Letters to the editor: Issues with Siebel Newsom's nonprofit; a bad math equation

Ethical issue for Newsom’s wife

Sacramento, we have an ethical problem. It was recently revealed by a government watchdog group that First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom, has derived a portion of her income by licensing her activist films to various California public school districts.

Mrs. Newsom has a for-profit production company called Girl’s Club Entertainment, Inc., that produces her activist films which are then distributed through her nonprofit, The Representation Project, to individuals, corporations and school systems, complete with accompanying lesson plans.

Because her husband appears in two of her four films and because licenses are sold to these schools which the governor is responsible for funding, we must look at this arrangement with greater scrutiny.

It is already highly unethical that the governor solicits campaign donations from state vendors to the tune of millions of dollars, but even more so that his wife seeks donations from many of these same vendors and campaign donors to her nonprofit. It’s essentially a backdoor way to purchase favor with the governor and avoid violating state campaign donor limits.

In Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s film “The Great American Lie,” she makes a movie portraying her husband as a politician that supports certain policies, and then in the movie’s curriculum she advises students to vote and campaign for politicians that support these same policies.

So essentially, The Representation Project not only solicits donations from big-money political supporters of her husband, but she also receives public tax dollars to create a new generation of activists in California’s public school system which benefits her husband’s political career and lines her own pockets. It’s not ethical, but who is in charge of creating and enforcing the laws to regulate these practices in a single-party-rule state? It’s good to be the king. And queen.

Alan Garner, Camarillo

Math explanation is a bit off

Re: John Snyder’s Feb. 14 letter, “Biden disapproval doesn’t add up”:

With all due respect to Mr. Snyder, his use of numbers to demonstrate that something isn’t adding up doesn’t add up.

Referring to the 1 in 6 Democrats who disapprove of the job President Biden is doing, Mr. Snyder states that one-sixth is 0.166 (or 16.6%). This is true (approximately). Referring to the two-thirds of disapproving Democrats who say that their disapproval was not a factor in how they voted in the midterm election, he then computes that two-thirds of 0.166 is 0.111 (i.e., approximately 11.1% of disapproving Democrats say that their disapproval was not a factor).

So far, so good. But then he goes on to say, “That means 0.055% of those surveyed disapprove of his performance enough (that) it factored into how they voted in the midterm election.”

Throwing in that percentage symbol changes things by a factor of 100. The difference between 16.6% and 11.1% is 5.5% (i.e., 0.055 — not 0.055%, which is 0.00055).

Nonetheless, Mr. Snyder goes on to make a valid point, but care must be taken in how we express numbers.

David Magallanes, Port Hueneme

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Letters: Issues with Siebel Newsom's nonprofit; a bad math equation