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Health & Fitness

Donkeys Ready for Changing of the Guard; Martin's Beach Update

Political change of any sort is often hard to come by… more so if you’re talking about the leadership of a political party. It takes decades to build the relationships and ability to raise funds that comes with party leadership. Now, however, a tsunami of change is coming to the Democratic party in the Golden State… and may not exactly be the dynamic eruption that Dems would hope for or need.

Consider the current Democratic leadership… and I note this with all advisement and respect because while I may be somewhat far behind these folks age-wise, I’m also no 20-something:  Jerry Brown, California’s 76-year-old governor, is running for reelection for the same job he won in 1974. Senator Barbara Boxer is 73 and Senator Dianne Feinstein is 81. The most prominent member of the congressional delegation, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, is 74 and started out as chair of the state’s Democratic Party when Ronald Reagan was president. And the current party chair is 81. That would be John Burton, a former congressman who first went to D.C. in the 1974 post-Watergate era.

So who are the next generation of Dem leaders in CA? The names regularly circulated include Attorney General Kamala Harris (49), Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (46), former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (61) and his successor, 43-year-old Eric Garcetti.

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Martin's Beach 

As we all know, trespassing is illegal. It is supposedly one of the fundamental protections of private property.  Yet the California Constitution establishes a public right to access a beach; even if it means crossing private land without permission. Lawsuits filed by special interest groups in the Martin’s Beach brouhaha cite Article 10, Section 5, which says no one — including owners of “the frontage or tidal lands of a harbor, bay, inlet, estuary, or other navigable water” — can “exclude the right of way to such water whenever it is required for any public purpose, nor ... destroy or obstruct the free navigation of such water.”

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But as I’ve noted previously, even a moron can figure out what’s protected is the public’s “right of way” and “free navigation” along navigable water; a right of way that runs parallel to the coast, up the beach to the mean high-tide mark. For instance, a landowner could not obstruct a surfer or boater on the water. Nothing in the passage permits trespassing on private property. Arguments in the Martin’s Beach case have been concluded… now we’ll see if the Friends of Martin’s Beach, the Surfrider Foundation and the California Coastal Commission have convinced the judge that it’s O.K. to break the law.

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