Author: SacBee — Opinion

Fred Harrold

Dying is a lonely process. No one can hold your hand and go with you. Close friends are often embarrassed to see you, or they don’t know what to say. After about five years as a hospice volunteer, I have found helping people in their last days to be uplifting. It always gives me a renewed sense of worth and makes my day a little brighter.

In my experience I have found that most people die as they have lived. Private people remain private; little wisdom is gained in the final moments of one’s life. Profound statements or words of unusual perception are seldom spoken. Often patients can’t speak at all, yet it is believed that they remain aware of voices and responsive to touch, so while there may not be verbal closure at the moment of death, there may be touching, gentle moments.

There is one patient I will never forget. She was a person I guessed to be in her early 70s. She was living, if it could be called that, in a residential housing facility in a suburb of Sacramento. When I entered her small room off a narrow hallway, I was struck by two things: the indifference of the care-giver who met me and the bleakness of her room.

With shades drawn the room was in semi-darkness; besides the bed and bedside table, the only other furniture was a cot piled high with linens and blankets. No pictures on the walls, no bedside photos of family, no postcards, nothing to break the cheerlessness of the room. A cheap set of drawers stood against one wall; on it a small lamp, giving out a faint yellow glow, sat alongside a pile of old papers and unread, outdated periodicals.

The woman was lying still and staring at the ceiling, as she had been doing most the day, rousing only for meals. Her face had a nice bone structure indicating she had been pretty in her youth, but it had become lined and drawn, aged by weather, hard work and the struggle to survive.

When I introduced myself, she apologized for having to speak slowly and barely above a whisper.

As I tried to draw her out, she became fully awake and we talked of a life devoid of family, warmth or joy. She had done manual labor in her youth and had had an unhappy home life as an adult. When she became ill she came to Sacramento to be near family but received little support. This all was matter-of-factly said, with no hint of self-pity or complaint.

Despite her lack of education or social training, she had a quiet grace and dignity that caught me off-guard. I got the feeling that although kindness and caring was seldom shown her, she was a lady in the true meaning of the word. I asked if she would like me to read to her. She thought that would be nice, and I could tell by her startled expression she had rarely, if ever, had someone offer her a caring question.

The following week, I took a small book called “The Snow Goose.” It is a beautiful story of a man and his companion, a snow goose he had nursed back to health. It took only an hour to read, and while I read she lay still, barely moving. I thought she might have dropped off to sleep, so I asked her if I should continue. She murmured, “Please go on.”

After finishing the story we discussed it briefly, and I was surprised to find she had listened to every word and remembered it in some detail. The more we talked, the more I realized this downtrodden, exhausted lady had an inner grace and spirit that seemed to actually glow as we talked, and light up the room with a warmth and a spiritual feeling that filled me with awe.

On my next visit a week later, I moved a bouquet of flowers I had sent a few days earlier to her bedside table so she could better see them. I noticed the frown on her face seemed to relax a little, as if she had been waiting for me – perhaps it was the flowers. She seemed unusually quiet and when I asked her a question, it took greater effort for her just to whisper something too faint to understand.

So we just sat there, quietly holding hands. After a short while, as she looked at me with gentle eyes that I’ll never forget, I saw a small soaplike bubble appear out of one of her nostrils. As I gently wiped it away, another appeared from between her lips. I thought it odd until I realized she had stopped breathing and with elegant grace, peacefully and so gently, she had left the room.

A little overcome, I just couldn’t leave without doing something to show the deep respect I had for her. So I brushed her hair, positioned her hands on her chest, straightened her nightgown, smoothed the blankets and left her with some degree of the dignity she deserved. I wish now I had thought to place some flowers in her hands.

A line from one of my favorite poems by Kahlil Gibran crossed my mind. It went, “… And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered.”

I felt privileged to have been witness to such inner ethereal beauty and to have been part of such a powerful, spiritual event.

The $250 million that California is about to save by slashing vital rehabilitation programs for prisoners will cost us many times that much money.

The money we think we’re saving will cost us many times over in more crime, more drug abuse and ruined lives.

Rehabilitation and alternative programs can save lives. I know. One of them saved mine.

I grew up in Boyle Heights, a rough section of East Los Angeles, in the 1980s. Poverty, gangs, drugs and violence plagued our community. But I was lucky enough to stay out of most of it – until one night, at age 19, I did something stupid.

A friend and I were attacked by a group of teens. In the struggle, I fired a shot from a handgun, scattering the crowd but striking one of the assailants in the forearm. Luckily, he was not seriously hurt. My friend and I also escaped with only minor injuries.

But I was charged with a felony. My friends urged me to fight the charges on grounds of self-defense. Instead, I took responsibility for my action. I pleaded guilty to felony assault with a deadly weapon.

I was fortunate. Because I had no criminal convictions and with numerous letters of support from former teachers and mentors, the judge gave me a lenient sentence: six months in county jail followed by five years’ probation. I was accepted into an alternative work-furlough program that allowed me to get a job at an attorney’s office during the day. I spent my nights and weekends in a South Los Angeles halfway house.

Two months after completing my sentence, I was given parole. This allowed me to leave Los Angeles and resume my education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I graduated with a degree in psychology.

I went on to receive a master’s degree in public affairs from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

Since that incident in 1993, I’ve worked and volunteered at nearly a dozen nonprofit organizations. I have mentored at-risk youths, built affordable housing and organized low-income families.

For the most part, I have dedicated my life to remedying the economic situations that lead to youth violence.

Chances are none of this would have happened if that judge and parole board hadn’t believed in me. They allowed me to participate in the work-furlough program and let me out on parole to continue my studies.

We know that rehabilitation programs work. A study in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency found that graduates of such programs are less likely to return to a life of crime. The 2000 study of 33 educational, vocational and work programs for prisoners found that participants were more than 20 percent less likely to reoffend than non-participants. Studies of prison drug-treatment programs have documented similar success rates.

Every prisoner who becomes a productive citizen through rehabilitation programs translates to saved tax dollars and innocent lives saved from crime victimization.

But even before the new cuts, we still don’t have nearly enough of these programs.

For example, a 2009 grand jury report on California State Prison, Solano, found “a long list of inmates waiting” to get into Prison Industry Authority programs that provide work experience. These prisoners want help preparing for legitimate jobs, but aren’t receiving it. As a result, California prisoners have the highest recidivism rate in the nation: Seventy percent reoffend after leaving prison, more than twice the rate of New York.

And it will only get worse as these new cuts go forward. The few dollars we save today will be swamped by what these “savings” will force us to spend tomorrow on police, courts, prisons – and funerals for victims of violent crimes that might have been prevented if we hadn’t been so short-sighted.

A far-sighted rehabilitation program saved my life from ruin. Let’s save lives, not delude ourselves over false cost savings.

As you traipse through California’s national parks armed with only a camera or binoculars, don’t be shocked to run across a fellow visitor packing heat.

Up until Monday, firearms were basically banned from most national parks. Now, each state’s gun laws extend inside national parks within its borders. In California, that means it is perfectly legal to carry an unloaded firearm as long as it’s plainly visible, and for those with concealed weapon permits to tote them, loaded or unloaded.

It is a saddening change. It raises the risk of violence or accidents in places that are valued for their tranquillity. But now that it’s the law of the land, the National Park Service needs to put safety first and make sure the public is fully informed.

The gun rights lobby spent years pushing for the looser law, resorting to the old canard that more guns equal safer people. The Obama administration, to its discredit, went along as the price for passing credit card reform.

Guns are permitted in 373 of 392 parks, national seashores, recreation areas, and other Park Service sites (30 of them in California), including gift shops and restaurants run by private concessionaires. But it is still illegal to take weapons into designated “federal facilities,” including visitor centers, offices, or maintenance shops.

There could be even more confusion in the 30-plus national parks that cross state lines, because what is legal in one part of the park isn’t in another. For instance, on the Nevada side of Death Valley National Park, visitors will be able to openly carry loaded guns as well as unloaded ones, but not once they cross into California. In addition, concealed carry permits from Nevada aren’t valid in California, and vice versa.

The Park Service says the burden is on the public to know the gun laws in the park they’re visiting, though it plans to hand out fliers at entrances to larger parks and publish articles in park newspapers. Good. We welcome any effort to make this unfortunate transition as smooth and peaceful as possible.

One great achievement of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called the Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called the Power Elite. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in yourself, and the path upward from there was grooved in your favor.

Since then, we have opened up opportunities for women, African Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Latinos and many others. Moreover, we’ve changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hardworking.

Yet, as we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at society’s top, yet trust in elites has never been lower.

It’s not even clear that society is better led. Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago? Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before? Journalism used to be the preserve of working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars. Now it is the preserve of cultured analysts who file stories and hit the water bottles. Is the media overall more reputable now than it was then?

The meritocracy promise has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, the reputation lower.

Why has this happened? I can think of a few contributing factors.

First, the meritocracy is based on an overly narrow definition of talent. Our system rewards those who can amass technical knowledge. But this skill is only marginally related to the skill of being sensitive to context. We’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating.

Second, this new system has created new social chasms. In the old days, there were obviously big differences between people whose lives were defined by “The Philadelphia Story” and those who were defined by “The Grapes of Wrath.”

But if you ran the largest bank in Murfreesboro, Tenn., you probably lived in Murfreesboro. Now you live in Charlotte or New York City. You might have married a secretary. Now you marry another banker. You would have had similar lifestyle habits as other folks in town. Now the lifestyle patterns of the college-educated are different from the patterns in other classes. Social attitudes are different, too.

It could be that Americans actually feel less connected to their leadership class now than they did then, with good reason.

Third, leadership-class solidarity is weaker. The Protestant Establishment was inbred. On the other hand, those social connections placed informal limits on strife. Personal scandals were hushed up. Now members of the leadership class are engaged in a perpetual war. Each side seeks daily advantage in ways that poison the long-term reputations of all involved.

Fourth, time horizons have shrunk. If you were an old blue blood, your lineage traced back centuries and there was a good chance you’d hand your company down to members of your clan. That subtly encouraged long-term thinking.

Now people respond to ever-faster performance criteria – daily stock prices or tracking polls. This perversely encourages reckless behavior. To leave a mark today, leaders seek to hit home runs. President Bill Clinton tried to transform health care. President George W. Bush tried to transform the Middle East. President Barack Obama has tried to transform health care, energy and more.

There’s less emphasis on gradual change, more on big swings, producing more huge failures and uncertainty. Many Americans, not caught up on the romance of this sort of heroism, are terrified.

Fifth, society is too transparent. Since Watergate, we have tried to make government as open as possible. But as William Galston of the Brookings Institution jokes, government should sometimes be shrouded for the same reason that middle-aged people should be clothed. This isn’t Galston’s point, but I’d observe that the more government has become transparent, the less people trust it.

This isn’t to say we should return to the WASP ascendancy. That’s neither possible nor desirable. Rather, our system of promotion has grown some serious problems, which are more evident every day.

OK, the beast is starving. Now what? That’s the question confronting Republicans. But they’re refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.

For readers who don’t know what I’m talking about: Ever since Reagan, the GOP has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” But there has always been a political problem with this agenda.

Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts? The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea – propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol – was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait-and-switch.

Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year’s budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of Bush-era tax cuts (and Bush-era unfunded wars). And the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.

So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Barack Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.

Many progressives were deeply worried by this proposal, fearing that it would turn into a kind of Trojan horse – in particular, that the commission would end up reviving the long-standing Republican goal of gutting Social Security. But they needn’t have worried: Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted against legislation that would have created a commission with some actual power, and it is unlikely that anything meaningful will come from the much weaker commission Obama established by executive order.

Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.

In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: “I don’t think anybody’s gonna go back now and say, ‘Let’s abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid.’ ” What about Social Security? Five years ago the Bush administration proposed limiting future payments to upper- and middle-income workers, in effect means-testing retirement benefits.

But in December, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because “middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., GOP) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes.” (Hmm. Since when do conservatives openly admit that the GOP is the party of the affluent?) At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan – and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: In effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast.

Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.

President Obama finally reversed his above-the-fray stance on health care reform. Up until now, he left details of a bill up to the House and Senate, which after a year of debate have struggled to find common ground. The longer the wrangling has gone on, the more dissatisfied the public has become.

Obama published his own plan, eliminating special deals such as the so-called “Cornhusker kickback” for Nebraska, and taking elements from the already passed House and Senate bills. As he promised, Obama posted his proposal online 72 hours before a Thursday summit with congressional leaders (see www.whitehouse.gov/health-care-meeting/proposal).

While Americans justifiably are frustrated with the politicians, they still want action. A Feb. 8 Washington Post/ABC poll asked voters, “Do you think lawmakers in Washington should keep trying to pass a comprehensive health care reform plan, or should give up on comprehensive health care reform?” Sixty-three percent said, “Keep trying to pass.”

Thursday’s summit is a last-ditch attempt to build support among wavering Democrats and resisting Republicans, but Obama should leave no doubt that the time has come for action. No excuses.

The Democrats have large majorities in both houses (59 of 100 Senate seats; 233 of 435 House seats). The American people deserve an up or down vote. If the majority Democrats fail to make that happen, the blame rests squarely on them.

The elements outlined in Obama’s plan resonate with the public.

The most recent Newsweek poll (Feb. 17-18) shows strong support for:

• Creating a new insurance marketplace – the Exchange – that allows people without health insurance to compare plans and buy insurance at competitive rates: 81 percent.

• Requiring health insurance companies to cover anyone who applies, even if they have a pre-existing medical condition: 76 percent.

• Requiring most businesses to offer health insurance to employees, with tax incentives for small business owners to do so: 75 percent.

• Requiring that all Americans have health insurance, with the government providing financial help to those who can’t afford it: 59 percent.

• Preventing insurance companies from dropping coverage when people are sick: 59 percent.

A January Kaiser poll shows the popularity of other elements in the Obama plan:

• Expanding Medicaid to cover everyone with incomes under $29,000 a year for a family of four: 62 percent.

• Allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance through age 25: 60 percent.

Obama largely adopted the Senate’s approach to paying for the legislation, including a proposed increase in the Medicare payroll tax for individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and couples earning more than $250,000, and a tax on high-cost health care plans.

Responding to recent premium hikes by insurance companies (such as Anthem Blue Cross of California), Obama has added a proposal for new federal authority to block excessive rate increases.

Obama finally seems to understand that doing nothing, or futzing around for another year, is not an option. He has his plan. Now he has to go to the American people directly and campaign for it.

ANDY ALFARO Bee file, 2009
Light-rail riders in Sacramento might have to wait longer for fewer trains as Regional Transit lays off workers and trims service.

Publicly, most local transit officials applaud the billions of dollars in federal stimulus money that have gone to high-speed rail.

Privately, they question the government’s transit priorities in the current recession.

As federal and state investment in high-speed rail ramps up, local bus and light-rail systems are retrenching, cutting service and laying off workers. The public has signaled it wants high-speed rail, and elected officials are responding accordingly. But as the country invests in the future, it cannot ignore the present, specifically the dire situation facing local transit.

Sacramento Regional Transit is a case study of the crisis. Think about no buses or light rail in Sacramento County after 7 o’clock at night or no transit service at all on weekends. Prepare for longer waits at light-rail stations.

Instead of 15 minutes between trains, the wait might edge up to 20 or 30 minutes. Those are the kinds of service cuts RT officials must consider as the area’s largest public transit agency struggles with a third straight year of deep declines in revenue.

Sales tax receipts are 14 percent below what was projected when the budget year began. In addition, “Furlough Fridays” and unemployment have reduced fare box receipts.

Finally the state, reeling from its own budget crisis, has drastically cut support for transit. And though RT gets some funding from the federal government, including $22 million in stimulus money thus far, much of that money comes with strings attached. It must be used for capital expenditures, not for operations.

Coming together, big declines in sales taxes, fare box receipts and state support have left a gaping $16 million hole in RT’s $140 million annual budget. The transit agency must bridge this year’s shortfall by June 30. Next year it must cut another $20 million.

To absorb revenue shortfalls of that magnitude, RT is laying off people for the first time since the early 1980s. Sixty layoff notices have gone out already. An additional 240 people have received warnings to prepare for layoffs. The first phase of layoffs will affect administration – planners, clerical workers, managers, budget officers, customer service representatives. Most will be without a job by April.

The next phase of layoffs will involve operations. Workers who drive the buses and operate the light-rail system will be let go, along with mechanics and service personnel who maintain them. Those jobs will be gone by June. On March 8, RT’s board will meet to debate and hear public testimony about service cuts, which routes to eliminate or reduce. On March 20, the board will vote. In June, the service cuts will go into effect, stranding thousands.

The economy will not rebound in time to prevent the 60 layoffs already announced. The 240 additional layoffs and accompanying service cuts can be reduced only if the state or the federal government provides more operating cash.

Local transit operators got some hope when the state Senate voted last week to restore $300 million to transit that the governor had proposed to eliminate. If the governor rejects the Senate plan, RT’s future will be even more precarious.

This week will determine the shape of American politics for the next three years.

No, that’s not one of those journalistic exaggerations intended to catch your attention, although I hope it did. It’s an accurate description of the stakes at the health care summit President Barack Obama has called for Thursday.

The issue is whether the summit proves to be the turning point in a political year that, at the moment, is moving decisively in the Republicans’ direction. If the summit fails to shake things up and does not lead to the passage of a comprehensive health care bill, Democrats and Obama are in for a miserable time for the rest of his term.

Republicans know this and are doing all they can to undermine, discount, discredit and back away from the encounter.

They are insisting, as House Minority Leader John Boehner has said, that the only test of Democratic seriousness is whether they are willing to “scrap” the health care bills that have already passed and “start over.” Doing anything else is dismissed as a “backroom deal.” Of course it’s absurd to say that the House and the Senate, having worked for a year to pass quite similar bills, should now give up. But Boehner knows what he’s doing: He wants the Democrats to give up on health care because doing so would be the surest way to prove that they lack the guts and competence to govern.

Republicans hate this summit because if it works, it will keep this from happening, and also because it calls many bluffs at once.

Above all, Obama is trying to force the Republicans to put their own health care ideas on the table. As soon as this happens, the debate is no longer about the flaws, real and imagined, in the Democratic proposals. It becomes a choice between what the Democrats want to do and what the Republicans want to do. That’s a fair fight.

Obama also wants to cut through the shibboleths and clichés of conventional Washington punditry. There is much establishment mourning over the failure of “bipartisanship” and the rise of political “polarization.” Obama is saying: Look – he always says “look” when he’s impatient – Democrats have already included a lot of Republican suggestions in these health reform bills, and here they are. What more do you want? If the only way to get Republican votes is for moderate and liberal Democrats to enact conservative Republican ideas into law, that’s not bipartisanship. That’s capitulation. Can’t you see that? You want transparency? Let’s do this all out in the open. I’ll post our plan, you post yours. Everyone can have a look.

No wonder Republican leaders are grumpy. The summit will call attention to the elephant in the room that the most insipid commentary on the loss of bipartisanship pretends isn’t there: There is no bipartisanship because Republicans have become an almost uniformly conservative party.

The GOP opposes – yes, on principle – many of the forms of government action that earlier generations of moderate and liberal Republicans were willing to support. The current crop of Republicans would never give as many votes to Medicare as the Republican Party of the 1960s was willing to throw Lyndon Johnson’s way.

To say that the one legitimate way to pass bills is to get a lot of Republicans to vote for them is to insist that election results don’t matter and that only conservative legislation will ever get through Congress. All the Republicans have to do is be stubborn and yell a lot about being “excluded.” I don’t blame the Republicans for any of this. They have a right to be as conservative as they want to be. They have both substantive and political reasons for blocking health care reform. So far, the strategy has worked. Why should they do anything differently? But I do blame those who pretend to be nonpartisan or “objective” for falling for this ploy.

And that’s whose bluff Obama is really calling with this summit.

He’s saying: Please, establishment media, look honestly at what the Republicans are doing. Instead of offering lectures about bipartisanship or nostalgia for some peaceable Washington kingdom, look at the substance of our respective proposals and how they match up against the problems we’re trying to solve.

Oh, and there’s also this: He’s telling Democrats they can get things done, or they can crawl away timidly into the darkness of self-defeat.

Like every department, Sacramento County parks is taking devastating cuts. The department needs $5 million to minimally operate its facilities, from the American River Parkway to Gibson Ranch to the Effie Yeaw Nature Center.

Its budget now is less than $2 million.

Despite a temporary three-month reprieve, the Effie Yeaw Nature Center, a national model for outdoor education and habitat preservation in an urban area, remains threatened with closure. This icon, approaching its 30th anniversary next year, has provided nature tours, Maidu Indian programs, camps, school field trips, wildlife counts, birding classes, art workshops and live animal exhibits to thousands each year.

The center already has suffered major cuts. Last August, it had 25 staff – five full-time and 20 part-time. With budget cuts, the center this year is down to six staff – four full-time and two part-time.

Then came the announcement that the center would close April 1. After public outcry, the county Board of Supervisors gave the center a short reprieve, until July 1.

What happens after July 1?

The county parks department and the American River Natural History Association are working on a proposal to eliminate the center as a county park unit and transition to a nonprofit-run unit – like Fairytale Town in the city of Sacramento did after 38 years as a city-run organization. The city and Friends of Fairytale Town Inc. signed a partnership agreement on October 1, 1997.

A May 1997 headline told that story: “City manager wants all-out squeeze on services, jobs to stem deficit.” As part of a radical revamping of city services to eliminate a huge budget shortfall, the city manager wanted the “cultural divisions” to become “as self-sufficient as possible.” That’s when the city transferred operation of city-owned Fairytale Town to the Friends of Fairytale Town.

Such a transition for the Effie Yeaw Nature Center won’t happen overnight.

Currently, the center receives about $200,000 a year in outside funds – $75,000 from the American River Natural History Association and the rest from donations, classes and special programs.

As a nonprofit park, fundraising would have to increase significantly. When it was fully staffed, the center received $1 million a year from the county.

County parks staff plans to bring a proposal for a phased transition to the county board by April or May, leading up to June budget hearings.

One thing is clear: To assure the future of the American River Parkway and the nature center, supervisors must create a permanent funding source for these treasured public assets.

What You Can Do

No lawmaker, Democrat or Republican, can possibly relish the task of closing another multibillion-dollar, mid-year budget shortfall.

But they have no choice. Too many of them are acting as if they do.

Several lawmakers seem heartened that California’s tax receipts ran $1.3 billion more than expected in January.

But with the state’s unemployment rate still above 12 percent, legislators are deluding themselves if they believe that tax dollars are going rain down on Sacramento come April 15.

California remains in a terrible recession and budget crisis. With some notable exceptions, lawmakers don’t seem to be facing the reality that they must pare $6 billion from the current year’s budget, and start solving the deficit looming for the fiscal year starting on July 1.

Republicans and some Democrats refuse to consider any taxes, including enforcing existing laws by increasing collections. Democrats refuse to make significant cuts, particularly in social services and health care for the poor.

After years of bad budgets, Democrats figure they have cut all they can. They have zero incentive to cut more deeply this early in the process, when Republicans, the minority in the state, seem unwilling to consider even modest tweaks to the tax code.

Either house has yet to make a real or significant spending reduction.

Bills to carve out more than $1 billion from prison spending might make sense. But cuts that deep would require the state to release prisoners. Lawmakers have shown themselves to be unwilling to take such a step, even balking at turning out medically infirm prisoners.

Legislators are distracted. Many are campaigning for higher office. Four aspire to become attorney general. It’s highly unlikely that any of them would agree to any cuts in prison spending, lest they be tarred as soft on crime.

Legislators are willing to approve legislation that would delay payment of some bills, amounting to about $1 billion. That will ensure that the state has enough cash to operate without issuing IOUs. But such gimmickry is the very definition of stopgap.

All this said, senators are to be commended for holding public hearings and taking public testimony on the budget mess. The Senate Budget Committee has held 10 hearings and spent long hours picking over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposals. The full Senate approved interim measures last week and will vote on more Monday.

The Assembly’s full budget committee has not met, leaving matters to budget subcommittees. On Monday, the Assembly will follow the Senate’s lead by making an initial round of budget votes.

But Democrats and Republicans have not reached accords, and Schwarzenegger is unlikely to approve key parts of the Democrats’ plan.

The Assembly remains undisciplined. At the very time the Senate was voting on its first batch of budget bills last Thursday, Assembly Democrats, including Speaker Karen Bass and incoming Speaker John A. Pérez, massed on the Capitol steps to denounce an offensive and racist stunt by students at the University of California, San Diego.

When college students do dumb things, university administrators need to deal with it.

If administrators fail to act, then perhaps lawmakers should step in.

But for now and for the foreseeable future, the Legislature cannot be diverted. It needs to focus on the budget. Every day that lawmakers delay is a day that California goes deeper into the red.

It’s Wednesday at noon in Vince’s Italian Restaurant in Elk Grove. The local Rotary Club is gathered for lunch, and about 80 people are digging into their steaks and shrimp salads.

The meeting starts with a rousing rendition of “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and the usual salutations, announcements, the Pledge of Allegiance and greeting of guests. It was at that point that I noted Abram Wilson, sitting over to the left.

Wilson stood out for several reasons. He was dressed in a dapper suit. He was one of the few African Americans in attendance. He was also the only mayor in the room.

Wilson is the mayor of San Ramon.

What was the mayor of San Ramon doing in Elk Grove, 54 miles away from home? “I am running again for AD 15,” he told me. By AD 15, Wilson means the 15th Assembly District, one of the more artful works of gerrymandered cartography that California’s politicians have produced.

A Rorschach blotch that stretches from Walnut Creek to Livermore to Stockton and Elk Grove, AD 15 would not exist except for politicians attempting to rig elections. Following the last census, Democrats and Republicans huddled in private and attempted to draw up safe seats for their respective parties in Congress, the Legislature and the state Board of Equalization.

It is not a perfect science. The kingpins designed AD 15 to be a Republican stronghold, but in the anti-GOP wave of 2008, Democrat Joan Buchanan of Alamo swept into office, defeating Wilson, a Republican. But Wilson hopes to seize on a current backlash against incumbents. That’s why he is burning rubber and piling up the mileage between the East Bay and points inland.

We’ve all heard the usual arguments against gerrymandering. It stifles political competition. It results in a Legislature dominated by ideologues on the left and right, with few or no moderates.

Less noticed is the impact of gerrymandering on communities such as Elk Grove. Over the last decade, Elk Grove was one of the state’s fastest-growing cities. In fact, this city of 136,000 experienced the nation’s fastest growth rate among large cities between July 1, 2004, and July 1, 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

By rights, voters in such cities should be represented by someone with some sort of geographic connection. A former mayor of Stockton or Lodi might fit that bill. But a former member of the San Ramon school board, like Buchanan? Or a San Ramon mayor? How can they possibly represent a district that stretches into four counties and three distinct regions?

To be sure, Buchanan and Wilson make an effort to stay connected. Hours before Wilson was at the Rotary Club on Wednesday, Buchanan had hosted a free pancake breakfast in Elk Grove. She is deep into re-election mode, months after a costly and failed bid to win the open 10th Congressional District seat.

Still, because of gerrymandering, Wilson and Buchanan are like political Bedouins. They wander the electoral desert with no single place to call home. And if Assembly District 15 were to exist in perpetuity, residents of Elk Grove would probably never have one of their own in the seat. The district’s votes are predominantly in the East Bay.

There is some hope for an end to Rorschach blotches like AD 15.

Voters in 2008 surprised the naysayers by passing Proposition 11, a redistricting reform measure. Because of that initiative, state auditor Elaine Howle is putting together a panel of citizens to draw maps for the Legislature and BOE after the next census. Some 31,000 Californians have applied for the job. By October, the auditor’s office will narrow that pool to 60 finalists – 20 Democrats, 20 Republicans and 20 from neither party.

Clearly, there is no way to keep politics out of redistricting. Yet The Powers That Be are so threatened by Proposition 11 that they are working to overturn it.

As The Bee’s Capitol Alert noted this month, 14 Democrats in California’s congressional delegation, along with Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, have dumped $160,000 into a campaign initiative account to eliminate the 14-member citizen redistricting commission.

If they can raise enough money and persuade voters to repeal Proposition 11, California could see a return to the days of fat-cat politics gerrymandering seats.

I asked Wilson what he thought about Bass and other Democrats trying to overturn redistricting reform.

“Terrible, terrible,” he said.

Then he returned to gripping and grinning, trying to win back a seat that, by design, was supposed to be safe for the GOP.

Frank Mecca is executive director of the County Welfare Directors Association of California, a nonprofit association.

Throwing punches at families who receive welfare may be a good way to score cheap political points, but it won’t do anything to improve the lives of people in our state.

The false allegations that gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner have made about CalWORKs – California’s welfare-to-work program – are not only flat-out wrong, they’re deeply disappointing. Californians deserve better from two people who want the job of leading California out of the worst economic crisis in three generations and the worst state budget crisis ever.

Even a cursory look at some of the claims lodged by the two declared gubernatorial candidates shows their representations of California’s welfare-to-work system are misinformed at best. At worst, these false allegations represent a shameful political attack on families who turned to human assistance programs to help keep themselves above water as the recession battered the housing, job and stock markets.

Both candidates claim California is assisting too many people, with grants that are too high, and that not enough CalWORKs participants are working. Those statements come from invalid cross-state comparisons, ignore research that shows California’s model is successful and are based on a federal measurement system that even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has discounted.

California’s system appears to serve more people than other states because CalWORKs continues supporting low-income working families as they transition to self-sufficiency, reducing grants gradually as incomes go up. These are families working lower-wage jobs that simply can’t make it on their incomes alone but want to move their families out of poverty. States like New York do something similar, by using their federal welfare funds for state tax credits for 1.3 million low-income working families, but those families are not counted in New York’s “official” welfare caseload.

Grant amounts are far from oversized, and arguments that they are too high ignore the high cost of living in California and the fact that other states provide significant housing subsidies not provided by California. California’s maximum monthly aid payment for a family of three covers just over half of the fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment and only brings the family’s income to 45.5 percent of the federal poverty level. Further, the purchasing power of CalWORKs grants has significantly declined. Today’s grants are lower than they were 20 years ago in real dollars and today can buy about half of what they could in 1989.

Finally, most adults in CalWORKs are required to work but are not counted as “participating” under a flawed federal measurement system that fails to credit legitimate work-readiness activities and excludes part-time work, just two of the measurement system’s many flaws. These working participants, who have little control over work hours and schedules, may not get enough hours to consistently meet the measurement rate each month.

Whitman and Poizner argue CalWORKs is a budget-busting program, but it has actually contributed $12 billion to the state budget since it began, as welfare dollars have been shifted to other state programs. What Californians haven’t heard from the candidates is that CalWORKs brings $3.9 billion in federal funds to the state, boosting our economy with $7.1 billion in economic output, 137,000 private and public-sector jobs and $130 million in sales tax revenues.

Both candidates also ignore the fact that CalWORKs is a successful example of a bipartisan agreement that meets the goals of getting people to work and helping poor children. Since CalWORKs was enacted in 1997 with Republican Gov. Pete Wilson’s signature, caseloads have dropped by 41 percent. And research has borne out what that bipartisan group of legislators believed: A model coupling strict work requirements with work incentives, services and a safety net for children has the best outcomes for family earnings, poverty reduction and child well-being.

Poizner’s and Whitman’s proposals would undermine these services for poor children, likely increase poverty and do nothing to put people to work. Their ideas come at a time of dramatically increased unemployment, poverty and homelessness for families with children – a time when we most need a program like CalWORKs.

A healthy debate about what services government should provide and at what cost is a vital part of our democracy. But the discussion must be based on facts, not distortions or misrepresentations. No matter what party the next governor represents, he or she will take office as California tries to recover from a devastating economic meltdown. As the state contemplates solutions to avert this crisis, Californians deserve to have all the facts.

I got an e-mail the other day that depressed me.

It concerned a piece I recently did that mentioned Henry Johnson, who was awarded the French Croix de Guerre in World War I for singlehandedly fighting off a company of Germans (some accounts say there were 14, some say almost 30; the ones I find most authoritative say there were about two dozen) who threatened to overrun his post. Johnson managed this despite the fact that he was only 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds, despite the fact that his gun had jammed, despite the fact that he was wounded 21 times.

My mention of Johnson’s heroics drew a rebuke from a fellow named Ken Thompson, which I quote verbatim and in its entirety:

“Hate to tell you that blacks were not allowed into combat intell 1947, that fact. World War II ended in 1945. So all that feel good, one black man killing two dozen Nazi, is just that, PC bull.”

In response, my assistant, Judi Smith, sent Mr. Thompson proof of Johnson’s heroics: a link to his page on the Web site of Arlington National Cemetery. She thought this settled the matter.

Thompson’s reply? “There is no race on headstones and they didn’t come up with the story in tell 2002.”

Judi: “I guess you can choose to believe Arlington National Cemetery or not.”

Thompson: “It is what it is, you don’t believe either. …”

At this point, Judi forwarded me their correspondence, along with a despairing note. She is probably somewhere drinking right now.

You see, like me, she can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as “biased” anything that didn’t support your worldview.

If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn’t just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn’t just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning.

But that’s the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by all the people who still don’t believe the president was born in Hawaii or that the planet is warming. And by Mr. Thompson, who doesn’t believe Henry Johnson did what he did.

I could send him more proof, I suppose. Johnson is lauded in history books (“Before the Mayflower” by Lerone Bennett Jr., “The Dictionary of American Negro Biography” by Rayford Logan and Michael Winston) and in contemporaneous accounts (the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times). I could also point out that blacks have fought in every war in American history, though before Harry Truman desegregated the military in 1948, they did so in Jim Crow units. Also, there were no Nazis in World War I.

But those are “facts,” and the whole point here is that facts no longer mean what they once did. I suppose I could also ignore him. But you see, Ken Thompson is not just some isolated eccentric. No, he is the Zeitgeist personified.

To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper’s online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe.

I submit that any people thus handicapped sow the seeds of their own decline; they respond to the world as they wish it were rather than to the world as it is. That’s the story of the Iraq war.

But objective reality does not change because you refuse to accept it. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge a wall does not change the fact that it’s a wall.

And you shouldn’t have to hit it to find that out.

A recent poll found that a plurality of Americans think we’d be better off today if Congress was selected at random from the phone book. Now, you may share the notion that ordinary people tap into a vast wellspring of civic concern, common-sense judgment and pureness of heart. As a journalist who hears from these ordinary people all the time, I know better. They tap into a vast wellspring of Bud Light. Basically.

I decided to ridicule the poll results by flipping through the phone book and randomly calling Joe and Jolene Lunchbuckets. I would ask them complex questions, with comical results.

Call 1: Remes, Robert

Me: Let’s say there’s a vote to invoke cloture on a debate over an appropriations bill allocating revenue-sharing funds to municipalities based on the disproportionality of their tax burden as calculated for the previous fiscal year. Would you vote yes?

Robert: Absolutely.

Me: You understood that?

Robert: Sure. I’m a lawyer. I don’t like filibusters.

Call 2: Bird, Eugene

Me: Do you think global warming is for real?

Eugene: Actually, I have a daughter who is in Alaska right now, flying over the ice floes toward the North Pole, cataloging how the ice cap is receding. So, yes, I think it’s real.

Me: And how much money in campaign contributions would it take to change your opinion?

Eugene: Whatever it takes to get me re-elected. I’m a lobbyist. I understand.

Me: You’re a lobbyist?

Eugene: Yes. For Middle East policy. And my son won the Pulitzer Prize for “American Prometheus,” a book about J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Call 3: Springer, Rebecca

Me: Please prioritize the seven most pressing issues facing the United States in terms of immediacy of need, while weighing moral imperatives against the limitations of current financial realities.

Rebecca: First, repairing the economy, with emphasis on job creation; second, health care reform; third, protecting individuals’ civil rights and giving voice to minority opinions; fourth, national security; fifth, the environment; sixth, rebuilding the transportation infrastructure; seventh, a plan to bring people out of poverty.

Me: (Sigh.) What do you do?

Rebecca: Excuse me?

Me: You’re a lawyer, right?

Rebecca: Oh. Yes. I thought you asked when I was due. I’m pregnant, but I haven’t told my firm yet.

Call 4: Wolkoff, Daniel

Me: Hi. You’re a lawyer or a lobbyist, right?

Daniel: I don’t even have a degree. I do historic restoration of stained glass.

Me: Hooray! Can you prioritize your political concerns about …

Daniel: Sure can. I listen to NPR 20 hours a day! For years, I’ve been fighting against unjustified American intervention in Central America and the domestic proliferation of nuclear power plants. Now, I’m opposing development plans for a half-acre grove of trees in my neighborhood. Meanwhile, we’ve just had the Supreme Court undermine any possibility for the electoral process to be remotely fair by giving an overpowering voice to corporations. I think the justices should be impeached. Also, to …

Mr. Wolkoff went on for 45 minutes, which gave me time to contemplate what had gone wrong with my plan: Of all the phone books in the country, I chose that of Washington, D.C., world capital of wonkdom.

Still, I might have continued, except for what happened with my fifth call.

I used the same process as I had with all the others: Flip through book, open to random page, take knife, blindly stab name. My fifth pick for Joe or Jolene Lunchbucket turned out to be: Weymouth, Katharine. The publisher of the Washington Post. No, I never even dialed.

CLIFF OWEN Associated Press
Marco Rubio is a rising conservative star.

Mar-co, Mar-co, Mar-co.

The nom du jour, if you somehow missed it, is Marco. As in Rubio, rising conservative star, not Polo.

All those other rising stars? So yesterday.

Sarah? Scott who?

You’d think from all the print, chatter and buzz that Marco – the name fans seem to prefer – had charted the Silk Road. On a slightly smaller scale, he launched the annual CPAC parade of conservative stars Thursday with a rousing speech that brought giddy conservatives to their feet.

Rubio brought plenty of raw meat to the table, but that was the least of his charms. As speeches go, there wasn’t much new to chew on. Think “Groundhog Day” to a country music soundtrack.

But amid the expected was something fresh that will serve Republicans well in the coming months – and years. The traditional GOP is getting younger and less pale. Rubio, a tea party favorite who is challenging Florida Gov. Charlie Crist for the U.S. Senate, may be the Republican Party’s Barack Obama.

More important, he is one of a new crop of young leaders who are first-generation Americans, sons and daughters of exiles, who can talk about the American Dream in a personal way. The 38-year-old son of Cuban immigrants, he is a natural pitchman for a new GOP. It doesn’t hurt that he is photogenic.

Rubio’s story about his hardworking parents – his father’s 16-hour days and his mom’s job as a Kmart clerk – is familiar by now. And though the artifact that bad luck is a virtue is as stale as Marie Antoinette’s cake, Rubio is saved from death-by-cliché by an unlikely benefactor: Fidel Castro.

Rubio’s parents came to the America to escape Castro’s cruel tyranny. You don’t have to weep Glenn Beck tears – or descend into bellicosity with words such as “fascism” or “socialism” – when your life is a metaphor for the anti-Obama movement.

And Republicans don’t have to beat voters over the head with platitudes and promises. They don’t even have to invoke “exceptionalism,” code to liberals for wallpapering classrooms with the Ten Commandments.

All they have to do is let Rubio speak and remind voters why, as he put it, you don’t see Americans hopping rafts to seek refuge in other countries. … “What makes America great is … that “there are dreams that are impossible everywhere else but are possible here.”

Rubio reminded his appreciative audience that those who seek our shores are from countries that have let government run the economy and determine which industries will be rewarded. The United States, at least theoretically, has chosen to let free markets, and thus individual liberty, thrive. The problem with government-run economies, he said, is that “the employee never becomes the employer; the small business can never compete with a big business.”

These are simple truths, but they resonate more when articulated by the voice of personal experience.

Rubio isn’t a perfect candidate despite his nearly instantaneous coronation. He waded into hyperbole bordering on falsehood when he said that only in America can one start a small business in the spare bedroom. Actually, small businesses are birthed everyday on dirt floors in countries where a “spare bedroom” is where the cow sleeps.

Such forgivable slips notwithstanding, Rubio represents something important for a party for which diversity has meant hiring a mariachi band for the convention. And he is but one of several young rising Republican stars who share his political roots. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, 38, and South Carolina Rep. Nikki Haley, also 38, both first-generation Indian Americans, come to mind.

Jindal, unfortunately, made his national debut prematurely with his much-ridiculed response to President Obama’s 2009 address to Congress. But also like Rubio, he’s young and has decades to recover as he oversees Louisiana’s post-Katrina reconstruction.

Haley, who is running for governor against a fierce stable of seasoned, tenured men, is popular as a fiscally conservative accountant. Like Rubio, Haley and Jindal can recount the American Dream story with passion born of been-there.

In a world where narrative drives politics, these are as good as it gets. As good, even, as being the son of a welfare mother and a Kenyan goatherd. You might even say, they’re exceptional.

It started with a tip that checkpoints meant to nab drunken drivers were instead taking away cars, lots of them. The investigation confirmed those fears – and more.

As a report in The Bee showed on Sunday, the sobriety stops have become cash cows for California police departments and towing firms – and they’re fattening their wallets disproportionately at the expense of Latino motorists.

This hijacking of the checkpoints is an unfair, and likely illegal, corruption of what is an effective tool to keep dangerous drivers off California’s highways.

Last year at DUI checkpoints statewide, officers impounded more than 24,000 vehicles from drivers caught without a license but made only 3,200 drunken driving arrests, according to the nonpartisan Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

To recover their cars, owners paid an average of $1,805 in towing fees and police fines – a total of more than $13 million statewide. In about 70 percent of seizures, the owners didn’t bother to retrieve their vehicles, which then were sold at auction to pay the fees and fines, generating an additional $29 million. Finally, the officers running the checkpoints collected about $30 million in overtime last year.

California law allows police to impound the cars of unlicensed drivers for 30 days if they endanger public safety. But at some checkpoints witnessed by reporters, the seized vehicles appeared just fine. And while getting unlicensed – typically uninsured – motorists off the road is worthwhile, the punishment is out of whack with the crime, especially when DUI suspects typically don’t lose their cars.

There’s another problem. While the investigation didn’t find that police target Latino neighborhoods, it documented that a result of setting up checkpoints on major thoroughfares is that many Latinos are caught in the net.

In municipalities where Latinos are the largest slice of the population, police impounded an average of 34 cars at each checkpoint – three times the rate in cities with the smallest Latino populations, the investigation found. For instance, in Montebello, near East Los Angeles, police seized 62 cars for every drunken driving arrest. (The ratio in Sacramento was eight vehicles impounded for each DUI arrest.) Police don’t check the immigration status of drivers, but reporters discovered that a sizable number of those at checkpoints are illegal immigrants, who rarely challenge the seizures or get their cars back.

It’s understandable, perhaps, that cash-strapped cities and towns are intoxicated by a revenue generator, especially when federal money often pays for the operations.

But that doesn’t justify a legally problematic practice on the rise. California has doubled its use of checkpoints in the past three years.

State officials have declared this the “Year of the Checkpoint,” and have scheduled 2,500 of them, up from about 1,700 in recent years.

It apparently is up to the courts to step in and end this abuse. A case is pending before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that challenges the constitutionality of the California law, arguing that police can’t seize vehicles when the only violation is driving without a license.

The appeals court should put this cash cow out to pasture.

The difference in cost between holding a special election in an odd-numbered year and holding a regular election in an even-numbered year can be huge.

To its chagrin, that’s what the new Twin Rivers Unified School District has found. It merged the Rio Linda Union, North Sacramento and Del Paso Heights elementary districts with the Grant high school district in 2007.

That new district has a board that was elected to a four-year term running from November 2007 to November 2011. A special election in 2011 would cost the district $450,000, according to the Sacramento County elections office.

In contrast, a regular election in an even-numbered year would cost the district $50,000.

Every penny counts in a district facing a tough budget year.

So the board is considering two options for moving the election to avoid a $450,000 tab for a special election in 2011:

• Hold the election this November, which would shorten board member terms to three years.

• Hold the election in November 2012, which would lengthen board member terms to five years.

No elected board should be extending its term by unilateral decree – especially a new board that hasn’t faced voters since the district was established. The reality is that the original special election in 2007 drew only 19 percent of the 60,000 voters in the district.

An election this November is the better option. Voters in that new district should not go five years before being able to weigh in on the performance of the new board.

This is an issue of democratic accountability.

If it wants to save money with an election this year, the board needs to pass a resolution by March. The county elections office and potential candidates need to know. And the board needs to go on record now formally rejecting a 2012 election – signaling to voters that board members will not arbitrarily extend their own terms in office.

Dianne Feinstein
is the senior
U.S. senator from California.

Re “Feinstein’s play threatens to roil the water world” (Editorial, Feb. 14): Given the magnitude of the Central Valley water crisis, I was surprised by The Bee’s sharp criticism of an Emergency Temporary Water Supply amendment I am proposing to provide farmers with the minimum amount of water necessary to stay in business (38 to 40 percent of their contractual allocation), while maintaining environmental protections.

Water is jobs in our state. More than 2,700 growers, who farm 800,000 acres of land south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, rely on water from the Central Valley Project to stay in business. Three consecutive years of drought have caused more than 400,000 acres of farmland to be fallowed. Rows of almond trees have been uprooted, and thousands of farmworkers are unemployed.

Winter storms have boosted storage capacity at key reservoirs and replenished the Sierra snowpack, yet many farmers will not be able to farm because, as things stand now, the recent precipitation is flowing into the ocean. In addition, the National Marine Fisheries Service is slated to dramatically reduce the amount of Delta water available for agricultural and drinking water uses to just 8 percent of the Delta’s water flow during the key irrigation months of April and May. Westside farmers can’t survive on that.

The Endangered Species Act is a vital instrument, but it lacks flexibility to address the human condition during emergencies. That’s why I’m proposing to make technical modifications to the biological opinions that restrict Delta pumping and modestly increase the water exported from the Delta for human uses to 14 percent during the months of April and May, while leaving in place a major pulse flow to provide water for salmon during the peak of their runs.

This is a fair, short-term compromise that will help stem economic devastation caused by drought while honoring environmental protections.

There is precedent for my proposal. In 2003, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously for a bill which, like this one, made one change to the implementation of each applicable biological opinion in order to ensure a sufficient water supply, while upholding essential protections for New Mexico’s silvery minnow.

I understand that there are passionate views on both sides of the issue, and hopefully there will be an administrative solution that makes further legislation unnecessary. But I won’t leave Valley families to fend for themselves in dire circumstances. With 2.3 million Californians unemployed, I believe jobs and the economy must be our top priority.

I don’t know if the tea party that tea partiers say exists really does exist. They say it does but then take offense when they’re characterized as a pitchfork-and-torch mob chasing down the Frankenstein monster.

Despite the portrait provided by The Bee in last Sunday’s Forum, many reader comments illustrate the near-irreversible problem for tea partiers: They don’t control their message.

Proponents work overtime to describe tea partiers as average Americans frustrated by a politicized, calcified government apparatus. Why? Because the perception of tea partiers is one of wild-eyed loons spewing allegations of socialism, evocations of Nazism and admonitions about keeping government out of Medicare.

Birther lawsuits twice have been tossed as meritless by the U.S. Supreme Court, yet one-third of Californians are convinced the president isn’t an American citizen, and they identify with the tea party, according to a recent Field Poll. Birther theories received prominent play at the recent Nashville gathering of tea partiers, further cementing the movement to tinfoil-hat wearers.

It’s a movement where reason cedes to irrationality, civility gives way to petulance and provocative inquiry is drowned out by agendized hucksters looking to co-opt a movement while inflammatory carnival barkers demand that we take our country back.

Back from whom? Dick Armey, whose FreedomWorks special-interest group finances much of the tea party movement, admonished activists to rail against government-run health care.

Yet Dick Armey has been on the public dole nearly his entire career: 13 years as a college professor in the taxpayer-supported University of Texas system (free health care), followed by 18 years as a member of Congress where he enjoyed and continues to enjoy a government health care program supported by you, the taxpayer.

We should give the country to him?

Not a week after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, radical conservatives attacked him as a RINO – “Republican in name only” – because they were shocked to learn he’s pro-choice, has no intention of challenging the state’s gay marriage law and supports the state’s government-run health care system.

This puts Brown squarely in line with the independents who elected him but out of step with a conservative fringe that sees him supporting Obama’s agenda, and a socialist who must be replaced as soon as possible.

For a crowd that crows constantly about less federal government and more emphasis on states deciding their own fates, do these people not respect the will of the citizens of the Commonwealth? Why? Because Brown doesn’t think like “we” do.

Republican National Committee members at last month’s winter meetings were presented with a 10-point “purity test” that would have enforced party loyalty by separating “true” Republicans from so-called RINOs; if you didn’t agree with eight of the 10 planks, you’d get no endorsement or campaign money. (Ronald Reagan would have failed the test, but Meghan McCain passes.) The idea was rejected.

The chief sponsor of the proposal, committeeman James Bopp, defended his purity test, saying critics “will attack any effort to reassure voters that we are serious about restoring our conservative bona fides.”

Here in our region, the Placer County Republican Central Committee goes after GOP officeholders who aren’t conservative enough. When five registered Republicans on the Rocklin City Council supported the extension of a park tax, county committee chairman Tom Hudson issued a call to “take out” those “liberal RINOs.”

Residents passed the tax by an overwhelming 83 percent, which begs the question: What happens when ideologues are out of step with the body politic, as they are in Massachusetts?

Unapologetic, Hudson is absolutist in his scorched-earth defense of ultraconservatism against what many of his ilk call “liberal Republican ticket-switchers.” Those are people who’ve left the party to become decline-to-state or even Blue Dog Democrats, further reducing the GOP brand to a manic wolf pack of unyielding, uncompromising ideological purists, something entirely anathema to the founding principles and resultant pluralism that has always defined America.

Are these the leaders of the tea party movement? People touting ideological purity and intolerance to dissent as party mantras, something entirely anathema to the founding principles and resultant pluralism that has always defined America? Or are they opportunistic politicos manipulating the movement for their own selfish gain?

Dick Armey told RNC gatherers that the GOP can’t win without tea party voters. Yet voters in Rocklin are dismissed as misguided while the choice of Massachusetts voters must be replaced without haste.

It’s sad to see reasonable middle-class Americans with heartfelt and genuine beliefs misrepresented by distorted images of kooks and all-or-nothing ideologues, or milked by manipulators who seek only a return to power in Washington, prepared to abandon their supporters once they do.

And therein perhaps lies the tragedy of the tea party movement: that a sincere ambition may ultimately and invariably be doomed, and that its practitioners, like the Frankenstein monster, may have all the staying power of a folk legend.

JON KRAUSE NewsArt.com

One of the great paradoxes of life is that in the darkest of times, the human spirit can shine most brightly. Out of pain and suffering, joy can triumph.

In 1988, after 25 surgeries over five years to save his leg after an accident, my husband, Frank W. McReynolds, developed a serious bone infection and had to have his leg amputated. I met him several years later, and one of the reasons I fell in love with him was that instead of becoming bitter, he told me that he had grown from the experience, and that it had made him a better man.

He used his ordeal to help others. When he faced amputation, there was no one he could turn to for support, so he launched Advocacy for Amputees to help others facing loss of a limb – to take the fear away and provide information about prosthetics and available resources.

One day a local hospital asked him to visit a patient facing amputation. When he entered the patient’s room, the man snapped, “What do you know about it, anyway?” Frank took off his prosthesis and tossed it on the patient’s bed. Suddenly, the man paid attention.

Because of his own experience, my husband related not only to the disabled but to those afflicted with other severe challenges. He counseled parolees with substance abuse problems. He pumped them up with hope and encouragement and helped them turn their lives around.

I have discovered that in the darkness we find precious gems buried in our hearts and souls that can bring light to others. Not only did my husband’s pain bring out powerful inner resources of strength and character, but so did the gifts of human compassion shine like fire in those who helped him through many more physical ordeals over the past two years, including an above-knee amputation and colon cancer.

In December, Frank suffered his final blow – a major stroke. For six weeks, he was left completely incapacitated. He lost his ability to speak, to swallow, to eat, to move except for his left arm and leg.

As I walked through this bleakest tunnel of my life, the glow of the human spirit shone like stars that are most radiant in the blackest of nights. I was showered with scintillating scenes of the difference each of us can make in the life of another.

I became aware of details I would never have noticed or appreciated before – the “little things” – nurses offering a smile, a bit of humor, encouragement; priests and chaplains visiting with words of comfort and inspiration; a doctor taking extra time to listen and explain; a cup of coffee suddenly appearing from a nurse’s assistant; daily phone calls from friends and family checking up and offering help.

From the examples of my husband and those who helped him through his many challenges, I learned that what we do for ourselves will pass, but what we do for others will last forever. I learned that light triumphs over darkness.

Frank’s suffering generated his greatest gift to our community – caring more about others than himself. Despite his final ordeal, he never lost this gift. When family and friends came to comfort him in the hospital, he squeezed their hands and greeted them with a thumbs-up or a smile – offering even then his strong faith, powerful spirit and love. Even during his last days, he gave his friends a big wink. I believe he was telling us that no matter what the earthly view, the up-look is glorious.

A young nephew of mine wrote recently that “Frank’s positive attitude in the face of adversity has always been a source of inspiration for me.”

Shortly after my husband passed away on Jan. 30, a fellow amputee left this message on his voice mail: “Frank, you don’t need my number any more because you’re walking with me. I trust and love you always. I know you’re free now. You have no pain. You’re walking on two good legs. God bless you.”

Frank used to say to those he was helping, “Don’t leave before the miracle happens.” As another of his friends said about my husband: “He didn’t.”