A blog about Kern County, Politics, and Religion & Faith.
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We must learn to live within our means Absence of newspapers hurts communities Once again: Harvey Milk Day is a bad idea Student's freedom quashed in college classroom Flood of hope Hold on to at least some library services Tech ed a big win for students KHSD belt-tightening riles up parents One crazy week for this conservative Why not enforce the smoking laws we already have? June 06 July 06 August 06 September 06 October 06 November 06 December 06 January 07 February 07 March 07 April 07 May 07 June 07 July 07 August 07 September 07 October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 February 08 March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 August 08 September 08 October 08 November 08 December 08 January 09 February 09 March 09 April 09 May 09 June 09 July 09 August 09 September 09 October 09 November 09 June 06 May 06 April 06 March 06 February 06 January 06 December 05 November 05 October 05 September 05 August 05 July 05 Blog RollAsk The Californian Editorials Entertainment Eye of Bakersfield Faith Forum Fired Up! Inside Sports Neighbors Right Thinking Sound Off Talk of the Town 
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I had promised myself I wasn't going to join the post-Thanksgiving melee at local shops and malls, but a burned-out strand of Christmas lights forced me into the fray.
Elbowing my way through the crush at one local store, I came across a little girl of about 7 or 8 who looked up at me with wide, trusting eyes and said, "I can't find my dad."
No worries, I assured the girl as we walked to the nearest counter, where a store clerk notified the dad via the store's loudspeaker that...
The Salvation Army called me about a month ago looking for celebrity bell ringers to help kick off its annual Red Kettle Campaign.
Everybody knows there hasn't been a bona fide celebrity around here since Bakersfield lost Buck, but I signed on anyway, joining other local media types, elected officials and business leaders at the Marketplace last Saturday.
The kickoff appeared to have more "celebrities" than organizers knew what to do with, at least on my shift. We had a great...
A coalition of California's leading environmentalists has come up with an ambitious plan to turn sprawling Tejon Ranch into a vast natural preserve and is ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen.
Photos:
Photo by Alex Horvath
Californian columnist Marylee Shrider writes about a coalition of California’s leading environmentalists' plan to turn sprawling Tejon Ranch into a vast natural preserve.
It's a great plan, except for one little problem -- it doesn't own the...
Football coaches, referees and parents have been doing some pretty stupid things lately, like shouting, shoving and generally sucking the sportsmanship right out of the game.
But for Doug Barnett, varsity coach at Bakersfield Christian High School, this season was the best he could remember in 20 years of coaching football.
It was a great season, too, for his team, who, bumped up this year to the South Sequoia League, showed "great effort, great heart and tremendous...
Last week, while most of us were up to our eyeballs in election results, a shocker of a story from England surfaced for a moment and was gone, barely noticed by America's mainstream media.
In a statement that would have sparked worldwide outrage just a decade ago, one of Britain's leading medical schools, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, suggested last week that doctors should consider "active euthanasia" for seriously disabled newborns.
Not that the...
Paul Golla is only in his second year as Bakersfield High School's varsity football coach, but he's already within reach of a major career goal -- finishing an entire season without losing a single player to poor grades.
Imagine that. A high school football team that's 100 percent academically eligible. Golla wants it more than another valley championship, which, incidentally, his team won last year.
The Drillers are heading for the playoffs again, but Golla's goal of academic perfection...
The elephant that is the impending public employee pension crisis flopped into taxpayers' living rooms a few years ago, but is a topic most politicians vigorously avoid around election time.
Bakersfield City Councilman Zack Scrivner must have missed that particular memo because he's making the pension issue -- a "fiscal time bomb," according to some economic analysts -- the focal point of his race for reelection to the Ward 7 seat.
It's a platform that fired up two local unions...
Some years ago, a neighbor asked me to weigh in on a spat he was trying to settle between his son and his son's friend, both about 8 years old.
The son had traded away a baseball card to his friend, a transaction that sent the son spiraling into buyer's remorse a few hours later. The card, he had discovered, may have been more valuable than he first thought and he wanted it back.
The son was in tears, Dad was waffling, but the friend was resolute. It was a fair trade, the friend said,...
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