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Obama, In Silicon Valley For Fundraisers, Touts Accomplishments

Obama, In Silicon Valley For Fundraisers, Touts Accomplishments

By Josh Richman, Rhea Mahbubani, and Andie Waterman, San Jose Mercury News

LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif. — Criticized for leaving Washington amid an array of international crises, President Barack Obama told some of Silicon Valley’s richest Democratic donors Wednesday that he’s proud of his administration’s accomplishments and needs a Democratic House majority to further rev up the economy.

“When we came into office, we were going through the worst economy since the Great Depression,” but the economic record of the past five years represents “some pretty remarkable progress,” the president told about 90 guests at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser at the home of real estate mogul George Marcus.

In addition, he said, millions more Americans have health care, while high school dropout rates have decreased and college enrollments have increased.

Silicon Valley represents the spirit of dynamism that typifies the American economy, he said, yet there’s still a lot of anxiety as profits have accrued almost only to those at the very top. The middle class is “stuck,” he said. “They feel like they’re treading water.”

“It feels as if Washington doesn’t work,” ignoring those in need, he said. And that’s because the Republican Party is interested only in proving that government doesn’t work and saying no to common-sense steps to help working families, Obama said.

“I hope that the reason you’re here today is that you want to get something done. … We have to break this cycle of gridlock and cynicism,” he said, adding that both parties can and should work to advance the common good.

“I’d love nothing more than a loyal and rational opposition,” Obama said. “But that’s not what we have right now.”

Earlier Wednesday, the president spoke at an event for the House Majority PAC, a Democratic “Super PAC” independent expenditure committee, at San Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel. The event was closed to the media.

As the president passed the collection plate Wednesday, he also had a full plate of international and domestic problems to contend with.

Abroad, tensions with Russia are sky high following the shoot-down of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner last Thursday, apparently by Russian-backed Ukrainian separatist rebels. Meanwhile, Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip continued to rack up Palestinian civilian casualties.

At home, a federal appeals court ruling on Tuesday undermined a key segment of Obama’s landmark health care law, jeopardizing insurance subsidies for millions of Americans. And Obama is scheduled to meet Friday with three Central American presidents to discuss how to stem the flow of undocumented migrant children fleeing from gangs and drug cartels.

U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, faulted Obama for not being in Washington while Congress debates vital bills, including ways to ease the current humanitarian crisis at the border.

“I’m not going to give him advice about how to allocate his time, but he’s certainly not spending the kind of time with the people he needs to pass legislation and convince people who have a vote, who were sent here to legislate, of the virtues of whatever position he has,” McConnell said.

White House officials, however, say Obama is able to do his official duties while traveling for political purposes.

“In terms of fundraising, it’s a responsibility that presidents in both parties for generations have been responsible for,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “And the president, like his predecessors, is interested in supporting members of his party who are on the ballot in 2014.”

Rep. Mike Honda greeted the president as his Marine One helicopter landed at a Foothill College soccer field. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Anna Eshoo were at the luncheon, as well as Democratic House candidates Michael Eggman and Amanda Renteria. Tickets for the event went for $10,000 a person, including a photo opportunity and lunch, or $32,400 a couple, including a VIP photo opportunity and lunch.

The DCCC has raised about $124.7 million in this election cycle, while its Republican counterpart has raised about $101 million, according to The Associated Press. Californians standing to gain from the committee’s “Frontline” program — for incumbents facing tough re-election fights — include Reps. Ami Bera, Scott Peters, Julia Brownley, Raul Ruiz, and Lois Capps. The Cook Political Report, a renowned House race prognosticator, lists Bera, Peters, and Brownley as the most vulnerable.

Obama headlined two Democratic National Committee fundraisers May 8 in Los Altos and San Jose. Last year, he was in the Bay Area for Democratic fundraisers in November, June, and April.

Marine One left Foothill College at 1:17 p.m. for San Francisco International Airport, where a half-hour later Obama took off to Los Angeles. There, he was to attend another fundraiser Wednesday and then visit a community college Thursday to talk about the importance of job-driven skills training, particularly for fast-growing sectors such as health care.

Photo: Los Angeles Times/MCT/Jabin Botsford

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Earthquake Cluster Likely To Strike San Francisco Bay Area, Scientists Say

Earthquake Cluster Likely To Strike San Francisco Bay Area, Scientists Say

By Becky Bach, San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Bay Area’s Big One will still be plenty big, but it might not be just one, according to a study released Monday by U.S. Geological Survey scientists.

A flurry of midsized quakes is more likely to strike the San Francsico Bay Area rather than a giant 1906-esque rupture, said David Schwartz, a paleoseismologist at the USGS’s Menlo Park office and the lead author of the study, which appeared in June’s Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. The study marks the first comprehensive history of the Bay Area’s seismicity dating to 1600.

A quake cluster isn’t necessarily good news, as it could keep communities constantly cleaning up the earthquake damage, several experts said.

“It presents a very different problem in how you respond and recover from earthquakes,” Schwartz said.

After the 7.8-magnitude 1906 earthquake, the 20th century was abnormally stable, he said. Therefore, an earthquake cluster is overdue, the scientists said.

“Basically, what goes in, must go out,” Schwartz said. The region’s seismicity stems from the clash of two massive plates in the earth’s crust. The Pacific Plate is sliding northwest, while the North American Plate is moving southeast.

Since 1906, the plates have moved about 13 feet in the Bay Area. Like a compressed spring, they’re ready to burst.

In the Bay Area, the plate boundary fractures into a handful of fissures, all generally trending northwest-to-southeast. The well-known San Andreas Fault, which Schwartz calls the “master fault,” is accompanied by the San Gregorio Fault, the Hayward Fault, the Calaveras Fault and the Rodgers Creek Fault in the North Bay, among others.

Future quakes are expected to spread out along these faults.

“These faults are being stressed by the plate movements … and they all have to catch up,” Schwartz said.

The various faults “talk” to each other, said Roland Burgmann, an earth scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “The communicating family of faults sometimes tend to rupture together as a group or shut each other off.”

The 1906 earthquake was likely a fluke, the perfect alignment of conditions that allowed 300 miles of the San Andreas Fault — from northern Mendocino County to San Juan Bautista — to release its pent-up pressure. This massive shaking kept the area unusually calm for a century, Schwartz said.

“Eventually, there should be more clusters,” Burgmann said.

The scientists based their prediction on the historical record, which shows a cluster of quakes shook the Bay Area from 1690 to 1776. At least six earthquakes, ranging from 6.3 to 7.7 magnitude, rattled the region’s major faults during that period, Schwartz said.

The cumulative release of energy from the quakes roughly equals that of the 1906 earthquake, Schwartz said.

“This is a summary of a tremendous amount of work,” said Greg Beroza, a Stanford seismologist who was not involved with the study.

Previously, other scientists had scoured the records kept by the Franciscan missionaries at San Francisco’s Mission Dolores starting in 1776, Schwartz said. He called the Spanish missionaries “the first seismographers.” They described the rumblings in their records, allowing scientists to assess the earthquake’s strength by extrapolating from the amount of damage the Franciscans described.

Scientists dated the earlier quakes by digging trenches and calculating the age of charcoal or other organic materials found several feet below the surface, Schwartz said.

This technique misses small or deep earthquakes, which don’t break the surface.

Although the scientists predict a group of tremors, rather than just a single, large earthquake, they admit the future could surprise them. The Bay Area has a 63 percent chance of one of more large earthquakes before 2036, according to estimates released in 2008 by the Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities, a coalition of state, federal and academic geologists.

The USGS study provides a useful framework to plan for the future, said Thorne Lay, an earth scientist at UC Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study.

Schwartz said he hopes to look back even farther than 1600 to more fully understand the Bay Area’s seismic history — and its future.

“The key question is when are we going to come out of the shadow, when are we going to go back to normal?” Burgmann asked.

AFP Photo/Frederick Florin