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PUBLISHED 8/27/08 -----
Taggers have started making themselves at home at Panorama Park, the linear park along Panorama Drive with the jaw-dropping view of north Bakersfield’s Kern River oil field.
Residents were outraged to awaken recently to fresh graffiti and assorted other vandalism in the relatively new county park. Curbsides, street signs and even the trunks of several palm trees were hit with blue and red paint. Vandals nearly destroyed one metal park bench.
County parks...
PUBLISHED 8/26/08 ----
Kern County Superior Court Commissioner Linda Etienne cut through the political hype Monday and came down on the side of protecting the integrity of our elections.
The commissioner denied a request by Bakersfield City Council hopeful Beau Woodward to rule that a woman who had signed Woodward’s candidate petition was a registered voter at the time she signed.
Woodward came up one signature shy of the 20 needed to have his name placed on the Nov. 4 ballot to...
PUBLISHED 8/22/08 ----
The dumb idea of the day award goes to one Roy Benson, city not disclosed, who thinks Election Day ought to be a state holiday.
California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has given Benson, the proponent of the initiative to turn even-year election days in November into state holidays, permission to begin collecting petition signatures for his measure.
Why not? Voting day, after all, is a holiday in at least nine states, including New York and Ohio....
PUBLISHED 8/21/08 ----
Every summer brings a new batch of horror movies to theaters. They usually involve teen girls, lurking psychopaths and excessive screaming. As August draws to a close, many U.S. theaters be will showing another sort of summer horror movie — one with considerably less screaming and significantly more accountants. See it anyway.
“I.O.U.S.A.,” a documentary film about the U.S. budget deficit, opens at 7:30 p.m. tonight with a special version featuring...
PUBLISHED 8/20/08 ----
Paybacks are — to put it nicer than the saying — painful. Bakersfield’s Democratic Assemblywoman, Nicole Parra, felt the sting of her party’s legislative leaders when they booted her from her Capitol office this week.
The “payback” was for her refusal to vote on a Democratic version of the state budget Sunday. Parra was the only Democrat on the Assembly floor who did not vote for the budget. Republicans voted against the spending...
PUBLISHED 8/19/08 -----
In the world imagined by people at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 12 million American women give themselves daily abortions by performing the most mundane of acts: They take a birth control pill.
The federal agency, which determines national health policy and controls billions in funding, has produced a draft proposal that clearly targets women’s access to one of the most basic of family-planning options.
The leaked proposal, later...
PUBLISHED 8/17/08 -----
Critics of the so-called Abernathy machine are having great fun with Beau Woodward’s disqualification from the Bakersfield City Council race. The first-time campaigner needed a mere 20 valid signatures on his petition to run for office and he could only come up with 19. If he hadn’t waited until 10 minutes before the filing deadline to submit his paperwork, he surely could’ve found one more willing, qualified voter on short notice....
PUBLISHED 8/15/08 ----
California’s budget impasse may very well come down to a question of whether state Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, can live with the terms of an Arnold Schwarzenegger-brokered deal.
Schwarzenegger needs at least two Senate Republicans to break ranks with GOP colleagues, and Ashburn sounds like he’s prepared to be one of them. But he’s made it clear that the deal must be right. And it must.
The governor’s proposed 1-cent sales tax increase...
PUBLISHED 8/14/08 ----
Bummer. Saturday service at Bakersfield’s Department of Motor Vehicle offices ended this month as a result of the state budget stalemate.
Democrats and Republicans continue to bicker over a new state spending plan and closing a more than $15 billion budget hole. Approval of a 2008-09 budget is nearly two months overdue.
To apply heat to lawmakers’ feet and ensure the state will have enough money to pay its bills through September, Gov. Arnold...
PUBLISHED 8/13/08 -----
Sometimes cops need to break the law. If the situation calls for them to exceed the posted speed limit, for example, and they can do so safely, few would question their right to drive faster than the rest of us.
California’s new hands-free law falls into the same category. Since July 1, California drivers have been banned from using their phones in the traditional manner when they’re behind the wheel of a vehicle. But law enforcement agencies are exempt...
PUBLISHED 8/12/08 -----
It’s about time! Graffiti vandals now will have to clean up their own messes under a pair of laws signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week.
Assemblywoman Fiona Ma’s AB 1767, a three-year pilot program for San Francisco, mandates 24 hours of community service in graffiti cases, in addition to any civil arrangements with the affected property owner. And AB 2609, from Los Angeles Assemblyman Mike Davis, requires taggers to clean up the property...
PUBLISHED 8/10/08 ----
A funny thing happened as Americans trudged to and beyond $4-a-gallon gasoline. They became interested in this nation’s energy policy — or lack of one. They started warming to the idea of developing domestic energy supplies, including exploring for oil.
And so a funny thing has happened to the campaign for U.S. president. The candidates have started making “energy development” a top priority.
It used to be the Iraq war. Then it was the...
PUBLISHED 8/08/08 -----
When the 2008 Summer Olympic Games open tonight, the world’s eyes will be focused on China as much as on the performances of athletes competing for gold, silver and bronze.
The attention China has called to itself would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago, when the nation was isolated behind a “bamboo curtain” — a suspicious, brutal communist regime keeping outsiders out and its people locked in.
But in recent years, the...
PUBLISHED 8/7/08 ----
Over the years, Bakersfield’s assorted minor-league professional baseball teams have tried to get this city to build a new, publicly-owned stadium to replace backward-facing, ’40’s-vintage Sam Lynn Ball Park. On more than one occasion, the team has threatened to pull up stakes and move if something isn’t done. A couple of times it followed through — remember the Bakersfield Dodgers? — only to be replaced by another team.
And still,...
PUBLISHED 8/6/08 -----
Figure this one out. You’re trying to convince voters to come around to your way of thinking, so you call them at home with a recorded message. They might be in the mood to listen, but they might also be engrossed in a television program. Or eating dinner. Or sound asleep.
Have you helped your cause? Or hurt it?
Despite the dubious chances of catching receptive voters at home, politicians continue to take their chances. Most recently, retired Congressman...
PUBLISHED 8/3/08 ----
Constantino Carrera is the poster boy for what’s wrong with California’s death penalty.
The Kern County man was sentenced to death 25 years ago for participating in the double murder of a Mojave couple. The state Attorney General’s office now has confirmed Carrera will not face the death penalty after all.
“If it took 25-plus years to get to this point with Constantino Carrera, what was the point in giving him the death penalty...
PUBLISHED 8/01/08 -----
President Bush would like us to believe that the Olympics are just another sporting event and that he is just another sports fan.
The president said as much when he told U.S. Olympians attending a White House reception last month that politics and the Olympics “don’t mix.” Unlike his counterparts from Britain and Germany, who seem fully cognizant of the implicit endorsement of the China government that their presence would represent, Bush plans to...
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