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PUBLISHED 9-30-07 ----
A new report linking urban residential sprawl and rising carbon dioxide levels warrants our attention as the 2008 campaign season draws nearer.
The Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington and London, has issued a paper that draws a correlation between residential density, automobile emissions and increased carbon output.
The report concludes that building new homes in compact neighborhoods that have retail stores, schools and services...
PUBLISHED 9-28-07 ---
Bakersfield City Council members joined the national debate over immigration reform with a powerful statement — rather than the proposed, 15-second inflammatory sound-bite.
After months of controversy over Councilman David Couch’s proposal to declare that Bakersfield is not a “sanctuary city” and that English is Bakersfield’s official language, a more meaningful position was adopted Wednesday by the City Council.
The City Council...
PUBLISHED 9-27-07 ----
A new intersection, soon to be constructed at Fairfax Road and Highway 178 in northeast Bakersfield, presents an opportunity. The $28.9 million project is expected to take 18 months to complete. It’s one of the first visible signs that the more than $700 million in federal road improvement funds retired Congressman Bill Thomas secured for Kern County — primarily Bakersfield — is a reality.
Within the next few months and years, bulldozers...
PUBLISHED 9-26-07 ---
Take a hike, no charge.
This Saturday marks National Public Lands Day. To celebrate, the National Park Service is dropping the cover charge.
All entrance fees, including charges for vehicle and commercial tours, will be waived in honor of the national observance.
The idea is get people to visit national parks and more fully appreciate one of the undeniably good things Uncle Sam has...
PUBLISHED 9-26-07 ----
An entire refrigerator full of groceries, or that physics textbook? A week’s worth of child care, or that English lit anthology?
Those are the kinds of choices college students must make every semester, thanks to the ever-increasing cost of textbooks.
According to the California Public Interest Research Group, the average college student spends about $900 on books each year. Over the past decade, prices have increased at a pace four times the rate of...
PUBLISHED 9-25-07 ----
The law should not get in the way of people expressing moronic opinions.
Knuckleheads have as much a right to share their views as anybody.
That’s the central lesson we can take out of the recent state Supreme Court decision upholding a high school student’s right to write a “disrespectful,” “unsophisticated” and ill-informed diatribe on illegal immigration.
Andrew Smith wrote an editorial in the Novato High School...
PUBLISHED 9/25/07 ----
The smell of burning plastic should be your first hint, mom. Sooty skin, blackened soles on shoes, the vague aroma of gasoline are telltale signs, too. Are you paying attention, dad? Grandma?
Somebody torched the playground equipment again at Almondale Park sometime early Tuesday morning last week, igniting one play structure with a fire so hot it melted parts of another nearby play structure.
The play equipment that burned was a replacement for play equipment...
PUBLISHED 9/24/07
A funny thing happened on the way to new consumer protections for California’s 28 million cell-phone users. A $7 million funny thing.
Nine proposed changes in the law that would have allowed consumers to terminate their contracts, switch carriers, dispute their bills or take advantage of several other basic privileges have been almost entirely quashed, thanks to more than $7 million in campaign donations to California legislators from telecommunications companies...
PUBLISHED 9/24/07
So far, so good. The Judicial Conference of the United States voted unanimously last week to pay up to $1.4 million a year to rent a federal courthouse in Bakersfield.
Locating a federal courthouse in Bakersfield was derailed last year when city officials and southwest Bakersfield residents opposed plans to lease a building on the outskirts of town.
The federal General Services Administration rejected proposals for a downtown site in favor of a complex Castle &...
Most will agree the federal system of laws controlling immigration into the U.S. is broken. People are sneaking through porous borders, and living and working illegally in the U.S.
While some can argue these immigrants are contributing to the U.S. economy and society, this illegal activity places a heavy burden on communities. Public services are stretched. Criminal activity has increased. By its very nature, illegal immigration creates an underground society that does not assimilate and...
PUBLISHED 9/21/07
It looks like a straight ribbon of asphalt heading south to the horizon, but Highway 99, merging with Interstate 5 near Mettler, is a 150-year-old piece of history.
The present-day freeway linking Bakersfield with Los Angeles is only the latest of four incarnations of the economically and culturally vital road.
Entrepreneurs created the first phase, Beale’s Cut (named for local icon Edward Fitzgerald Beale) in 1854, digging out a 60-foot-deep,...
PUBLISHED 9/20/07 ---
So a member of the state Fish and Game Commission was personally opposed to poisoning wildlife. Imagine that.
In a bizarre twist to the debate over the proposed ban on lead ammunition, 34 Republican legislators successfully lobbied Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger into ousting commissioner R. Judd Hanna, whom the governor had appointed last February.
Hanna’s crime? He provided other commissioners with a 167-page document on the issue of lead-ammo contamination...
PUBLISHED 9/20/07 ----
You don’t have to look too deeply into gang culture and the periphery of street violence to find a grieving mother who ignored warning signs. A fight at school, a bullet hole in the car, a first-time arrest. Something.
Now, an Assembly bill awaiting only Gov. Schwarzenegger’s signature promises to address the issue in a new and innovative way.
AB 1291, authored by Assemblyman Tony Mendoza, D-Artesia, would allow juvenile court judges to send the...
PUBLISHED 9-19-07 ---
The late, legendary boxing coach Eddie Futch used to tell the story of a sparring session in a Detroit gym with a young Joe Louis. Every time Louis threw his left, the smaller Futch hopped aside and popped Louis with a right.
Louis grew increasingly frustrated, and Futch, sympathetic, eventually deigned to explain his secret. “Just before you throw your left, Joe, you raise your left toe. You might as well send me a postcard about it.”
...
PUBLISHED 9-19-07
Maybe it’s an indication that President Bush’s political clout is greatly diminished as he moves into the final 15 months of his second term.
Maybe it’s a sign that Bush has tired of the gamesmanship and partisan hand fighting that characterized Alberto Gonzales’ tenure as attorney general.
Whatever the case, Americans of various political persuasions can be cautiously encouraged by the president’s nomination of retired federal Judge...
Kern County Supervisors introduced sanity into the planning process two years ago when they established a rule requiring most developments in unincorporated metropolitan Bakersfield be hooked up to a municipal sewer system.
Previously, many projects had been allowed to go forward with septic-tank systems. Supervisor Michael Rubio, who has been dealing with sewage oozing from septics in the Rexland Acres area throughout his tenure on the board, was among those who praised the sewer-first...
This is nuts! It’s stupid, too. A learning exercise/hoax last week at Freedom Middle School missed its intended mark: to teach students about “taxation without representation.”
Instead, it taught students that their grownup teachers can act, well, not so grown up.
Parents of the Rosedale Union School District middle school were outraged when they learned their children would be charged 10 cents per page for all photocopied materials used in their social studies...
Some choice: Feed your family or volunteer at your kid’s school. Sometimes it comes down to that sort of decision.
School volunteers who work with students outside the direct supervision of school employees are, by state law, required to be fingerprinted and cleared by the Department of Justice. The cost: about $50.
Some school districts pick up all or part of the cost. In the Panama Buena Vista Union School District, for example, school-site parent clubs pay for the...
PUBLISHED 9-16-07
Crisp & Cole cannot be blamed for all of Bakersfield’s real estate problems. There is a lot of blame to go around. Like the rest of the nation, Bakersfield’s prices and sales are slumping, credit is tight, foreclosures mounting.
There is a variety of reasons for this. Articles on today’s Forum pages provide insights into a few of the causes and proposed responses.
But Bakersfield in the past has been relatively insulated from the trauma of...
You would think local legislators would jump at the chance to increase Bakersfield-area representation on a policy-making committee dedicated to solving our single most dire health concern.
You would think southern San Joaquin Valley-based members of the state Senate and Assembly would be climbing all over each other to demand a stronger local voice in solving our most pressing regional problem.
But no, they seem to be saying. Let’s let others continue to have a...
We got a taste of industry self-regulation last month when Monterey County grower Metz Fresh recalled 8,000 cartons of fresh spinach after a routine test turned up salmonella.
The company didn’t conduct the salmonella test because some California law required it. Metz Fresh didn’t announce the recall because of a government-mandated consumer-safety protocol. Things happened the way they did because of industry self-regulation — in this case, because Metz Fresh was...
California’s continuing struggle to safeguard its fresh vegetables, spinach in particular, justify the creation of a proposed Food and Drug Administration “Center of Excellence” at UC Davis.
Scientists at the center would work with agricultural and food-safety experts throughout the world to develop new and improved ways of detecting various contaminants, such as salmonella and E. coli, and defeating their spread. Advancement in those areas would protect both consumers...
PUBLISHED 9/12/07 ---
Yesterday Americans sadly observed the sixth anniversary of 9/11 — terrorists’ attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, outside Washington, D.C.
Tonight Bakersfield City Council members will decide if they are willing to spend local tax dollars to support the war on terrorism and the resulting Iraq war.
Will city tax dollars continue to be used to help support citizen-soldiers — city employees who are called up for...
PUBLISHED 9-12-07 --
Alcoholics Anonymous has helped millions of men and women worldwide overcome the ravages of alcoholism, thanks to its acclaimed 12-step program. God, mentioned directly or indirectly in seven of the 12 steps, is a big part of the recovery process.
AA says it’s not a religion, and that it is open and welcoming to agnostics and nonbelievers. But its religious overtones are significant enough to have prompted a federal appeals court to declare that parolees...
PUBLISHED 9-11-07
Addressing a city still reeling from the attacks, The New York Times wrote recently: “As Pearl Harbor Day and the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination were for past generations of Americans, Sept. 11 is the day we do not want to remember and the day we cannot forget.”
Two recent developments cause this sixth anniversary of the terrorists’ attacks to be especially sobering.
Terrorist Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida organization...
Compared to their 49 counterparts, California’s state senators as a group have the highest salaries in the nation — more than $113,000 a year, soon to exceed $116,000. No other state is remotely close.
On top of that generous compensation, they’re also paid a $162 per diem allowance, ostensibly for daily food, lodging and incidental expenses, which they are permitted to claim when the Legislature is in session. That figure, too, is by far the highest in the nation; six...
Talk about nuts! The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has the authority to regulate the nicotine content of such anti-smoking products as patches and gum, but not the nicotine content or other content of tobacco products.
A bill passed by a Senate committee just before lawmakers took their summer break would change that, extending the FDA’s authority over tobacco products.
It would give the federal agency the power to restrict advertising aimed at children, ban candy-flavored...
There’s a troubling irony in the fact that American men and women presumably go to war to defend certain ideals and then are often deprived of the benefits associated with those same ideals when they come home.
Veterans have a right to dignity, justice and reasonable protection. All too frequently they are denied them.
It was happening at Walter Reed Army Hospital, where the most seriously injured American soldiers were subjected to neglect and deplorable conditions until a...
PUBLISHED 9--0-07
Every cop who has worked the traffic beat for any length of time has seen it happen. The alleged speeder takes out his wallet, smirks confidently and flashes a badge. Not the badge of a sworn officer, but a close facsimile — a token of gratitude bestowed upon him by a politician, police chief or sheriff.
There must be thousands of people across California — service organization volunteers, political contributors, friends of sheriffs past and present —...
PUBLISHED 9-6-07
The people of our military deserve our full support, and not just while they’re wearing the uniform of their chosen service branch, or dealing with the challenges of advanced years. They deserve our support as they transition from active service to civilian careers, too.
For many servicemen and servicewomen, that period of transition means the pursuit of a college degree. Too many are finding that active duty doesn’t merely interrupt their education, it...
PUBLISHED 9/06/07
Intentional obstruction as a way of sending a “political message” is a generally distasteful practice, but there’s some merit in Don Perata’s move last week to hold up confirmation of two of the governor’s appointees.
Perata, the state senate’s president pro tem, announced he would delay confirmation of two of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s appointees to the Water Resources Control Board as a way of demanding that California put some...
PUBLISHED 9/5/07
Coming soon to an idyllic national treasure near you: McDonald’s Half-Dome.
Just kidding. Not that the idea is particularly funny. Just that it’s easy to visualize crass commercialism run amok at Yosemite National Park and other federal recreation preserves in the view of a new National Park Service initiative unveiled last month.
The park service’s “centennial challenge,” pegged to the 100th anniversary of the federal parks agency nine...
PUBLISHED 9/5/07
Bravo to Fresno State University and Chevron for teaming up on a system of solar panel-topped parking shade structures that will keep more than 700 parking spaces out of the San Joaquin Valley sun — and provide 20 percent of the university’s base demand for electricity.
What a great idea. Take a major step toward energy self-sufficiency, save hundreds of students the daily agony of 150-degree car interiors, and all without wasting a drop of water of...
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