch, with almost an absence of annoying ego — not something I would say of your average pol. He was born into the family biz, too, as his father, now in his 90s, is Nate Holden, the retired L.A. councilman and state senator.

And the reason we were talking is that I wanted to check in with him about the progress of what may be his final passion project in the Legislature, the California Mandela Act, AB 280, which aims to greatly cut down on the use of cruel solitary confinement in California prisons, especially for youth and women.

“I see my work on this as more of a vehicle for the activists who have educated me about it,” Chris says. “But we’ve been working on it since 2015, and twice passed it through the Legislature,” only to see it vetoed over objections from the CDCR — the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

“But the system we have in our state, the UN defines it as torture, and I’d like to think California can rise above that.

“You hear stories of a pregnant woman in solitary screaming, and they don’t respond — or at least not until they hear a baby screaming, too.”

As he prepares to leave office, Chris is still meeting with prison officials in order to get a bill they and the governor can live with.

For instance, they say they need to have solitary as an option for youth  because “the gangs would take that person and make them do things and  not have to worry about going into solitary confinement.

“So I realize there are nuances.

“But a kid in a cell no larger than a king-size mattress with no light?

“Families have said they come out after that and have no desire for anything but suicide.”

Chris says he’s looking for a win-win everyone can feel comfortable with — “but we want to get a win for those who have been working on this for so long.”

And “I remain optimistic,” he says.

He again notes how the international community views solitary confinement — post-Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid hero kept in solitary for six agonizing years. Mandela called it “the most forbidding aspect of prison life.”

The United Nations adopted the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, or Mandela Rules, in 2015, which generally prohibit using solitary confinement at all in prisons around the world. Chris says that “Our prison guys won’t even call it solitary confinement; they call it segregated housing!”

But they have agreed that an hour a day outside the cell is OK.

“So that’s good.

“But moving us out of the Stone Age is what this is about.”

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group editorial board. lw.ilson@scng.com

I’m not sure if they really support the changes to the 2014 law, which has in great part been successful in reducing our bloated prison population, or if they are just interested in getting re-elected. Because there’s no doubt that there is a perception among many Californians that our state is in the midst of some massive crime wave, whatever the real statistics may be.

So it’s good politics to support the proposed changes, insofar as good politics is keeping yourself in a job.

Target and other large retailers are also supporting the drive for a new ballot measure. As CNN reported, the chain donated $500,000 in support of the measure, though it would not respond to “repeated requests for comment,” CNN says. That may well  be because perception is not necessarily reality.

Because, “on a broad scale, the numbers don’t necessarily support retailers’ outcry on this issue. The National Retail Federation, a lobbying organization that represents big retailers, reported that shrink — losses due to external and internal theft, damaged products, inventory mismanagement and other errors — has remained about the same, between 1 and 1.5% of sales, since 2016. Target on Tuesday reported shrink declined in the fourth quarter.”

Just as politicians can find themselves in trouble, and need to deflect, bricks-and-mortar retailers are in a tough business environment, including from inflation as well as petty thieves. and find it convenient to blame others. Porch pirates aside, it’s hard to shoplift from Amazon.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed is one of the Democratic mayors supporting the reform proposal. And it’s clear her ability to remain in office is in trouble. The San Francisco Chronicle took a poll that showed  just 28% of likely voters approve of Breed’s performance, “even though crime in San Francisco is down in recent years.”

Breed is joined by San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, all of whom are up for re-election this year. Santa Monica Mayor Phil Brock in February became the first Los Angeles County mayor to support the proposed new ballot measure. “There’s no doubt that we need to reform (Prop 47),”  Brock told the Santa Monica Lookout. “I believe the (proposed) measure is essential.”

But like other Californians of good will, I’m anti-theft, and I think a lot of us have become confused about the non-correlation between the smash-and-grab robberies seen on the TV news and the reforms of Prop. 47. Purloining tens of thousands of dollars of jewelry from a glass case is just as illegal and punishable as it ever was.

I do support the recent move by members of the Legislature to allow police to combine the value of multiple thefts to exceed the $950 threshold set by Prop. 47. And I do support the Legislature’s and Gov. Gavin ɫ����̳om’s calling for additional penalties for thieves who sell or intend to resell stolen items.

Let’s keep up the good work while ensuring John Law still has our support in fingering thieves.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.