Surfrider, environmental groups sue Trump administration over oil protections

• February 20, 2025

A coalition of conservation organizations has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in an attempt to stop it from allowing more drilling off the country’s coasts, including in California.

The group said it is challenging President Donald Trump’s “illegal order to open protected areas of the ocean to future oil and gas leasing.”

Among those in the suit is the San Clemente-based Surfrider Foundation, which contends that offshore drilling threatens marine life, coastal economies, and the community.

“Offshore drilling is a dirty and damaging practice that is a direct threat to our thriving ocean recreation economy,” Chad Nelsen, CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, said in a statement. “Offshore drilling is opposed by a majority of Americans who want to protect our nation’s coasts from oil and gas development.”

The lawsuit is in response to Trump’s executive order in his first day in office that seeks to revoke Biden’s permanent protections to reopen the coast to drilling, Nelsen said.

In January, then-President Joe Biden ordered a ban on new oil and gas drilling, including along the California coastline, arguing the risks far outweigh the benefits.

The action, just before Biden’s term ended, was done using his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, or OCSLA, to restrict an area greater than 625 million acres, the largest withdrawal in U.S. history.

The safeguards he ordered restrict new offshore drilling and natural gas leasing along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea.

For Southern Californians, the repercussions of a 25,000-gallon oil spill off Huntington Beach in 2021 are still fresh, an incident that killed wildlife and shut down beaches and coastal fishing for weeks.

A $50 million settlement was reached in class action claims made by local fishing interests, tourism companies and homeowners, with millions more paid to government agencies.

Already, there has been a moratorium on off-shore leases in California waters since 1969 — typically within 3 nautical miles off the coast — and the last federal lease sale in the area was in 1984.

Southern California still has about 30 existing leases offshore that are decades old.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, nearly 400 municipalities and more than 2,300 elected officials across the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts have formally opposed the expansion of offshore drilling in these areas.

​ Orange County Register 

What’s going on with the Kennedy Center under Trump?

• February 20, 2025

By HILLEL ITALIE, Associated Press

Until a few weeks ago, the biggest news to come out of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., was its annual celebration of notable American artists.

That has changed since the return of Donald Trump.

In the first month of his second term, the president has ousted the arts institution’s leadership, filled the board of trustees with his supporters and announced he had been elected the board’s chair — unanimously. In a statement this week to The Wall Street Journal, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The Kennedy Center learned the hard way that if you go woke, you will go broke. President Trump and the members of his newly-appointed board are devoted to rebuilding the Kennedy Center into a thriving and highly respected institution where all Americans, and visitors from around the world, can enjoy the arts with respect to America’s great history and traditions.”

What is the Kennedy Center and how long has it been around?

Supported by government money and private donations and attracting millions of visitors each year, the center is a 100-foot high complex featuring a concert hall, opera house and theater, along with a lecture hall, meeting spaces and a “Millennium Stage” that has been the site for free shows.

The center’s very origins are bipartisan.

It was first conceived in the late 1950s, during the administration of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, who backed a bill from the Democratic-led Congress calling for a “National Culture Center.” In the early 1960s, Democrat President John F. Kennedy launched a fundraising initiative, and his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed into law a 1964 bill renaming the project the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. Kennedy had been assassinated the year before.

Construction began in 1965 and the center formally opened six years later, with a premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” otherwise known as “MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers).”

Who has performed at the Kennedy Center?

The center has long been a showcase for theater, music and dramatic performances, with artists ranging from the Paul Taylor Dance Company to a joint concert by Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. Other highlights have included the annual Mark Twain Award for comedy, with recipients including Lorne Michaels, Tina Fey and Bob Newhart, and the annual Kennedy Center ceremony honoring outstanding artists, most recently Francis Ford Coppola, Bonnie Raitt and the Grateful Dead, among others.

Presidents have routinely attended the honors ceremony, even in the presence of artists who disagreed with them politically. The good-natured spirit was well captured in 2002, during Republican President George W. Bush’s first term, when Steve Martin offered tribute to honoree Paul Simon. Martin digressed into a tangent about pirated music recordings and joked that he had been approached by Bush about getting bootlegs of Barbra Streisand, a prominent Democrat.

“It’s been nice being a citizen,” Martin added, as Bush and others laughed in response.

Why is Trump focusing on the Kennedy Center now?

Trump mostly ignored the center during his first term, becoming the first president to routinely skip the honors ceremony. One honoree, producer Norman Lear, had threatened not to attend if Trump was there.

Mirroring his overall governing approach, Trump has been far more aggressive and proactive in his second term, citing some drag show performances at the center as a reason to transform it entirely.

“At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” he wrote on his social media website earlier this month. “I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

Meanwhile, the Kennedy Center website still includes a passage about the core mission, one that strives “to ensure that the education and outreach programs and policies of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts meet the highest level of excellence and reflect the cultural diversity of the United States.”

Also listed on the site is a new project called “Promise of US,” for which “the public is invited to submit an artistic self-portrait to be part of a virtual wall of faces expressing the myriad diversity of America’s peoples and the promise of America’s future. This ever-expanding mosaic will be featured on the Center’s website and social channels.”

Who is in charge now?

Trump pushed out the incumbent board chair David M. Rubenstein, a philanthropist and Baltimore Orioles owner. He now presides over a board that by tradition was divided between Democratic and Republican appointees, but is now predominantly Republican, with recent additions including Attorney General Pam Bondi, country star Lee Greenwood and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter, brought on by Rubenstein in 2014, resigned soon after the board shakeup. Trump replaced her, on an interim basis, with diplomat Richard Grenell, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Germany during the president’s first term.

“I’m really, really, really sad about what happens to our artists, what happens on our stages and our staff who support them,” Rutter said during a recent interview with NPR. “The Kennedy Center is meant to be a beacon for the arts in all of America across the country.”

What has been the fallout?

The fallout is unprecedented. Kennedy Center consultants such as musician Ben Folds and singer Renée Fleming have resigned and actor Issa Rae and author Louise Penny have canceled appearances. During a concert last weekend that proceeded as scheduled, singer-songwriter Victoria Clark wore a T-shirt reading “ANTI TRUMP AF.”

Further controversy is possible. Next month’s schedule includes “RIOT! Funny Women Stand Up, a special comedy event in celebration of Women’s History Month.” Conan O’Brien is to receive the Twain award in an all-star event that will likely include jokes about the president. (Representatives for O’Brien have not responded to requests for comment.) The center also is scheduled to host “Eureka Day,” a stage play centered on an outbreak of mumps, a sensitive topic with the confirmation of vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

​ Orange County Register 

Former Newport Beach doctor pleads guilty to possessing child porn

• February 20, 2025

A former Newport Beach gynecologist pleaded guilty Wednesday, Feb. 19, to federal charges for possessing more than 200 child porn images on several electronic devices.

Mark Albert Rettenmaier, 72, of Laguna Hills pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana to two counts of possession of child pornography. He is free from custody on $600,000 bond.

Rettenmaier will face a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for each count during a sentencing hearing scheduled for Aug. 6. Prosecutors have recommended that he be sentenced to no more than five years in prison.

Rettenmaier’s license has expired and he is not currently eligible to practice medicine in California

On June 7, 2020, Rettenmaier uploaded 15 child porn images to an Adobe cloud-based storage system, according to the plea agreement. At least four of the images depicted a prepubescent minor and minor under the age of 12 engaging in sexual conduct, prosecutors said.

On July 22 that year, law enforcement officers seized Rettenmaier’s  cellphone and two laptop during a search of his home.The cellphone contained two child pornography images and one of the laptops contained a child porn video. Additionally, 209 images of minors engaged in sexual activity were found on the other laptop, the plea agreement states

One of the images on the laptop depicted a minor engaging in bondage constituting “sadistic and masochistic” sexual conduct, prosecutors said.

Rettenmaier admitted he knowingly downloaded the child porn images and video from the internet and stored them on his personal devices, according to the plea agreement.

Rettenmaier, who was the founder and head physician of Southern California Gynecologic Oncology, cared for women with gynecologic malignancies and unusual or complicated benign pelvic disorders in Orange County for more than 35 years, according to his biography,

Previously, in a separate case, Rettenmaier was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2014 on two counts of possessing child pornography.

The indictment was handed down after technicians at a national Best Buy facility in Kentucky, known as Geek Squad City, discovered what prosecutors described as a photo of a naked, prepubescent girl while fixing Rettenmaier’s broken computer and notified local FBI agents.

Rettenmaier’s attorneys challenged the legality of the computer search, leading U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney to hold hearings, during which the defense could call witnesses to explore the relationship between the FBI and Best Buy.

During those hearings, several Best Buy employees testified that they occasionally run across what they believe to be child pornography in the course of their repairs. The employees said they believed they had a “legal and moral” obligation to report their findings to law enforcement.

An FBI agent acknowledged paying some Best Buy employees $500 for some of the tips, but denied asking them to do anything outside of their normal work duties. Carney ultimately found that the Best Buy techs did nothing wrong.

The child pornography charges against Rettenmaier were dismissed after Carney threw out much of the evidence because  of “false and misleading statements” made by an FBI agent.

Carney also found that a request for a search warrant for Rettenmaier’s home failed to note the image found by Best Buy technicians that led to the investigation was in an area on his computer where deleted files are kept, so he may not have been aware of it.

The judge also focused on the testimony of the FBI agent who first examined Rettenmaier’s computer, and who acknowledged during courtroom testimony that the photo the techs found did not “by itself” constitute child pornography. The agent described the image as depicting an underage girl on her knees on a bed wearing a choker-type collar.

While the image may have been “distasteful and disturbing,” the judge determined it was not child pornography but instead child erotica, “the viewing of which is not unlawful,” Carney said during a hearing.

Staff writer Sean Emery contributed to this article.

​ Orange County Register 

Trial begins for Orange County judge accused of murdering his wife

• February 19, 2025

As an Orange County judge, who a short time earlier had admitted to fatally shooting his wife during a heated argument at their Anaheim Hills home, was being processed into police custody, his thoughts apparently took a turn toward how he might address the jury at his own future trial.

“I killed her,” Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Ferguson said, apparently to himself, in a comment captured on video during his August 2023 arrest, “Ladies and gentleman of the jury, convict my ass. I did it.”

About a year and a half after the killing, the Orange County Superior Court jurors who will decide Ferguson’s fate watched as a prosecutor, during opening statements Wednesday in a Santa Ana courtroom, played the video of the judge making those comments at the outset of his murder trial.

The judge shot and killed 65-year-old Sheryl Ferguson with the .40 caliber Glock he constantly carried in an ankle holster immediately after the wife — angry at her husband pointing his finger at her to mimic a firearm — told him “Why don’t you use a real gun?”, Senior Deputy District Attorney Seton Hunt told jurors.

Ferguson’s attorneys opted not to make their opening statements Wednesday, instead choosing to wait until after the prosecution has put on their evidence. But defense attorneys formerly tied to the case previously described the shooting as a “terribly unfortunate accidental discharge.”

The shooting was the violent culmination of an argument over finances that began at a night out between the couple and their college-age son at a Mexican food restaurant and continued as the family members watched the television show “Breaking Bad” in their family room. The bullet Ferguson fired at his wife tore through her mid-section, struck her organs, went through the chair she was sitting on and embedded in a wall.

The couple’s son, Phillip, then 22 years old, had been unnerved by his parents argument, the prosecutor said, to the point of grabbing a replica sword he owned. After his father shot his mother, the son jumped over a couch and tackled his father, taking the gun away from him. His mother uttered her final words, “He shot me,” the prosecutor told jurors.

Immediately after the shooting, Ferguson texted the clerk and the bailiff assigned to the courtroom he had presided over at the Fullerton courthouse, telling them “I Just lost it, I just shot my wife. I won’t be in tomorrow. I will be in custody. I’m so sorry.”

The son performed CPR on his mother as he listened to her breathing become shallower and shallower, according to the recording of a 911 call. By the time first responders arrived, Sheryl Ferguson was no longer breathing.

During his own 911 call, the judge responded to a dispatcher who asked him what happened by saying “I don’t want to talk about it right now, sorry.” Minutes later, one of the first officers to arrive at the Ferguson home described the judge sitting on a planter in the front yard, saying to police “I did it” and “shoot me.”

“What the (expletive) did I do?” the judge was recorded saying in police body-camera footage after being handcuffed. “Oh my God. My son, my son.”

Minutes later, Ferguson told the officer “I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be sitting here in handcuffs in front of my house.. Everyone is going to hate me. My son will now hate me.”

After one of the officers told him his wife had died, Ferguson asked them to bring his son over so that he could “hit me in the (expletive) face.”

“I deserve it,” Ferguson added. “I deserve everything.”

At one point, as he waited to be brought to the police station, Ferguson in his recorded remarks began bragging about his more than three-decade career at the Orange County District Attorneys Office, describing actions he took against members of the Mexican Mafia and an outlaw motorcycle club.

“And here I am,” the judge added. “Here I am now, like them, after all this. And my son is going to hate me.”

Ferguson was an experienced gun owner with a concealed carry license who only took the gun on his ankle holster off to take showers or sleep, Hunt told jurors. In a hearing held before the jury was selected on Tuesday, the prosecutor indicated that Ferguson owned 47 firearms and had 46,000 rounds of ammunition at his house.

Despite having a concealed firearm on him, Ferguson had been drinking the night of the shooting, the prosecutor told jurors, which was a violation of his concealed carry permit. Investigators estimated that the judge had a 0.17 percent blood alcohol level at the time of the shooting, twice the legal limit for driving.

While the defense held off on tipping their legal theory at the beginning of the trial, questions that Cameron Talley, one of Ferguson’s defense attorneys, asked early witnesses hinted that the could argue the shooting was not intentional.

Under questioning by the defense attorney, the 911 dispatcher who spoke to the couple’s son confirmed that he never said his father had shot his mom “on purpose.” And an officer who helped take Ferguson into custody confirmed to the defense attorney that Ferguson never said he “murdered” his wife or that he shot her “on purpose.”

To avoid a conflict of interest among Ferguson’s former judicial colleagues, Los Angeles County Judge Eleanor J. Hunter is presiding over Ferguson’s trial in an Orange County courtroom.

Last year, Judge Hunter doubled Ferguson’s bail to $2 million after she determined he lied to her to cover up consuming alcohol while awaiting trial. At the time, she described Ferguson’s claim that his use of cortisone cream and hand sanitizer had caused a false-positive reading for alcohol on his ankle monitor as “ridiculous.” The judge indicated that the violation of his terms of release and his allegedly lying about it could come up during the murder trial, either if Ferguson takes the stand or during testimony by defense character witnesses.

Judge Hunter  also warned Ferguson not to visit friends or former colleagues at the Santa Ana courthouse during breaks in his trial, in order to avoid “the appearance of impropriety.” The packed audience for opening statements on Wednesday morning included DA Todd Spitzer and some of his office’s veteran prosecutors, along with some current judges and court workers.

​ Orange County Register 

A run of fatal airline crashes upends sterling safety record

• February 19, 2025

By Allyson Versprille, Julie Johnsson and Gabrielle Coppola | Bloomberg

A spate of deadly airline crashes has tarnished the industry’s sterling track record, fraying the nerves of travelers and prompting questions about how the world’s safest form of transportation can respond.

The tragedies began on Christmas Day when an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people. Days later, an aircraft operated by Jeju Air Co. skidded down a runway in South Korea and smashed into a concrete wall, causing 179 deaths. The two accidents turned 2024 into the deadliest year in commercial aviation since 2018, after no fatalities at all on large passenger jetliners in 2023.

Disasters continued in 2025, with a midair collision between a US Army helicopter and American Airlines Group Inc. regional jet near Washington last month that killed 67 people. And on Monday, a Delta Air Lines Inc. regional jet crash-landed near Toronto and flipped on its roof, though there were no fatalities.

Besides their eerie and sudden concentration, there’s little that binds the catastrophes together. From a bird-strike and potentially faulty altitude readings to a suspected anti-missile volley and snowy weather — each accident has its own unique set of circumstances. That, in turn, makes it difficult to immediately point to any reforms to address.

And although the recent string of accidents may be statistical anomalies, they’re still startling given how US commercial passenger carriers had enjoyed years without a fatal crash, said Kristy Kiernan, a safety expert and associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

“Those of us working in the industry would be strongly remiss if we didn’t take this as a time to look at our core assumptions and how we operate,” Kiernan said. “We have a very robust safety system and risk mitigation procedures. How did those fail? Where has that either broken down or had gaps that simply hadn’t manifest until now? It’s super-important that we do that.”

Just two years ago, the International Air Transport Association heralded 2023 as the “safest year for flying,” with no hull losses or fatal accidents involving passenger jets.

Hassan Shahidi, chief executive officer of the Flight Safety Foundation, said there’s no evidence that the tragedies point to systemic risks to air travel. The accidents do, however, underscore how regulators, airlines and others must “redouble their efforts” to ensure appropriate safety measures are in place, including the right training, adequate staffing, and modern tools and equipment, he said.

Worried travelers

Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigation chief for the US Federal Aviation Administration, cautioned that investigators must first finish their probes to identify whether there are potential connections that may not be clear today. But as accident experts pour over the wreckage of the aircraft, some travelers are worried when boarding a plane.

Sheron Yuen, a retiree who lives in a suburb of Detroit, said she thought safety would improve after a midair collision near Washington brought more attention to the issue.

“But after that incident there’s been so many more that happened,” she said in an interview from the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport while waiting for a flight. Now, “I’m kind of wondering. I’m a little nervous actually.”

Johnny Jet, founder of travel advice website JohnnyJet.com, said he’s seen reader inquiries about the dangers of air travel jump roughly threefold over the last few months.

Others are less concerned. John Rose, chief risk and security officer of travel-management company Altour, said he’s seen no signs of softening demand for airline trips in response to the accidents. At the same time, more of the firm’s customers are asking about its risk protocols.

“A lot of organizations don’t necessarily put this as an utmost urgency because they haven’t had anything happen in the past,” he said.

And John Cox, a former airline pilot who’s now chief executive officer of consultancy Safety Operating Systems, stressed that aviation remains the safest form of travel, despite the recent crashes.

“I’m getting on an airplane Thursday without a second thought,” he said. “I don’t find any correlation or connection between” the crashes.

Trump firings

Recent moves by the Trump administration to cut federal workers have raised concerns among Democratic lawmakers and labor unions that those steps may in fact create further risks rather than address them.

Last week, the Trump administration fired workers across the federal government who were in their one-year probationary period, including hundreds of employees of the US Federal Aviation Administration.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a post on social media platform X that the layoffs affect less than 400 people out the agency’s tens of thousands, and that none who were fired were air-traffic controllers or “critical safety personnel.”

While experts said there’s no direct link between the staffing cuts and the latest accidents, they cautioned safety could erode over time.

Guzzetti, the former FAA official, said that all of the agency’s positions could be considered safety critical, especially given how difficult it is to recruit and retain people for those jobs. Eliminating workers also means that employees who are left have to pick up the slack, he said.

“Someone else is going to have to do the job of other people and be overburdened with too many tasks,” he said. “That could allow other tasks to more readily fall between the cracks and lead to an accident.”

And given the prevalent government narrative labeling many federal workers as expendable, recruitment is also bound to get much harder — if not impossible, said Dave Spero, the national president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union that represents FAA workers.

“There’s nobody out there that’s going to go, ‘Oh, I want to go be a Fed right now,’” he said.

— With assistance from Nibras Suliman and Carrington York.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

©2025 Bloomberg L.P.

​ Orange County Register 

Newsom proposes $125 million mortgage relief program for disaster victims

• February 19, 2025

Gov. Gavin Newsom is forming a $125 million mortgage relief program to benefit victims of recent wildfires and natural disasters, tapping a legal settlement fund created after major lenders were accused of misconduct during the mortgage crisis nearly 20 years ago.

The mortgage relief program is designed for homeowners whose houses were damaged or destroyed by natural disasters and are at risk of foreclosure, Newsom said Wednesday, Feb. 19.

The proposal will be considered at a board of directors meeting Feb. 20 at the California Housing Finance Agency.

California homeowners, the U.S. government and 49 states agreed to the national settlement in 2012. Then U.S. Attorney General Kamala Harris secured $18 billion, penalizing lenders for robo-signing and other servicing and foreclosure misconduct. The mortgage servicers included Ally Financial Inc. (formerly known as General Motors Acceptance Corp. Bank), Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

CHFA received its last installment of $300 million as part of the settlement in 2019, according to Jay Wierenga, a spokesman for the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. Since then, CHFA has used the money to support the National Mortgage Settlement Housing Counseling Program, which reimburses counseling sessions for more than 78,000 households in housing agencies throughout the state.

The $125 million proposed for mortgage relief and counseling services is what’s left of the settlement fund, Wierenga said.

In his announcement, Newsom said the mortgage relief program would not affect the upcoming state budget beginning Oct. 1.

See also: FAIR Plan bailout deepens housing strains

The money would be available to homeowners who lost their homes due to natural disasters since 2023, and would be administered by the CHFA.

Newsom estimated $100 million would be for direct mortgage assistance, with an additional $25 million used to extend an existing program that provides mortgage guidance on disaster assistance by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Last month, several lenders gave homeowners affected by the L.A. area fires a little relief on their mortgage payments.

Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo and 420 state-chartered banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders offered wildfire victims a 90-day forbearance of their mortgage payments, without reporting these payments to credit reporting agencies, and the opportunity for additional relief.

While Newsom didn’t share all the eligible disasters since 2023, he did mention several since last summer. They included last month’s fires in the Pacific Palisades and Malibu area and the Eaton fire in Altadena. Those fires — which destroyed over 16,000 structures — killed 29 people and burned a combined 37,000 acres in Los Angeles County.

“The governor’s proposal lays out the broad strokes of a program that is currently under development, so it would be premature to discuss additional eligibility details,” a spokesman for Newsom’s office said Wednesday.

The relief program also would be offered to homeowners whose houses were damaged or destroyed from the Franklin fire that burned more than 4,000 acres in Malibu on Dec. 9, 2024, in Malibu Creek State Park, and the Park fire in Northern California’s Butte and Tehama counties.

The Park fire ignited July 24, 2024, in Chico’s Bidwell Park  — about 90 miles northwest of Sacramento.  The fire, which authorities suspect was arson, became the largest wildfire of California’s wildfire season, and fourth largest in the state’s history.

In a related matter, more relief for fire victims came Tuesday, Feb. 18, when the L.A. County Board of Supervisors approved a six-month rent moratorium for tenants and workers affected by the L.A. fires.

​ Orange County Register 

Will the Declassification and Transparency Task Force bring us the truth?

• February 19, 2025

If you had to think of two words in the English language to represent the concept of inertia, a complete lack of forward progress, it would be these: task force.

If you had to get it down to one word, it could be this: Congress.

So the announcement this week that there is now a congressional Task Force on the Declassification and Transparency of Federal Secrets sounds more interesting than it’s likely to be.

But there’s a first time for everything, so let’s play along. What’s this about?

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has formed a new Declassification and Transparency Task Force to find and release government documents on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as documents on the 9/11 attacks, the origins of the COVID-19 virus, the Jeffrey Epstein client list, and the phenomena generally known as UFOs.

In the past you would have to sit through nine or ten movies to get this kind of information, but now we’ll be able to see all of it on CSPAN. The first hearing of the task force is planned for sometime in March.

House Oversight committee chairman James Comer appointed Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna to chair the task force. He said she is “committed to shining a light on the truth and ending the era of secrecy.”

Luna said her goal is to restore trust through transparency. “The federal government has been hiding information from Americans for decades,” she said. “We have spent years seeking information on the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, Reverend King, and other government secrets without success. It is time to give Americans the answers they deserve.”

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this. Will we hear shocking revelations of information so outrageously damaging that people were killed over it? Are the members of this panel going to need bulletproof vests?

So far, the Kevlar Caucus includes Republicans Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Eric Burlison of Missouri, Eli Crane of Arizona and Brandon Gill of Texas.

Good luck, everybody!

This will be a bipartisan task force, but the Democratic members have not yet been announced. Probably still being fitted for the Kevlar vests.

Comer and Luna have already sent letters to high-ranking government officials asking for briefings about the existence of documents, classified or unclassified, under their control.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked what documents she has “regarding the investigation into and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were asked what documents they have “regarding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States and Operation Neptune Spear,” the military operation that led to the killing of Osama bin-Laden.

Ratcliffe, Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were asked for a briefing on documents under their control regarding “the existence of unidentified anomalous phenomena,” a category that includes unidentified flying objects and submerged objects that have been observed in the oceans.

Ratcliffe and the Director of the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, were asked about documents on the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK.

Rubio, Ratcliffe and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were asked for a briefing on any documents in their departments related to the origins of COVID-19.

“After the briefing,” all eleven letters stated, “the Committee and Task Force shall seek to review these documents and make recommendations on declassification to ensure all applicable orders and laws are being implemented and deliver transparency to the American people.”

This might all be nothing, but it sounds like it could be something.

There is a quality to the second Trump administration that is reminiscent of the opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s after the fall of the USSR. The president has unleashed the DOGE team to tear through the electronic records of unimaginable waste and fraud that have gone on for decades. Who knows what information has been protected all these years by entrenched bureaucrats, excessive secrecy and the occasional assassination.

The president has the authority to declassify anything. He could make history.

Write [email protected] and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley

​ Orange County Register 

Theater review: A sunny production of ‘Annie’ warms the stage in Costa Mesa

• February 19, 2025

Optimism in challenging times must be found whenever and wherever you can uncover it.

For a short week at the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa the reminder that the sun will come out tomorrow is on handsome display in “Annie,” the musical that perpetually pursues hope and ultimately finds it in family.

Riding along on composer Charles Strouse’s still catchy jazz and vaudevillian period score — eternally propelled by “Tomorrow,” one of musical theater’s most effective earworms — these themes provide the enduring appeal of a girl’s Depression-era journey from hard-scrabble orphanage to Fifth Avenue mansion.

A positive to this production is the cool, calculating eye that director Jenn Thompson brings to the piece. Thompson, who played one of the orphans when the show started in 1977,  has de-smudged sentimentality from her staging (well, apart from opening night’s rapturous “ooooh” from the hall’s farthest upper reaches greeting the first appearance of Sandy, live theater’s most renowned canine (more on him at the end if you want to just skip ahead).

Though an early number declares “it’s the hard knock life for us,”  the pursuit of hopefulness can get gooey and “Annie” stagings are vulnerable to saccharine performances, which potentially lurk during the overplotted second act and Christmastime ending.

In September, Thompson was around the corner directing at South Coast Repertory, bringing similar brisk focus to the campy material of “Little Shop of Horrors.”  Here, she is aided and abetted by her actors in the three lead roles.

Hazel Vogel’s Annie — her red wigs shaded to “flaming” — is a thoughtfully determined and practical waif. The actress often takes a beat before offering sage, no-nonsense counsel to her elders.

She’s also no pushover with her orphan pals, even if she loves them a lot: in the show’s first scene she shuts up bratty behavior with the crack “Do you want to sleep with your teeth inside your mouth or out?”

Her primary foe is Miss Hannigan, the orphanage’s matron of miseries. Stefanie Londino, an accomplished veteran of “Annie” tours, makes for a most thoroughly accomplished Charles Dickens-y villainess. Her Hannigan is an erratic tyrant, with comic booziness and sheer exhaustion pouring from every pore.

When Londino sings “Little Girls” plenty of self-loathing is on display; later, when a glint of the real malevolence emerges from within her, it’s not surprising.

Where Vogel offers matter-of-fact realism and Londino manifests dead-on-her-feet desperation, actor Christopher Swan’s Oliver Warbucks’ progresses from bumptious billionaire to an affectionate mensch, whose motivations to adopt Annie include self-actualization.

Swan is impressive at peeling back inner layers his character doesn’t know he has so that when he eventually sings Warbucks’ overly yearning mini-ballad “Something Was Missing,” it feels earned.

This production has above average generosity in staging and costuming than most touring shows around for a single week in Costa Mesa.

Against a background scrim of the Brooklyn Bridge contours and fronted by a metallic-looking arch around and above the stage, the settings go from appropriately ramshackle in the orphanage to suitably well-appointed in the mansion.

The costumes — a lot of green on display across the Warbucks’ servants — are also a cut above, though Annie gets saddled for a while with a mauve outfit that should never be worn by a redhead.

What else? Ah, yes, Sandy.

Annie’s orphaned pooch is (so charmingly) undertaken by a 7-year-old labradoodle named Kevin.

Kevin arrives at Segerstrom having performed the role during the holidays at Madison Square Garden, so it’s difficult finding fault, particularly since the Costa Mesa audience went bonkers for him all the way through the curtain bows.

But a teeny aside in pursuit of theater realism: the first labradoodle was believed bred in Australia in 1989. Soooo, how can Kevin be found roaming the Manhattan streets in 1933?

Just sayin’.

‘Annie’

Rating: 3 stars (out of a possible four).

When: Through Sunday, Feb. 23: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m, Saturday,  1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

Tickets: $44.07-157.07

Information: 949-556-2787; scfta.org

​ Orange County Register