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From @POLITICO's @Davidsiders: @KamalaHarris ' rise gives California a shot at serious national power https://politi.co/2Y7LWt7 via @politico

California Democrats, especially those with ties to the influential LGBTQ and Hollywood communities, are finding themselves torn between a home-state senator they love, Kamala Harris, and an out-of-state suitor who has suddenly captured their attention, Pete Buttigieg. It’s a dynamic that’s unsettling the Democratic presidential primary in California — home to an early 2020 March contest that offers a mother lode of nearly 500 delegates. No two candidates are crowding each other quite so closely here, or elbowing each other quite so aggressively, in the pursuit of some of the party’s most generous and influential donors. Buttigieg, the mayor of...

Remember a couple of weeks ago when The White House got ticked off at Comrade Marinucci for posting video of activists protesting President Obama inside a San Francisco fundraiser? To Team Obama she was violating an unwritten rule on a print reporters posting video and they threatened to exclude The Chronicle from being the pool reporter in the future. To other sentient beings, Comrade Marinucci was -- and pardon the technical term here -- "reporting the news." News that MANY other non-journalists who were there at the fundraiser were recording with various camera phones. And she was perfectly within her...

The White House is denying that it threatened to exclude the San Francisco Chronicle from presidential events in its coverage area after one of its reporters recorded a video of singing protesters at a fundraiser last week that was restricted to print reporters. When a group of 10 protesters interrupted President Obama to demand the release of the WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning, it was only matter of hours until the first video surfaced online. The group, which calls itself the “Fresh Juice Party,” had recorded footage, most likely from a cell phone camera, shot from the vantage point of its...

The White House that fancies itself as the most transparent in history is not without its control-freak instincts when it comes to media access. It seems that Team Obama was none too pleased that veteran Chronicle political reporter Carla Marinucci posted a 40-second video of a group of supporters-turned-protesters serenading the president a cappella - "We paid our dues ... where's our change" - at a recent fundraising breakfast at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel. The protesters' objection: the treatment of Wikileaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning. The White House threatened that Marinucci would no longer be allowed to serve as...

The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights. White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news. The Chronicle's Carla Marinucci - who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times - pulled out a small video camera last week and shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel. Read more:...

Protest video stirs up White House Threatens to exclude Chronicle from pool coverage in Bay Area after paper posted recording of demonstrations at S.F. event. ------------ (04-28) 04:00 PDT Washington - -- The White House threatened Thursday to exclude the San Francisco Chronicle from pooled coverage of its events in the Bay Area after the paper posted a video of a protest at a San Francisco fundraiser for President Obama last week, Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee said.White House guidelines governing press coverage of such events are too restrictive, Bushee said, and the newspaper was within its rights to film the...