Censorship creep at college

Some students at U.C. Santa Barbara are upset about potentially being upset.
The Associated Student Senate last month passed a resolution demanding professors warn students about things in their classes that, in the words of one student newspaper report, "could potentially trigger symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."
Not to be too dismissive, but, wow, that could be a pretty broad requirement. It could cover everything from German verbs (which traumatize many) to photos from the Battle of the Somme.
Look, it's hard to understand how you could teach about the Trail of Tears without making people uncomfortable. That horrid moment in American history should be disquieting.
UCSB students want their professors to flag in their syllabuses any content, according to the news story, "considered to trigger" trauma. "Considered to trigger?" What's that even mean?


What a class where all students are comfortable looks like.

The student Senate provided a preliminary list, the campus newspaper reported, of potentially traumatizing subjects. The list includes "rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-injurious behavior, suicide, graphic violence, pornography, kidnapping, and graphic depictions of gore."
If that sounds a bit like the warning accompanying an R-rated movie that's because it's close. And perhaps carried to its illogical conclusion, college classes should come with a similar rating system. But can anyone really imagine an advanced physics class needing a warning that "we're going to get into the gory details of high-energy physics?" And Hamlet? Be warned: "Murder most foul ..." abounds.
If you've been raped, you've been traumatized. There's no doubt. Listening to a lecture about the subject likely wouldn't be pleasant for you. But it wouldn't -- or certainly shouldn't -- be pleasant for anybody. That doesn't alter the fact that discussing rape is a legitimate educational topic, especially at the college level. Likewise, so is slavery. And the death penalty. And white-collar crime. And poverty. Homelessness. Racism. Abortion. Death. The list of topic with the potential to make someone uncomfortable is endless.
And it's not just at UCSB. College students apparently face possible discomfort at Oberlin College where the Office of Equity Concerns has issued a 2,558-word trigger-warning guideline (http://new.oberlin.edu/office/equity-concerns/sexual-offense-resource-guide/prevention-support-education/support-resources-for-faculty.dot). For example, it says "Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read. However, it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more."
When the students, arguably some of the brightest around, demand content warnings what we begin is the slide toward content control, another phrase for censorship. So much for colleges being intellectual free-fire zones ... or even free-speech zones.
Rather than asking a professor to put little red flags on the course syllabus, how about the students carefully reading it when it's handed to them at the first class meeting?  How about the students making some assumptions, not only about the work that's expected but also the content that's coming?
That doesn't seem too much to ask in a setting where ideas are meant to collide and academic freedom is alleged to be sacred.

On health care, we can't have it both ways

Despite a last-minute surge in sign-ups for medical insurance under the Affordable Care Act, a new poll shows Americans don't like it. Is that shocking?
Of course, the numbers show Americans are wild about provisions of the act -- especially a ban on using pre-existing conditions to deny coverage -- they just don't like being forced to participate.
A mere 26 percent of those polled in the Associated Press/GfK survey support the ACA (oddly, only 13 percent think it will ever be repealed).
"I like the idea that if you have a pre-existing condition you can't be turned down," Dallas resident and Democrat Gwen Sliger told the AP, "but I don't like the idea if you don't have health insurance you'll be fined."
Obviously though, if you're going to have an insurance system it can't work the way Sliger would like. If insurers are banned from refusing to cover the sick, they need some way of making sure people don't wait to sign up until they're sick. There's no economic way to make a system like that work. The insurance pool has to be broad and deep -- that is, full of young, healthy people paying premiums and not just the old or the chronically sick who are the most likely to need expensive, on-going care.
That isn't exactly how enrollment is working out. Only about a quarter of enrollees are between 18 and 34, according to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services figures. That's well below the 40 percent enrollment target the Congressional Budget Office estimates is needed to balance out the risk pool for insurers (some insurers say the 40 percent figure is too high).
Young people tend to be the healthiest. They also tend to have lower incomes as they launch their careers and higher expenses as they start families, buy a first home and pay off student debt. But included in that group also are people who can remain on their parents' health insurance policies until age 26 because of the ACA.
Still despite grumblings, Americans are signing up. Some 6 million have enrolled as the open sign-up deadline of March 31 nears. That's short of the 7 million the Obama administration had predicted, but much better than some expected given the rocky way the government website operated during the first two months of sign-ups.
The reality is this: we can pay through the ACA -- although a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system would be cheaper and more efficient -- or we can continue to pretend we have everyone covered as former President George W. Bush did when he said hospital emergency rooms are the nation's "universal" health care system.

Charge people, not just companies

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said Thursday it expects to face federal criminal charges stemming from the 2010 natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno.
The company said in a statement it is in negotiations with the U.S. Attorney's office but "now expects the U.S. Attorney will charge that PG&E's past operating practices violated the federal Pipeline Safety Act in areas such as record keeping, pipeline integrity management and identification of pipeline threats."

The aftermath of the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion.

A host of scathing reports in the wake of the blast put the blame squarely on PG&E, including one from the National Transportation Safety Board accusing the utility of "baffling" mistakes, a "litany of failures" and spotty oversight. The NTSB said, for example, it took PG&E nearly 95 minutes to shut off the gas spewing from the broken San Bruno pipeline.
That explosion and the fires it caused killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.
The utility, which last year announced it would pay out $565 million in legal settlements, said in its Thursday statement that the "criminal charges are not merited and that PG&E employees did not intentionally violate the federal Pipeline Safety Act."
That's right, and drunken drivers don't intentionally kill others when they climb behind the wheel and end up bashing into an innocent family. Nevertheless, we hold them responsible because they should have known the potential for harm.
PG&E knew, or should have known, the potential for disaster on the 54-year-old San Bruno pipeline was real. It knows, or should know, that it has similar disasters-in-waiting along many parts of its vast natural gas distribution system.
Of course the utility didn't intend for the pipeline to explode. The company just chose to ignore the problem despite being warned by some of its own workers. It made a calculated economic determination it was cheaper to take a chance than to properly maintain the aging pipeline.
And that brings up the other problem: why in these situations is it always the company facing charges? Despite the determination in some quarters that a company is a person, any company is made up of people who manage it and set its policies. Why are those responsible for ignoring this problem or those who set up the policies making that inattention possible not being held accountable?
When a company is charged criminally, there almost always is a fine imposed. No person pays the fine. The company or its shareholders or, ultimately, its customers pay. Ignoring for the moment the bad press a company must endure, holding companies rather than individuals responsible cynically allows the whole thing to be reduced to little more than the cost of doing business.
That's unfair. It was unfair recently when Toyota was allowed to pay a fine for misleading customers and regulators for years about safety defects in its vehicles, but no company official was charged. It will be unfair if General Motors is simply allowed to pay a fine for ignition switch problems, known about for a decade by company officials. And it will be unfair if PG&E managers escape with the defense, "gee, we didn't intend to kill anyone."

Balancing protection and free speech

Secret Service agents are given wide latitude when it comes to protecting the president. They can change a motorcade route in an instant. They can, and often do, keep the president's exact itinerary vague. They can keep protesters far away.

Protecting the president is not an office job.

All of this is perfectly acceptable if it is done solely for the purpose of presidential safety. It becomes a much more dicey proposition when it is done simply to protect the chief executive from hearing what he doesn't want to hear or seeing what he doesn't want to see. Think Richard Nixon.
In both of President George W. Bush's visits to Stockton, the Civic Auditorium was rung with city buses and only a select few (that is, supporters) were allowed inside, much to the disappointment of those, say, who wanted to let him know they felt about America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No doubt some believed their free speech rights were infringed by not being allowed to shout their views within earshot of the president.
That issue was before the Supreme Court on Wednesday in an Oregon case brought against two Secret Service agents who in 2004 moved protesters away from a restaurant where a visiting Bush suddenly decided he wanted to eat. Not moved away were Bush supporters and that prompted the lawsuit and the claim of a free speech violation.
The high court, which is often divided, seemed to speak with one voice, as in, we're not impressed.
Justice Antonin Scalia said that if there was any objective reason to move protesters to improve security, then "it doesn't matter whether there was any intent to suppress anti-Bush demonstrators."
Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who resides on the move liberal section of the political spectrum, seemed unimpressed with the suit saying the protesters were within "throwing distance of a bomb or shooting distance as well."
Although signals from the court seemed clear, justices aren't expected to rule until possibly June. But in addition to their rather dismissive questions, the justices have as precedent a 2012 case in which the court ruled that two Secret Service agents couldn't be sued by a man arrested after confronting then-Vice President Dick Cheney. In that case, the court said the agents were immune and left undecided the question of First Amendment rights.
Certainly free speech is important. It's a bedrock right in a democracy. But in this case it must be balanced against presidential security and the hair-trigger decisions the president's protection staff must make. The scales here tilt toward safety.

Lobbying to discriminate

We are about to find out just how much personhood the U.S. Supreme Court is willing to grant corporations, this in the wake of its tortured Citizens United decision. By that 2010 ruling the high court decided that corporations are persons for the purpose of the First Amendment. The ruling granted corporations and unions virtually unfettered access to the nation's politics by allowing huge amounts of money to flow into campaigns.
Today the justices heard a challenge to the Affordable Care Act by three companies claiming their religious freedom is being infringed by the requirement that contraception be included in employee health plans.
It is a spurious, gender-biased argument at best. If upheld it allows health care discrimination against women only.
The lead plaintiff in the case is Hobby Lobby Inc., a chain of 500 arts and crafts stores with 13,000 employees. The privately-held for-profit company is owned by conservative Christians who object on religious grounds to certain birth control methods because they can interfere with pregnancy once an egg is fertilized.
"It's our rights that are being infringed upon to require us to do something against our conscience," said company CEO and founder David Green.
One presumes that at least some of the company's 13,000 workers do not share this view, but if the court upholds this position, all bets are off.
The court, and by extension the American public, has a long tradition of tolerance toward individual religious beliefs. Tolerance, however, should not be carte blanche permission. Did David Koresh have a religious leg to stand on when the Branch Davidians he led tolerated child abuse under the guise of religious belief? Of course not.
Individual beliefs are one thing. Extending that proposition to an entire company is another matter altogether. The high court years ago ruled an Amish cabinetmaker could not avoid Social Security taxes for his employees even though he viewed them as against his religion.
Narrowly drawn dispensation to nonprofits and religious organizations on the birth control issue has been granted under the ACA. It is another matter altogether to extend that logic to an entirely profit-making company. Hobby Lobby was established to make money, not to prophesize. To extend such cafeteria-style exemptions is to risk facing arguments, say, that a company's owner holds religious beliefs that make doing business with same-sex couples wrong. Or that ban coverage for blood transfusions and vaccinations, Where does it end?
Mistakenly granting personhood to corporations and unions under Citizens United was bad enough in that it allows unfettered influence in our politics. If such personhood is extended further to corporations like Hobby Lobby, it creates a religious sanction for intolerance.
The kind of discrimination Hobby Lobby argues is protected was banned 50 years ago by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin in public accommodations, be they public or private. That remains a proper reading of the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Hobby Lobby and the others essentially are asking to be allowed to discriminate against women who happen to be their employees.
The ACA necessarily fixes a floor for the coverage that can be offered. Preventative health care, including care that prevents pregnancy, is part of that package. In that sense it is no different than the state of California dictating minimum auto insurance coverage.
The Supreme Court simply cannot punch exemption holes in this floor. It discriminates against Hobby Lobby workers. It carries the very real danger of extending discrimination to others.

  

Who's driving responsibility?

Even as auto manufacturers introduce more and more vehicles that secretly collect more data about us, we are discovering that when it comes to disclosing information about themselves it's a different story.
General Motors, for example, is just the latest manufacturer caught hiding information about a serious defect. In February the automaker issued a recall of 1.5 million vehicles to repair ignition defects linked to at least 12 deaths. GM knew about the defect for more than a decade. This from the recipient of a $49.5 billion too-big-to-fail government bailout.
GM faces an investigation from Congress, the Justice Department and, ah, the company itself.
Then there's Toyota that last week agreed to pay a $1.2 billion fine to avoid prosecution over safety problems linked to 37 deaths. Just as was the case with GM, Toyota executives knew for years about potential problems with floor mats and gas pedals. The company misled consumers and the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration about the scope of the defects until regulators forced the information out. Some 9.4 million vehicles were eventually recalled.
The $1.2 billion fine was the largest penalty ever paid by an automaker, but it was a penance of the $13 billion fine Toyota could have faced had it not settled.
By its own admission, Toyota sought to protect its brand ahead of its customers' safety. By settling, the company protected not only its bottom line -- not to mention the just under $60 billion Toyota has on hand -- but its execs, not one of whom will face criminal sanctions.
That's the way it always works. Somewhere in the bowls of the corporation, faceless executives make decisions that harm others and when they're caught the company pays a fine -- often, though not in Toyota's case, without admitting any wrongdoing. The fine is a cost of doing business, a cost passed on to shareholders and customers. Meanwhile, the executives in charge are handed bonuses and country club memberships. No perp walk for them.
Probably that's OK in a country where the Supreme Court has decided companies are "people." By that skewered thinking, a corporation being fined is a "person" being fined.
All of this isn't over, of course. Toyota and GM face more investigations and the lawsuits are piling up. If those costs came directly out of the pockets of the executives responsible, the defects would have been caught and cured much, much earlier.

Stockton dumped on by the state

By what lapse of common sense did the City of Stockton allow the state, through one of its contractors, to dump thousands of pounds of water hyacinth in a city park?
The small, decomposing water weed has been piled at Louis Park for weeks. It was yanked from the nearby Deep Water Channel as part of a state cleanup of the noxious weed that clogs Delta waterways.


A mess when it's in the water. A mess when left to rot in a Stockton park.

Much of the cleanup was piled at the Port of Stockton by state contractor Rick Hatton of Hayward-based Aquatic Harvesting. Those piles were quickly cleaned up and hauled away to be recycled. But the piles at the city park were simply left to rot. And smell. And become a convenient place for some people to dump additional waste.
For reasons that are still puzzling, the park is one of five sites the state's permits allow to be used to stockpile the harvested weed. That arrangement was supposed to be temporary, a word that seems to have taken on a somewhat elastic definition. So far, temporary has meant three months.
"It's a new program, and we're still working out the details," Gloria Sandoval of the state Department of Boating and Waterways told The Record.
Don't you think disposal would have been one of the details -- like an end-date for temporary stockpile -- that reasonable people would have worked out in advance? Even in a new program?
City officials say, yes, they gave permission for the state to pile the weeds at the park. They also claim to be working to have the waste removed. We can only hope the cost doesn't come back on city taxpayers.

No more turning a blind eye

The federal judge shepherding Stockton's bankruptcy is worried about Vallejo ... and that means Judge Christopher Klein is worried about Stockton.
Vallejo emerged from bankruptcy three years ago but is again circling the drain, being sucked down by its pension obligations. That Bay Area city decided against touching its employee pension obligation when it initially sought bankruptcy protection. That decision, while avoiding a fight with employee unions and the state's giant pension system, CalPERS, kept staggering financial obligations on Vallejo's books.
A similar tactic was taken by Stockton: no confrontation with CalPERS. The theory, and it certainly seemed reasonable at the time, was that to take on CalPERS was to invite an expensive, protracted court fight the city might lose. City leaders reasoned they hand their hands full fighting creditors over the hundreds of millions owed them.
Stockton's creditors, of course, didn't view it that way. They felt they were being singled out to take the hit while city workers jobs and worker pensions were being protected (never mind that the ranks of the two biggest city departments, police and fire, were drastically thinned as the city plunged toward bankruptcy and we had a surge in murders as one consequence).
At a hearing this week in Sacramento, Klein took note of news reports about Vallejo's increasingly precarious position.
"This court," he said, "has an independent duty to satisfy itself that the (Stockton) plan is going to work. "I'm probably going to have to be persuaded that the plan is going to work."
A month ago Moody's Investors Service warned that the city could face a second bankruptcy if its pension obligations aren't reduced.
Of course, it was outfits like Moody's that helped steer the country into the Great Recession -- and by extension Stockton into bankruptcy -- when the credit rating companies essentially turned a blind eye toward the Wall Street shenanigans that caused the economy to fail. Actually, blind eye is too kind since the rating agencies were handing out gold stars to every shaky investment package Wall Street cobbled together.
Moody's part in this was not lost on Marc Levinson, Stockton's bankruptcy attorney, and he made sure it wasn't lost on Klein either.
"What you're reading in the press is not true," Levinson told the judge. "Look where the press is coming from. It's coming from the tools of Wall Street."
The credit rating companies do have a certain credibility problem.
Still, Klein is right in fretting about Stockton's long-term pension obligations and what they might mean to the city's financial health after bankruptcy. Nobody in city government years ago seemed to give much thought to those obligations as they were granting the benefits. It's time someone did.

Private travel is not so private

Last week the California Department of Motor Vehicles held a hearing about rules for testing and operating driverless vehicles that are expected to be part of our Jetson's future. Oddly, much of the hearing was taken up with a discussion of privacy issues. There are worries "they" will know all about your movements.
That's a reasonable concern in our ever-less-private world.
But it turns out that's going on now. One in five new cars sold this year can disseminate information about where you're driving and how fast. It can even report the number of passengers in the vehicle and what's on the radio. Are they also capturing your phone calls? What restaurants you frequent? Whether you made a secret stop on the way home you don't want your spouse to know about?
You may own the car but the information you and your car are generating is claimed as the exclusive property of the car manufacturer. Our cars are becoming sophisticated data transmitters.
It's one thing to equip vehicles with "black boxes" that can be tapped for information about the moments before an accident. It is another matter for some company to constantly collect driving information without our knowledge and certainly without our consent.
A bill before the California Senate would allow consumers to see what data their car emits and to decide what, if any, information they want to share and with whom. Current law prohibits insurers from using data other than mileage to set rates and that protection is part of the bill offered by Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel.
The legislation, SB 994, pits auto manufactures against auto insurers. Fine, let them fight as long as the outcome is that consumers control the information generated by vehicles they bought and paid for.

Mayor Anthony Silva expands the police force ... sorta

Just when you think Stockton's mayor, Anthony Silva, can't do anything else to embarrass himself and the California city he purports to lead, he proves you wrong.
He's changed the locks on his City Hall office. He's made wild and unsubstantiated accusations against city administrators and workers. He's donned a gladiator helmet and waved a mace at the end of his State of the City address. He's gotten himself a mail-order ordination so he can perform weddings. In a bar one evening, according to people sitting at the next table,  he even offered to put a couple of young ladies on the animal control board, after making sure they knew he was the mayor (possibly the worst pick-up line ever). The list goes on and on.
Now comes the latest: Silva has purchased -- he says at his own expense -- police-like badges he hands out to members of his private security detail. He needs a security detail? What he needs is Xanax.
He goes into dangerous parts of the town, he said by way of explanation. Just how having his "detail" flash fake badges, even ones emblazoned with the words "Office of the Mayor," keeps him safe is a question for another day. The real question, one properly raised by the Stockton Police Department, is about the possibility of confusing the public about who really has police powers. Members of the mayor's posse, hangers-on who to trail Silva about (is this his security detail?) could misuse the badges, the SPD worries. We've already had at least one incident in which a member of Silva's group made demands while claiming to be speaking for the mayor.
The strange thing about information leaking out about the badges was not badges -- although that's certainly strange -- but Silva's reaction. Nefarious City Hall forces were out to get him again, he alleged. According to Silva, the badges were purchased with his own money and therefore releasing information about that under the state's Public Records Act was wrong.
Well, Mr. Mayor, not really. By putting "Office of the Mayor," this elected city official is involving the city. What if a member of his "security detail" flashing one of these badges did something that got the city sued? Is Silva prepared to indemnify the city against that? Doubtful. And just who are the members of his security detail?  Are they being paid?  By whom? Is the mayor next going to dress members of his entourage in police-like uniforms?
Then there is the matter of opinions from the state Attorney General's Office saying that handing out police-like badges to the public violates the law. That inconvenience seems to trouble the mayor not a whit.
If the mayor feels the need for protection, say while visiting a dangerous part of town, it would not be unreasonable to ask the city police department to provide it. Previous mayors have.
What's not reasonable is for the mayor to form his own police force. It is both an affront to city police and a potential danger to the public.

Putting the bite on taxpayers

The board of the San Joaquin County Mosquito and Vector Control District has voted to keep biting taxpayers.
With 10 of the 11 board members voting, the district trustees voted 5-5 Monday to keep giving members the same health insurance package provided the district's full-time workers (the tie vote allows the benefit package to continue). Oh, and board members also will keep their $100 per meeting stipend.
Not bad for volunteer, part-time work.
To be fair, not all board members participate in the district's health insurance program. But clearly some trustees feel they have it coming and at least one, Michael Manna, called it "sad" that members of the media showed up at Monday's meeting to cover the vote.
Why, the district is trying to protect citizens from West Nile virus, Manna said, and that's what the press should be writing about.
The statement was a classic deflection tactic. Nobody is suggesting fighting mosquitoes and the diseases they carry isn't important. The media have reported those efforts widely, including a report that just this week county health officials had found the first bird infected with the West Nile virus this season.
What is being suggested by the San Joaquin Taxpayer's Association is that mosquito district trustees shouldn't be tapping county taxpayers for their health insurance. The benefit also has drawn the ire of the county grand jury.
Former Stockton Councilman Dale Fritchen noted that City Council members don't receive health care benefits for their service even though they have much greater responsibilities than the mosquito district trustees.
That brought a response from trustee Jay Colombini who said the taxpayers' group should be going after examples of egregious waste rather than the district "where we're actually doing our job and have a reserve."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves," Colombini said.
Who should be ashamed?
Was Colombini really suggesting mosquito board trustees are entitled since the district somehow didn't face the problems faced by the City of Stockton?
Talk about a deflection tactic.
 "At this agency, service has morphed into a sense of entitlement," Renison complained.
That brought an angry response from trustee Francis Groen who said Renison's rhetoric was "totally vicious (and) wrong."
Actually, the only thing wrong with Renison's statement was it's scope. A "sense of entitlement" infects far too many elected officials who enter office with the best of intentions but, over time, let good intentions mutate into prerogatives.

Sign of Louisiana times

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, alleged-to-be Republican moderate and presidential wannabe, needs to get thicker skin.
His state, under the guise of trademark violation, has sued the left-leaning group MoveOn.org for, get this, a billboard the policy group has plastered on Interstate 10 coming into the state capital, Baton Rouge.
What does it say?

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal

"LOU!SIANA/Pick your passion! But hope you don't love your health. Gov. Jindal's denying Medicaid to 242,000 people."
MoveOn and Jindal have been in a pitched battle for months over the governor's opposition to opting into the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Jindal argues that while the cost is covered by the federal government in the short-term, those costs long-term will shift to the state and be too burdensome.
It's a bogus, take-that President Obama argument used by a number of the 24 states who've refused the federal money for Medicaid expansion. Nine of the 24 are in the South.
That nonsensical denial of health care to a quarter-million Louisiana residents resulted in MoveOn's take-that Jindal billboard. It parodies the state's tourism logo and motto.
Jindal's front man on the anti-billboard suit, Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne says that's not right.

Louisiana Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne

"We have invested millions of dollars in identifying the Louisiana: Pick Your Passion brand with all that is good about Louisiana. No group should be allowed to use the brand for its own purposes, especially if it is for partisan political posturing."
Oh, and in an attempt to distance Jindal from the suit, Dardenne added, "We own the mark and its use is under the direction of my office, not the Office of the Governor."
Nice try, Jay. Most of the country calls political parody protected free speech.
Maybe Louisiana should change the moniker to "Pick your poison." Perhaps the state should spend the money wasted on this suit and the millions wasted on its ad campaign to cover the hundreds of thousands of its citizens who need health insurance. And maybe, just maybe, Louisiana officials could reconsider who is really causing the state "irreparable harm, injury and damages," claims they make against MoveOn in court documents.
One last thing: Dardenne is a candidate for governor next year. Is he worried his name could one day replace Jindal's on the billboard?

SUSD taken for a ride?

Stockton Unified Superintendent Steve Lowder describes the purchase of 31 special education buses as a "no-brainer." After all, the district only paid $2 million and SUSD pays Storer Transportation $3 million a year to run its routes busing special education students.
Three take-away two is pretty simple math. A no-brainer, if you will.
So why then do the buses sit unused in the district maintenance yard on Sanguinetti Lane?
It turns out the math isn't nearly that simple. Buying the buses is just the initial cost. Then you have to maintain them, insure them, fuel them and hire drivers for them. Those on-going costs have Michele Huntoon, SUSD's new chief business officer, questioning whether the promised savings are all that much. Or exist at all.
District trustees sure must have liked the estimated $700,000 annual savings. They voted 7-0 to buy the buses. Curiously, now that the numbers have gotten a little soft the memory of the vote by one trustee, board President Kathleen Garcia, has gotten a little fuzzy.
"If we spent money on all that, we ought to have our heads examined," she told a Record reporter. "I just don't remember it."
Trustees David Varela and Steve Smith made and seconded the motion to buy the buses respectively, according to the meeting minutes. They didn't return Record calls for comment on Friday.
All $2 million may not be lost, even if not one of the buses picks up one student. Lowder says maybe SUSD can lease
them to another agency or sell them. Maybe.

Losing the initiative

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed has given up his push for public employee pension reform. For now.
Reed and his allies called it quits Friday after a judge rejected Reed's challenge to the language describing the measure for the purposes of signature collection.
Proponents now have their sights set on the 2016 election cycle, the Democratic mayor said in a statement.

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed

The continued reliance on the initiative process is bad in that it has overwhelmingly been subverted by moneyed special interests. Not that Reed and his allies are all that moneyed. It is estimated it would take about $2 million to gather the necessary signatures to get his proposal before the voters. He has about $200,000.
What is good about Reed's proposal, though, is that it keeps the issue before the public. Public pensions can't be sustained in their current form, Reed argues. He's correct and everyone acknowledges it save public employee unions who see pension reform not only as a challenge to their members' pocketbooks but also their power.
What Reed proposed was giving government agencies, under certain circumstances, the power to freeze accrued retirement benefits and reduce them in the future. Once promised, some case law says, pension benefits can't be cut without an offsetting benefit.
Of course, one offsetting benefit might be having a pension at all. Many employees in the private sector have seen their defined-benefit pensions frozen, and replaced -- if at all -- by the much more iffy defined-contribution plans such as 401k accounts. That shifts responsibility to employees not always equipped to handle the nuances of volatile equities and bond markets.
Simply throwing the current defined-benefit system out is unlikely. Modifying the current system, however, is not only likely, but necessary. The unsustainability of the current system is without question. Unfunded pension liabilities are strangling government budgets. One of the major factors underlying Stockton's bankruptcy filing was the reality that the California city faced employee pension obligations it could not meet.
However, pension reform should come through legislation, not the ballot box. Too often reform proposals passed through the initiative process  are too simplistic to work and too unfair to those involved. Reform should be a transparent, well-thought-out process.
Reed's proposal isn't. His insistence on reform is.

No drilling in the Delta ... for now

Did you ever notice that when a court issues a ruling the losing side often refuses to comment saying they hadn't received the court's formal opinion or that the ruling is under study? More likely, the losers just need time to lick their wounds.
That would seem to be the case with the state Department of Water Resources. Thursday a state appeals court ruled the state may not willy-nilly access private land in the Delta. That access is needed for studies relating to Gov. Jerry Brown's dream of boring a pair of giant tunnels under the estuary. Those tunnels would essentially bypass the fragile Delta, carrying a major source of freshwater south so it can be dumped into canals to quench the thirst of south Valley farmers and south state residents.
In court papers state officials have warned denying access to the land could drive up the cost of the tunnels, estimated at $14.5 billion. It could even jeopardize the project. We can only hope the latter is true.
The 2-1 ruling from the 3rd District Court of Appeal said state access to the land amounted to a "taking" of property under the law. Landowners, the court said, were entitled to formal eminent domain proceedings, including the right to have a jury determine just compensation.
State officials sought access to do soil studies. They want to punch 6-inch holes up to 200 feet deep. Afterward the holes would be filled with grout.
Many Delta landowners opposed the studies and not just because drilling the holes would be an inconvenience to them and that the studies further paved the way for the actual tunnel. They simply oppose the tunnels, reasoning that tapping the Delta's major water source before it enters the estuary threatens their land, their water supply and the environmental stability of the whole system.
These are not trivial concerns.
The DCA's ruling does not end the matter. The state likely will pursue eminent domain proceeding, an effort that was started then dropped earlier. Just as likely is the continued opposition by some 150 Delta landowners of the 240 parcels involved.
Sometime before the state's next move we can expect DWR officials to again rationalize why they think a Delta by-pass system that produces no new water sources and no new water storage is such a good idea.

Something to chew on

In yet another sign the economy is improving -- at least for the newly toothless -- the Tooth Fairies of the nation were 44.6 percent more generous last year than just one year earlier.
That sad news for American parents was gleaned from the annual poll by the national dental insurance company, Delta Dental. The company has been tracking Tooth Fairy payouts since 1998 when a single tooth netted a kid about $1.25. The going rate in 2013, the poll found, was $3.50.
The 44.6 percent increase tooth losers enjoyed last year was better than the hefty 29.6 percent return investors in the S&P 500 got.

Stockton's taggers are sewer rats

This is written at the risk of giving the perpetrators the very attention they seek, but taggers -- they like to think of themselves as artists -- continue to turn Stockton into a sewer.
Of course, with all the crime and money problems this Central Valley city has, the government's efforts in dealing with graffiti seem to fall somewhere between catching jaywalkers and ticketing drivers who make rolling stops.
In reality, the city has an active and aggressive graffiti program, the idea being that you jump on the problem quickly and consistently (information: stocktongov.com/government/departments/police/psGraf.html). You make sure taggers learn that the city has more gallons of paint than they have and that the city has the will to use it.
But because the problem is so pervasive, it often feels like we've given up. A ride along Interstate 5 through Stockton is a case in point. The ongoing $122 million, eight-mile improvement project includes the construction of hundreds of yards of sound walls, but as fast as those walls go up, they are hit by taggers (the accompanying photos were taken Wednesday on northbound I-5 between March and Hammer lanes).
There is an obvious effort to paint over the tagging, but the damage is done. The over-painting rarely matches and sometimes covers up intricate designs built into the masonry. To those in the 130,000 vehicles that use this part of the interstate daily, it must appear that that civic pride isn't a high priority.
It's not just Interstate 5. Drivers southbound on Highway 99 at Farmington Road last Sunday would have seen that taggers had essentially covered a large state traffic sign, blotting out important road information. Cleanup crews reacted quickly and by Wednesday there was little evidence of the tagging.
Graffiti is not new. Decades-old graffiti can be found at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and millennia-old graffiti can be found inside the great pyramids at Giza. That means the problem, like the nincompoops who create it, won't go away. But neither should the effort to stop this vandalism go away.
Still, it would be refreshing to see a few taggers give up their weekends and after school hours cleaning up the messes they've created. There are penalties -- loss of driving privileges, fines, jail and the like -- but since young people are the usual perps, the public really can't tell whether those responsible are being held accountable.
There is a school of thought that holds that what white collar criminals fear most is public humiliation. Not jail. Not fines. Humiliation. Perhaps it's time to try that on taggers, their age notwithstanding.

Look no hands ... or privacy

Here's something to make your heart flutter: By the end of the decade there could be driverless cars prowling California's streets and highways. Not that there don't seem to be a lot of cars on autopilot now.
By the end of the year the Department of Motor Vehicles must finalize regulations for the broad use of  driverless cars. The department is scrambling to come up with rules telling companies what they must do to test their technology on public roads ... before the public gets its hands -- if that's the right term here -- on such vehicles.

Testing the driverless technology

Tuesday the DMV held its first public hearing on how to regulate the public's use of the technology. What was the focus of much of the hearing? Preventing rolling stops? Slowing down speeders? Whether a drunken owner of such a car could climb aboard, free to press a few buttons telling the car to head for home?
Nope. Privacy?
State lawmakers already have decreed driverless cars must be able to log operational records, data that could be mined to reconstruct what happened in the event of an accident. Privacy advocates want to make sure technology companies can't mine a vehicle's data to track our movements.
Consumers have reason to be concerned given that practically every keystroke a computer user makes while on the Internet already is quietly grabbed by some company -- or government agency -- for whatever use they want. That "location services" function on your smartphone? It isn't there to help find you if you get lost on the way to the doughnut shop.
Google, according to testimony Tuesday, fought attempts to add privacy guarantees when the company pushed legislation two years ago for driverless vehicle testing and public operation. You're not paying attention if you think Google is just a company that wants to help you find gardening tips on the Internet.
It's not hard to imagine riding along in one of these Jetson-esque vehicles, passing a shopping mall only to be bombarded inside the car with advertising from nearby stores. We don't need our cars telling us we need a new pair of Dockers or what the special is as the restaurant we're approaching.
Obviously we want DMV regulations making this new technology as safe as possible. We also want rules that make all of us as safe as possible from this technology.

Healing an unhealthy system

Unfunded health benefits for current and future California state workers are expected to cost $64.6 billion over the next 30 years, state Controller John Chiang said last week.
That estimate is based on June 30, 2013 figures that are not adjusted for inflation. That estimate also is $730 million higher than it was just 12 months earlier.
Clearly this -- not unlike the unfunded employee benefit costs facing many California cities, including Stockton -- is a ticking time bomb.


California Controller John Chiang

For the state there is an answer, Chiang believes. He proposes a painful plan that would fully pay the costs within five years. He would add higher payments on top of what the state shells out of its general fund to cover current bills: $220 million in the coming fiscal year growing in steps to $1.37 billion in fiscal 2018-19.
Is this the answer? The proper question is whether we can afford to wait to start seeking a realistic solution.
Today the state has $1.8 billion in the budget to pay for retiree health benefits. That money goes out the door as fast as it comes in. It only pays for medical and dental bills as they come due with nothing -- zero -- set aside for future obligations. You can liken that to making minimum credit card payments while continuing to pull out the plastic for new charges.
Chiang's five-year plan would be enormously painful in the short term but save taxpayers billions -- and in all likelihood save the system for state workers -- in the long run.
Chiang has proposed a solution. It now falls to lawmakers and the governor to start working on the problem.

Shaking up funding

Northern California was rocked by temblor 50 miles off the coast of Eureka about 10:20 p.m. Sunday.
The shaker, 6.9 on the Richter scale, was strong enough to have done considerable damage had it come at another place and not so far under the ocean floor. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake centered near Santa Cruz killed 63, injured 3,757 and did an estimated $6 billion damage. It had a magnitude of 6.9.

The S.F. Bay Bridge damaged in 1989 earthquake.

Luckily on Sunday there were no reports of damage in Eureka, a city of 27,000 -- although hundreds of calls flooded in to authorities -- and geologists said there was no danger of a tsunami.
Earthquakes are common in California. In fact, of the 61 temblors reported worldwide Sunday by the U.S. Geological Survey with a magnitude of 2.5 or greater, 26 were near Eureka. That's simply life along the San Andreas Fault, the best known of the many fault lines lacing California. State residents are schooled to expect the unexpected, and until recently the largely unpredictable.
Last fall, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation making California the first state to get an earthquake early warning system. For years scientists have been working on a way to give the public a warning. They think they've got it.
The system is designed to detect the first strong pulse of an earthquake, a pulse that carries information about its size. That first pulse moves more quickly than the slower waves that follow and that do the most damage. The idea is to get the word out quickly, giving maybe a minute warning.
That may not sound like much, but a minute could give many people time to take cover, move away from overhead objects or even evacuate a building. The further you are from a quake's epicenter, the more warning time you'll have.
The California system will cost about $80 million to build and run for five years. The catch: legislation signed by the governor does not provide funding. Instead, the state's Office of Emergency Services was ordered to find possible funding sources by January 2016 and to develop standards of a statewide system.
No one can reasonably expect a warning system to
be thrown together overnight, even though California scientists have successfully run a test version for two years.
But neither can we reasonably expect real progress on this system without funding. Simply telling the OES to find the money isn't good enough.

Stockton's new neighbor

Go ahead. Dare you. Just try to find out what Google plans for the four-story structure the tech company has built aboard a barge now tied up at the Port of Stockton. Google it if you like.
You won't find much.

The Google barge before being sent to Stockton.

For their part, local officials for days denied even talking to Google officials when they were asked about rumors the company barge might find its way to Stockton. When official word finally came, port officials had enough time to come up with a "Welcome to Stockton" banner. Obviously this was a complete surprise to local officials.
And Google?
Just 48 words total, including: "It’s been a busy six months for our barge and it’s grown tired of all the attention, so we are moving it to Stockton where it can have a break, enjoy the city’s delicious asparagus and warmer climate, and get a bit of rest before its next chapter.”
And the next chapter?

In the past, Google has said it intends the barge to be a showcase for Google products.

Feel free to speculate what that means. Google brain implants? A death ray? An underwater camera project to give us "street views" of the ocean? Tracking Internet activity for the NSA?

Remember the 1970s and Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer, a huge vessel built, the billionaire said, to pluck manganese nodules from the ocean floor? It turned out it was built at the behest of the CIA to pluck a sunken Soviet submarine from 16,500 feet of water.

You don't suppose ...?

 

 

'No greater freedom'

Wayne LaPierre, who constantly figures out how to give hyperbole a bad name, out did himself Thursday.


Wayne LaPierre

The executive vice president and mouthpiece-in-chief of the National Rifle Association, speaking Thursday to a receptive audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, took aim at his usual targets, politicians and the media. He found conspiracies behind every tree. He vowed the NRA "will not go quietly into the night."
But then ...
"In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere you look, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want," LaPierre opined.
Really? No greater freedom.
How about the freedom to get up and publicly say what you want, no matter how asinine? He certainly proved he had that right.

An outbreak of ethics

California lawmakers are about to go all ethical on us.
Soon to be introduced is a fistful of bills to reform how they do business. To suggest the proposals will not change reality may be cynical, but it's also reality. Government isn't your high school civics class.
The latest outbreak of good-government hand-wringing springs from the public relations fallout of having two state senators putting themselves on indefinite leave -- some might reasonably call these paid vacations -- while they fight criminal charges. One, Rod Wright, having been found guilty in January of perjury for lying about where he lives, and the other, Ron Calderon, under federal indictment on 24 counts of corruption. Both are Democrats and both deny culpability.
Not that the Democrats have cornered the unsavory behavior market. Republican State Sen. Tom Berryhill of Twain Harte is challenging the finding of an administrative law judge that he illegally

coordinated with county Republican committees by steering campaign money to brother Bill Berryhill's Assembly campaign in 2008 (Bill Berryhill is out of public office having lost his race to represent the 5th Senate district -- essentially San Joaquin County -- to Cathleen Galgiani in 2012). In other words, Tom Berryhill was laundering money. It didn't happen, Tom Berryhill's attorneys say. Uh huh.
The reforms Democrats propose won't stop everything -- not the lying about living in the district you claim to represent, not the taking of money in exchange for votes, not the secretly shifting of campaign money -- but the legislation could plug a few holes. Among the things being proposed are:

• A ban on fundraisers at lobbyists' homes
• Lowering the current $440 limit on the value of gifts officials can receive from a single source
• Barring officials from receiving gift tickets to concerts, sporting events and other kinds of entertainment
• Increasing the frequency of campaign finance report filings

Not that these are bad ideas, but lawmakers always seem to cluck-cluck about reform after a few of them have been caught with their hands in the public cookie jar. And they wonder why public skepticism about their work for the public's good edges inexorably toward cynicism.
If the pols, be they in Sacramento or Washington, really want the public to believe they mean business about political reform, then they need to put teeth in their reforms. For example, if you're convicted of a felony, you're gone. If you're under felony indictment, you're gone at least until the matter is adjudicated, and if you've continued to receive your salary while on leave, every cent of it must be repaid -- from the point of indictment until conviction -- and then you're gone. If you're caught laundering campaign money every cent has to be repaid into the campaign fund of your opponent from your personal bank account.
It was Jess Unruh. the legendary California Assembly speaker, who gave a rather succinct political rule for his legislative colleagues' dealings with lobbyists. Said "Big Daddy" Unruh (this being a highly sanitized version): "If you can't drink their booze, take their money, sleep with their women and then vote against 'em, you don't belong in politics."
Those perhaps were simpler times and Unruh's rule perhaps naïve on its face, but if we could at least enjoy that level of political ethics it would be something.

Just doing his job

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a celebrity cop killer, the convicted murderer of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
Since the 1981 murder, Abu-Jamal has successfully petitioned to have his death sentence thrown out and transformed himself into a victim wronged by the criminal justice system rather than a predator lying in wait.

Debo P. Adegbile

Debo P. Adegbile, a voting rights expert and former director of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, on Wednesday became the latest victim of Abu-Jamal's crime. His nomination to become head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division was blocked when seven Senate Democrats joined Republicans to deny Adegbile the job because, opponents said, he once had helped represent a "cop killer." The nominee also was opposed by the Fraternal Order of Police.
The 47-year-old, a senior counsel the past year on the Senate Judiciary Committee, made what to some is the unforgivable mistake of helping Abu-Jamal's defense. In 2009, years after the conviction, Adegbile contributed to a court brief that argued that Abu-Jamal's jury was improperly instructed. A judge later ruled the appeal had merit.
Apparently some believe criminal defendants do not deserve legal representation, although that long ago became settled law. Further, some believe anyone who represents a defendant is no better than the suspect. In the eyes of some, that's especially true for anyone who would represent a convicted cop killer.
On this point, it might be helpful to remember a long-ago case involving unpopular suspects. At least one American believed those suspects deserved  defense nonetheless. That man was John Adams, one of the nation's founders and its second president.
In 1770 Adams risked infamy and even death by agreeing to defend British soldiers in what we remember today as the Boston Massacre. Adams, at the time a young attorney and outspoken critic of the British occupation, later confided to his diary that taking the case was "one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country. Judgment of death against those soldiers would have been as foul a stain upon this country as the executions of Quakers or witches, anciently."
In other words, Adams had a job to do and he did it. That's what defense attorneys -- like Adegbile -- do, even when the causes are unpopular. Perhaps especially when the causes are unpopular.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell opposed the nominee, saying, "Everyone deserves a fair trial and a zealous legal defense. And lawyers aren't personally responsible for the actions of their clients.
"But lawyers are responsible for their own actions. In this case, the nominee inserted his office in an effort to turn reality on its head, impugn honorable and selfless law enforcement officers, and glorify an unrepentant cop-killer," McConnell said.
Of course, McConnell's statement about Adegbile's role turns facts on its head.

Inequality for most

The signs of economic recovery are all around us, including in San Joaquin County where the Great Recession took a huge toll in jobs and property values. Foreclosures are well off their Great Recession peak; unemployment remains high but not at the Depression-era level it reached in some areas; cars are selling, restaurants have customers and mall parking lots are full. All is well, or so it would seem.
But a troubling report from the Economic Policy Institute (http://www.epi.org/publication/unequal-states/) shines a disturbing light on what more and more is capturing the attention of economists, policy makers and the media: income inequality.
Of course, a certain political cohort dismisses talk about the growing distance between the haves and have-nots. Those who raise the specter of income inequality are simply engaging in class warfare, they argue. Keep it up, these apologists contend, and we'll kill the goose that lays the golden egg. By goose they mean the much vaulted "job creators" and by golden egg they mean higher incomes for all.
Except that the EPI study by economists Estella Sommeiller and Mark Price suggests all are not sharing in those higher incomes. Not by a long shot.
In California, between 1997 and 2007, average incomes grew by 31.5 percent, but drill down on that number as Sommeiller and Price did and you find that the top 1 percent of income earners captured 62.4 percent of that total income growth. In that same period, incomes for the top 1 percent increased by nearly 192 percent. For everyone else in California the increase was just over 13 percent.
Who are the 1 percenters? In California they have an average income of more than $1.2 million per year, nearly 27 times greater than the average income of the bottom 99 percent ($45,589).
Income disparity in this state now pushes toward highs not seen since the Depression (Not the Great Recession. The Depression).
And it's not just in California. The pattern Sommeiller and Price found here is repeated across the nation.
Pooh-poohing this reality, dismissing it as class warfare promoted for political purposes, is to ignore what's happening -- and what's happening is the middle class is shrinking. Seventy percent of the nation's economy is driven by consumer spending. If there are fewer consumers to spend,  economic vitality becomes increasingly anemic.
Only a radical few suggest massive income redistribution. But only the myopic can't see the danger of letting this divide increase.

Not so super majority

The Democrats no longer enjoy a super-majority in the California Legislature. Sen. Ron Calderon has announced he will take an indefinite leave of absence while he deals with a 24-count federal indictment accusing him of taking bribes.


Ron Calderon

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, last week gave Calderon until Monday to either take a leave of absence, resign or face expulsion. Since Calderon will be able to keep drawing his $95,291 a year salary, the choice no doubt was pretty easy from Calderon's viewpoint (he will not get his $163 tax-free per diem during his leave). From the taxpayers' point of view, this arrangement is another indication of the perversion of the Golden Rule that pervades politics, as in, he who has the gold makes the rules.
Calderon is but the latest Sacramento pol to do a $95,291 number on taxpayers. Last week another Democratic senator, Rod Wright of Inglewood, took a paid leave to fight his conviction on eight felony counts stemming from lying about his residence.
One good thing about this: The loss the Democrats' super-majority threshold means they will have to deal with the Republicans and can no longer pass new taxes, advance ballot measures or enact immediately effective "urgency" bills without at least some cooperation across the aisle.

Historical oversight

“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.”

That was the reasonable – although historically inaccurate -- assertion made by Secretary of State John Kerry on Face the Nation this morning. He made a similar statement on NBC’s Meet the Press as part of the White House campaign to show Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that we’re really, really mad about the possibility he’s send troops into the Ukraine.



Kerry’s declaration, made with a straight face, no doubt put one of those scary KBGesque smirks on Putin’s face. The statement, especially from Kerry, should have made Americans wince.

It was Kerry who became a spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans against the War, after returning from Vietnam, where he’d earned a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. He appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1971.

“In our opinion and from our experience,” he told the senators then, “there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.”

John Kerry in 1971 when right and wrong seemed clearer.

In other words, our reasons for being in Vietnam were trumped up. Not that Vietnam was this nation’s last invasion based on trumped up claims. There also was our deadly and costly adventure in Iraq, the future consequences of which remain to play out.

Kerry was right to chide Putin over the developing crisis in the Ukraine. He was wrong to imply by omission that other countries are the only ones that have made such blunders.“You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests,” he told David Gregory on Meet the Press.

The history of international relations indicates otherwise, including the U.S. history Kerry chose to ignore on Sunday.

Mr. Mayor, really?

It's all a misunderstanding, blown out of proportion by the media.
That's the standard explanation by Stockton (CA) Mayor Anthony Silva for any misstep he makes. He made a couple Feb. 27 when he went to Lincoln Unified's Lincoln Elementary School to participate in the annual Rotary Read-In.

Anthony Silva at the end of his 2013 State of the City address

Each year for 23 years, hundreds of business, community and political leaders have participated in the Read-In. Participants show up at area elementary schools to read books to classes of giddy kids, answer a few questions and leave the book behind for the school library.
It's a lot of fun for the readers -- and the kids always seem to enjoy being able to delay doing math or their own reading. Fun and innocent. Until Thursday.
It turns out, Silva didn't bother reading to the kiddos. Instead he told his "life story," he said, which we presume he thought would be much more interesting to a gaggle of third- and fifth-graders than anything Dr. Seuss may have written. And maybe it was. But was it appropriate for the mayor to tell the youngsters about his anti-condom vote as a student member of the Lincoln Unified board decades before? Was it appropriate for him to describe the wound a teacher suffered in the 1989 Cleveland Elementary School massacre as being "large enough to place a video camera inside."?
It's all been blown out of proportion, Silva said, especially by The Record. But Lincoln School Principal Scott Tatum apparently felt disturbed enough about it to send explanatory emails out the next day to parents of the students visited by Silva. Even for Silva, it would have been a stretch to suggest Tatum lacks a sense of proportionality (or propriety).
Silva has a storied track record when it comes to off-the-cuff remarks, although he defends his condom comments as "a passing reference and age appropriate." He also said he "will refrain from using that word again in my future speeches."
Good idea, Mr. Mayor, especially at elementary schools.

 

For Jerry Brown, it's his to lose

To the surprise of absolutely no one this side of the Crab Nebula, California Gov. Jerry Brown will seek a fourth term as governor.
Filing his reelection papers Friday, Brown is without Democratic opposition. That also isn't surprising given his popularity among voters -- a 60 percent approval rating in a January poll by the Public Policy Institute of California -- and the fact that he's sitting on an $17 million campaign war chest that tends to dissuade challengers.

California Gov. Jerry Brown

For that matter, Brown isn't facing much Republican opposition either. Oh, at least two wannabes say they want his job, but come on ...
There's Neel Kashkari, an Ohio born investment banker and former Treasury Department official who helped administer the bank bailout. He campaigns on pledges to create jobs and improve schools, but then who doesn't promise that?
Well, there is one guy who doesn't. He's Assemblyman Tim Donnelly of Hesperia, a tea party gun rights advocate who wants Brown's job. He has one thing going for him: opposition to Brown's dream of twin tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. His real claim to fame, however, is being caught trying to board an airliner with a loaded handgun. He alleges he forgot he was packing, somewhat troubling for any gun owner. Such forgetfulness also is troubling for anyone who wants to oversee the multi-billion dollar
state budget.
Politics being politics, there are no sure things although Brown comes close. Still it would be nice to see the Republicans field a candidate with more name recognition than Kashkari (but with his smarts) and less wacko-challenged than Donnelly.