Author: SacBee — Opinion

Bill Camp

There has been a lot of talk in recent days about the lawsuit we filed involving the strong-mayor initiative in Sacramento. Many have characterized it as an attack on the voters’ right to “reform” our city government, as well as an effort to stop any movement toward a strong-mayor form of government. While these characterizations may make for good sound bites, they miss the real purpose of our lawsuit: to ensure that all Sacramentans receive the benefits of the procedures the California Constitution requires for major changes to our charter.

As the Sacramento Superior Court decision clearly points out, the so-called strong-mayor initiative proposes significant changes to the city charter that would completely overhaul the structure of city government. The court made it clear that a measure that makes such radical changes to a city charter cannot be legally placed on the ballot directly through the initiative process – as Mayor Kevin Johnson is attempting to do by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers and paid signature gatherers.

The judge’s ruling outlines the two options – both with ample public participation – that the California Constitution provides for reforming a city charter:

• First, the City Council may place a revision before the voters directly after public debate.

• Alternatively, the voters may use the initiative process to place a measure on the ballot that asks for a vote on an initial question: Do you want to revise our city charter?

• If a majority of the voters says yes, then the voters are asked to elect a charter reform commission that would hold public hearings and consider revisions to the charter based on the public’s input. All Sacramento voters would be eligible to serve on the commission – not just hand-picked political insiders.

• The elected commission would place their recommended revised charter on the ballot.

• At that point, voters get to cast a second vote for or against the revised charter proposed by the commission.

We believe there is a good reason for this deliberative process. Fundamental changes in the city charter – which is the city’s constitution – should not be made casually or carelessly, as is often the case with policies crafted in the course of high-priced initiative campaigns.

Overhauling a city’s charter is no small matter. It should be done with deliberation and thoughtful input from all segments of our community, in a public and inclusive process.

This would have been the right way for the mayor to revise the city charter, but he failed to follow the law. Instead, he huddled with a small, hand-picked group of advisers in closed-door meetings and drafted a measure completely overhauling the way city government is organized.

Fortunately for us, the court has stepped in to stop this violation of the process our state constitution requires. We believe most Sacramentans will be thankful for that.

California’s Supreme Court just made the state’s already confusing marijuana laws even more so.

In a ruling Thursday, the justices were unanimous that the Legislature erred in 2004 when it imposed legal limits on the amount of pot medical marijuana patients can grow or possess.

Thus, they have tossed out a state law that limited medical marijuana users to 8 ounces of dried pot and six mature marijuana plants or 12 immature plants.

To add to the confusion that law enforcement faces with the current marijuana laws, the justices also said that local governments can impose their own possession and grow limits on users, but those limits can’t be used to prosecute individuals in state court.

Huh?

Sacramento County Sheriff John McGinness nicely summarized law enforcement officials’ take on the ruling: “an abundance of ambiguity.”

The decision provides no comfort for parents worried about their kid’s drug use, or employers concerned about employees stoned on the job, or motorists nervous about pot-impaired fellow drivers. As McGinness noted, it appears “to invite greater acceptance and greater use of marijuana.”

A second case pending before the high court challenges city and county governments’ rights to limit the number of pot dispensaries that can be allowed within their jurisdictions.

If those limits fall, it’s hard to see how any community can keep the pot industry from exploding, Humboldt County-like, within its borders.

No one anticipated such a fallout when voters approved the state’s medical marijuana law in 1996.

Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, was billed as a way to legalize marijuana use for those suffering from cancer, glaucoma, chronic pain and other ailments. It’s done much more than that. It’s made marijuana a quasi- legal drug for anyone who wants to get high.

As the California Supreme Court made clear with its most recent ruling, the voters enacted the medical marijuana law and only the voters can modify it in any substantial way.

The status quo is not acceptable. At minimum, a new ballot measure is needed to regulate pot, tax it and keep it out of the hands of children.

Amid rubble, great human suffering and a continuing struggle to get food and water in the aftermath of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake, people in Haiti are taking the first steps toward rebuilding their lives.

Snippets from news stories reveal humanity and enterprise. In makeshift camps, people have tapped water lines. They’ve set up markets selling oranges, plantains and charcoal for cooking. They’ve reopened barber shops.

Young children play soccer. Local radio stations now are broadcasting Creole-language humanitarian information from local journalists. The U.S. government is distributing wind-up radio sets. Taptaps, Haiti’s colorfully decorated private buses, are running.

With many churches and the main cathedral in ruins, people are holding impromptu masses and services. They are singing traditional songs and hymns to children who have lost their homes and brothers and sisters. With international aid, “cash for work” programs are hiring Haitians to clear rubble and do other cleanup. People are forming community organizations, gathering money for food and water and gathering information to help aid workers.

Even with the enormous logistical hurdles that remain for relief efforts, people already are starting to talk optimistically about long-term recovery and reconstruction. “If you look back in history, other cities that had been destroyed by earthquakes or by fires – London and Lisbon are two that leap to mind – were entirely rebuilt, magnificently,” said the United Nations’ Haiti communications director David Wimhurst. “Now, this would be a wonderful opportunity to rebuild Port-au-Prince.”

People recall the 9.0-magnitude earthquake off of Indonesia in 2004, where 250,000 people were killed in a single day by the resulting tsunami and 2.5 million others lost their homes, families and jobs. The emergency phase in that disaster ended in 90 days, and authorities organized a plan to rebuild.

And then there are the miracle rescues. On Friday, family members and neighbors sleeping in front of their collapsed home heard moaning. After 20 hours of digging with bare hands, they freed an 84-year-old woman who had been trapped for 10 days. Doctors say, unfortunately, she may not survive.

On a more hopeful note, a 23-year-old carpenter who had been trapped for five days in the rubble of a hospital heard three taps from a hammer and tapped back with a stone. American firefighters were able to rescue him and he is recovering from his injuries.

President Barack Obama has asked former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to raise funds for immediate relief and long-term recovery. They established the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which is funneling money to established groups with a heavy presence and track record in Haiti. For more information, go to www.clintonbushhaitifund.org.

Americans are opening their wallets and their homes to help. The picture of a 7-year-old Haitian orphan arriving at Sacramento International Airport with her new family from near Auburn is priceless. With people in and out of Haiti pulling together, a devastated country can recover.

DeeAnn Reeder, from Orangevale, studies bat behavior and immune systems at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where she also teaches biology. “I’ve always viewed them as these incredibly tough, well-adapted animals that can take anything you could throw at them,” she says. “Until now.”

Across the Northeast, something is wiping out hundreds of thousands of bats. Biologists, shaken by the destruction, bring back harrowing accounts from caves where they had long studied thriving populations. They tell of tiny bodies littering the snow, of slogging through the muck of animal remains, of shoveling out layers of the dead. In three years, more than a million animals have died. Gone with them is their insect-eating prowess; one biologist has calculated those fallen bats ate nearly 700 tons of moths, beetles, mosquitoes and other bugs each year. The full impact will take years to comprehend, as the effects of losing so many bats spreads to their predators and to their prey. Those tracking the wave of deaths believe it may have rippled outward from a single cave in New York state, possibly carried there from Europe on the muddy gear of some unwitting cave enthusiast. It could reach California the same way.

As best anyone can tell, the bat deaths started slowly. They spread quietly from the suspected epicenter of Howe’s Cave, west of Albany, N.Y. By January 2008, reports began to trouble government and research biologists. In New York and Vermont, something unusual was driving bats out of hibernation before their normal time. They would collapse on the snow, emaciated, and die. A pale, whitish fungus grew on their bodies. Genetic tests are still ongoing, but the fungus appears identical to one found in Europe. There, it was seen growing harmlessly on some hibernating bats as long ago as the 1980s. Some speculate that those bats have evolved to tolerate it. Others suggest the fungus in America has mutated into some more virulent form.

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The first time DeeAnn Reeder saw a faint powdering of pale fungus growing on bats’ noses in one of her own research caves, her stomach plunged. It felt as if she were going to throw up. Then it got worse.

“You would look at bats on the cave wall and know they were going to die,” Reeder said, “Just pathetic looking, horrible looking animals.” Fungus grew all across their faces. They were so thin and dehydrated that they seemed almost crispy. Some clung to the wall by only one foot.

Reeder, 40, studies bat behavior and immune systems. She is a small woman, just 5 feet 3 inches tall, with strong cheekbones and pale eyebrows that give out halfway over each eye. She grew up in Orangevale and spent her summers at a rustic cabin beside Wrights Lake, where she would spend hours watching marmots – bigger, heftier versions of the squirrels she knew at home. They ate like squirrels, sometimes sitting upright, both paws delicately clasped around a curl of pancake or a melon rind that her parents had tossed out to feed the animals.

“I was always at heart an animal behaviorist,” Reeder says now. She got her doctorate at the University of California, Davis, where she studied monkeys at the primate center. Now she teaches biology at Bucknell University in central Pennsylvania, and she has long been a co-editor of a definitive taxonomic volume, “Mammal Species of the World.”

Out of all the mammals of the world, Reeder chose the bat. “They have these amazing strategies, including hibernation, to deal with the fact that there is basically no food for half the year,” she says. She loves their ingenuity, the way they parse out reproduction, mating in the fall, then waiting until spring to develop a pregnancy. She marvels at their wings, a thin, translucent unfurling of strength and elasticity.

“I’ve always viewed them as these incredibly tough, well-adapted animals that can take anything you could throw at them,” she says. “Until now.”

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When biologists first identified the fungus growing on the bodies of so many dead bats, they named it Geomyces destructans. They have not fully established whether the fungus, with its characteristic start at the nostrils of a hibernating bat, is the killer itself or is preying on bats weakened by something else. But the name, “destructans,” captures biologists’ suspicions and their desperation. Once a telltale wisp of white fungus is seen at the nostrils of a hibernating bat, it is likely that 95 percent to 100 percent of the bats hibernating with it will die. The outbreak, which researchers have come to call “white nose syndrome,” is killing off entire communities in the caves where bats gather to hibernate. Bats tend to sprawl over each other during hibernation, like sleeping puppies or kittens, and the behavior, known as clustering, is probably hastening the spread of white nose syndrome from bat to bat. At first, biologists wondered whether low food supplies or pollutants might be felling the bats. But the mystery disorder has been radiating outward from its epicenter just as a disease outbreak would. So far, it has spread across nine states, at a rate of about 200 miles each winter.

Somewhere between 45 and 48 species of bats fly across the night skies of the United States, some sipping nectar, some scooping up insects into a basketlike trap they can form with their legs. Roughly half of these bats migrate in the winter, or live in regions so warm that there is food for them year round. The rest hibernate, stretching out the meals of spring, summer and fall to last an entire year.

Bats that hibernate must balance on an energy tightrope. They have to remain light enough to fly until they are ready for torpor. Yet they must store enough fat to live on all winter. They make their fat supplies last by dramatically slowing their heart rate, their breathing rate and the rest of their metabolism. Like other small hibernating mammals, they also arouse sporadically during the winter, but each arousal exacts a high cost, burning up in hours calories that would otherwise last for weeks. Researchers don’t fully understand how white nose syndrome kills, but it’s clear that stricken bats fall off this energy tightrope. They cannot seem to slow their metabolisms as much as healthy bats. And they arouse much too often, squandering a winter’s worth of calories by around February. The victims starve.

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During gentler times for bats, Bucknell University knocked out cinderblock walls to turn part of a basement into a vivarium, complete with climate-controlled hibernation chambers and a room-size flight cage. There, Reeder had planned to study the animals’ stunning coping mechanisms. Instead, much of her vivarium has been devoted to trying to understand – and perhaps combat – whatever is killing bats across the northeastern United States. This fall and winter, Reeder and her students have been collecting healthy and sick bats to study their hibernation patterns. Her group has also been testing anti-fungal chemicals that might be used to treat or prevent white nose syndrome. So far, she has judged one possible preventive treatment safe enough to be released into the air in a test cave. She recommended against another after some healthy bats treated with it died.

To avoid disrupting her captive colony more than necessary, Reeder and her students leave the lights off in the windowless vivarium rooms. They wear headlamps, casting spots of light that bob in the murk. They speak softly, preserving a cavelike hush. Before entering the flight cage to work among the bats, the researchers pull on thick garden gloves. Inside, a bat flaps slowly across the expanse, disturbed by the noise, then settles back onto a wall. The cage floor gives softly underfoot as they enter. It is a wrestling mat, to cushion the fall of any animal that might drop to the floor. It’s covered with long strips of white paper, flecked with bat droppings. One of Reeder’s students carefully eases a bat from one cage wall, conscious of the animal’s knees, which articulate backward compared with human knees. The bats are getting the spray-on treatment that Reeder later will reject as potentially dangerous. They are not happy. The first one, a female, is 14 grams of fury. She twists and chitters, a high-pitched staccato shriek. She bares her teeth. They gleam white inside her pink mouth like little pearl daggers. “Oh, honey, it’s OK,” one of Reeder’s students coos to the bat.

Cupped in the researchers’ hands, illuminated by circles of light, these bats are exquisitely wrought. Their wing membranes stretch between lightweight, elongated bones that correspond to bones in our middle finger, ring finger and pinky. Veins spread through the wings like lace. Reeder rubs the belly of one she is holding and says softly, “Oh, fatty, fatty you are.” At that moment, it is easy to see in her the girl who waited for marmots outside a Sierra cabin, the one who used to go racing home after school to watch Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom.” Reeder examines the animal’s soft brown pelt, the shiny black eyes that see superbly, the peaked ears that echolocate even better. “She’s in great shape,” Reeder says. “There’s not so many organisms that you can say, ‘Oh, fat, good for you.’ ”

Reeder delights in this one fat, healthy bat.

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So far, white nose syndrome has rampaged through six bat species, striking the little brown bat and the tri-colored bat especially hard. Researchers tracking the syndrome believe it could drive some endangered species into extinction and slash the populations of others. It could also drastically change the patterns of which bat species can thrive in colder climates. Migrating bats are likely to survive, but hibernating species could take decades to rebound, if they ever do, because they breed slowly, often producing just one pup a year.

With at least two endangered species in the syndrome’s path, biologists will not rule out the weird, the long-shot, the improbable response. Late last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service awarded a grant to round up Virginia big-eared bats and try to breed some in safety. It’s difficult to keep bats in captivity, and no one has ever tried with this species. Reeder and others have been looking for something, anything, that might protect bats without disrupting the delicate ecology of a cave. They had even considered having treatment teams enter a cave and spray the wings of every bat inside.

Meanwhile, researchers are pleading with people to stay out of caves and mines that might be infected. Geomyces destructans can survive at least a week at warm temperatures, long enough to hitch a ride on muddy shoes or caving gear, through an airport and to another cave thousands of miles away. The word has mostly gotten out to biologists and serious cave enthusiasts, who can follow frequently updated online advice about the best precautionary measures. Tougher to reach are the amateur hobbyists, the casual church or scouting groups that might visit an infected cave and never know what they have done.

If white nose syndrome spreads only bat to bat, it’s difficult to say if or when it would cross the Rockies. Before diseased bats could reach the mountain range, the infection might be stopped or slowed in regions with fewer caves and lower bat population densities. One of the leading theories about white nose syndrome, though, is that this fungus has already crossed the Atlantic with human help. To spread the syndrome to the West, Reeder says, “All it will take is one careless caver to take their caving gear into California or into Colorado.”

DeeAnn Reeder and graduate student Roy Jacob examine a bat in 2007. Reeder hopes to find out why a mysterious
ailment has wiped out millions of bats in the Northeast, and whether the plague could spread across the country.

Carrie Peyton Dahlberg

Is Sacramento still paralyzed by its past, as Joan Didion once suggested?

Nearly five decades ago, author Joan Didion ruminated on the “peculiarity” of her hometown, which she claimed was paralyzed by a past no longer relevant.

“Sacramento is a town which grew up on farming and discovered to its shock that land has more profitable uses,” she wrote in “Notes From a Native Daughter.” The old families, she added, “are closing ranks, preparing for the long night, selling their rights of way and living on the proceeds.”

We were reminded of these passages last week upon reading the first installment of The Bee’s “Road to Recovery” series. Various business leaders were asked about the region’s long-term economic prospects.

“The housing industry is really what pulls the economy out of recession,” said Russ Davis, a vice president at Elliott Homes. “Always has, probably always will.”

There’s a fair measure of truth to Davis’ observation. The development industry is an important part of this region’s private sector, employing an estimated 56,000 people. When land and housing values start to rebound again, it will undoubtedly restore many thousands of jobs.

Yet if the Sacramento region simply goes back to its past, it will continue to be be whipsawed by periods of boom and bust. This area must work to lessen its over-reliance on real estate jobs and state government employment. Its business and political leadership must think bigger, and lay the groundwork for a new form of prosperity.

Some of that groundwork is already being laid. The influx of new solar power companies and other “green-tech” businesses is encouraging. So is the relocation of small but innovative businesses such as Gregory Mountain Products, which moved its headquarters to Sacramento in 2008.

While the Silicon Valley – with its universities and culture of innovation – will be continue to be Northern California’s economic engine, Sacramento offers attractions for many new enterprises.

The cost of living is more affordable here. We have universities and government functions – such as Cal-EPA – that certain businesses, such as green-tech firms, want to interact with, and draw talent from.

Yet as a region, Sacramento faces a problem: It doesn’t think of itself as a region, one that must compete in a global economy. During the boom years, its localities acted like localities, too often competing with each other instead of cooperating.

Contrast that with Denver. When Mayor John Hickenlooper visited Sacramento last week, he described how Denver had reached out to surrounding municipalities, building alliances and working together to secure federal funds. That cooperation led all 32 mayors of the region to win voter support for a sales tax increase to expand rail transit across the Denver region.

Contrast that with our local situation.

Regional Transit serves a single county in this region – Sacramento – and amid the state’s financial crisis, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is gutting its budget and that of other transit agencies. Service is being cut back, and leaders in surrounding counties have shown little interest in partnering with RT on a wider regional system.

Expanded transit in this region could help link job centers and universities – including a planned university in Placer County – just as the the Bay Area and its schools are linked by BART and CalTrain.

This is where Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson could play a leading role. Johnson invited Hickenlooper to Sacramento largely to extol the virtues of Denver’s strong-mayor system. Yet whether or not Johnson ever wins voter approval for enhanced mayoral authority, he can start building bridges now with his regional counterparts. And his counterparts should have good reason to be receptive. Expanded transit is a legacy project that should be equal with all of their other priorities.

To be sure, the expansion and diversification of this region’s economy will hinge on forces outside of the actions of individual governments. In coming decades, the growth of China and new economies in Southeast Asia will reshape trade and investment in ways we can only begin to imagine. Various U.S. metropolitan areas will be winners and losers, based purely on geography and other factors they can’t completely control.

And yet many regions are positioning themselves for the 21st century, which should prompt Sacramento to ask itself: What is our vision? And can we take advantage of this slow period to imagine a future that breaks from the mind-sets of the past?

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How does the U.S. military support Haiti without looking like an occupier?

Nukes & Spooks

Posted by Nancy Youssef

In the midst of the looting, violence and chaos that is engulfing Haiti, the U.S. military is trying to strike a delicate balance – reaching out and providing aid, while signaling to the Haitians it has no interest in occupying their country.

It is a challenging task. While the United States has been Haiti’s largest foreign aid contributor for decades, it’s also been its most frequent occupier. It’s a role the U.S. would like not to repeat.

The U.S. military has said that it wants the Haitian people to see troops passing out food, water and other needed items. En route to India today, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates addressed concerns that the U.S. presence could look like an occupation, telling reporters that while U.S. forces would provide some security, “I haven’t heard of us playing a policing role at any point.” U.N. forces would take the lead he said, adding: “We are there in support of them and the government of Haiti.”

But that might be difficult. The Haitian government is weak, its infrastructure frail and its security situation so precarious that it demands a show of force. On Monday, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon asked the U.N. Security Council immediately to send 3,500 security officers to address the security problem.

So how does the U.S. military support a weak government without looking like occupiers? That is, to properly support this government, the U.S. may have to step in and be the government because Haitian officials simply cannot do the job. And what are the consequences of looking like an occupation force?

New U.N. survey shows extent of bribery in everyday Afghan life

Nukes & Spooks

Posted by Jonathan Landay

It’s no secret that paying bribes is a part of everyday life in Afghanistan. A report released last week by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime that attempts to quantify the problem shows just how daunting it will be to reduce the corruption that permeates the government and helps power recruiting for the Taliban-led insurgency.

The report concludes that Afghans in 2009 paid bribes totaling about $2.5 billion, or the equivalent of about 23 percent of GNP. That means that bribery and opium production, which accounted for an estimated $2.8 billion last year, represent the country’s largest income generators.

“It is almost impossible to obtain a public service in Afghanistan without greasing a palm,” writes Antonio Maria Costa, the UNODC executive director, in the report. “During the past 12 months, one Afghan out of two, in both rural and urban communities, had to pay at least one kickback to a public official.”

The report was based on a survey of 7,600 people in 12 provincial capitals and more than 1,600 villages across the war-torn country. It provides sobering reading for U.S. and allied officials who are pressing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to clean up corruption as part of the strategy to contain the Taliban-led insurgency.

The average bribe amounts to $158, the incidence of bribery is somewhat higher in rural areas than urban areas – 56 percent versus 46 percent, and it is more prevalent in the country’s north and the east, according to the UNODC report.

“A kickback is so commonly sought (and paid) to speed up administrative procedures that more than a third of the population (38 percent) think that this is the norm,” it found.

The theory behind In-Home Supportive Services is pretty simple. If low-income elderly and disabled people can be assisted in their homes with cooking, bathing, shopping, housecleaning or taking medications, they can be kept out of much more expensive nursing homes. Everybody wins. Quality of life improves, and the government saves money.

But as more and more people sign up for IHSS, costs have skyrocketed. Caseloads have doubled in the last decade, going from 208,000 to 430,000. In that same period, state spending on IHSS has tripled, rising to a projected $1.5 billion this fiscal year.

While many welfare experts are dubious, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is convinced that fraud is driving up costs. To deal with fraud, the state now requires recipients and IHSS workers to be fingerprinted and has imposed more burdensome record-keeping on providers, recipients and counties.

County district attorneys have been given more money to investigate and prosecute fraud. Sacramento District Attorney Jan Scully, who received $3 million to set up an IHSS fraud task force, says in four months her office has turned up 19 felony cases that account for $315,000 in alleged IHSS overpayments. Considering Sacramento County has 42,000 caregivers and recipients, 19 instances of fraud isn’t really all that significant.

Critics argue persuasively that claims of fraud are overblown. A 2007 state audit found only 1 percent of IHSS cases involved fraud.

An admittedly harsh but more sensible and effective approach to reducing IHSS costs is to reduce eligibility across the board. A new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office – “Considering the State Costs and Benefits: In-Home Supportive Services Program” – concludes that it costs the state and counties more to provide in-home services than they save in nursing home costs. Why? Because a certain unknown percentage of IHSS recipients would not go into nursing homes even if benefits were cut off completely.

The LAO’s report tests a basic assumption of the IHSS program – that without help in their homes all or even most IHSS recipients would go into very expensive skilled nursing facilities, in the end costing the state and counties more money.

The average cost of a skilled nursing facility is $55,000 a year. The average cost of in-home services in California is $10,000. Obviously, in-home services are cheaper.

But as the analyst’s report concludes, if in-home services are reduced or eliminated, most recipients will not go into nursing homes. Some won’t meet the criteria that would make them eligible for state-supported nursing home care. And others, who do, will choose voluntarily to stay in their homes. In some cases, family members who are IHSS providers will continue to care for their elderly or disabled relatives in their own homes even if they aren’t paid.

Rather than sending in cops and prosecutors to ferret out low levels of fraud, the state could save more, in these tough economic times, by reserving in-home services to individuals who are the most impaired and most likely to have to go to nursing homes or access other more expensive state support to remain in the community.

A harsh response? Yes, but better than sending in the cops.

Starting Sunday at UC Davis, the National Academy of Sciences will begin five days of hearings on federal water pumping restrictions aimed at protecting fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Given the academy’s stature and reputation, we can’t help but say “welcome” to all the scientists on the panel. That said, there are real questions about this review. Is it warranted on scientific grounds? Or is it just an effort by an influential U.S. senator to shore up her support among farmers in the San Joaquin Valley?

At issue are federal wildlife regulations that seek to protect steelhead, sturgeon, Delta smelt and two runs of salmon. At certain times of the year, the regulations set limits on reservoir operations and water diversions so fish aren’t sucked into the Delta’s water pumps. In the fall, the rules require more outflow through the Delta.

So far, two separate scientific panels have affirmed the importance of fall flows for the smelt. Yet farmers near Fresno, who have lost irrigation supplies to such rules, claim they are based on bogus science. And they have Sen. Dianne Feinstein on their side.

In September, the wealthy owner of Paramount Farms, Stewart Resnick, asked Feinstein for an outside scientific review. Feinstein, who has received significant campaign contributions from Resnick and other farmers over the years, readily complied.

The result is an NAS review that will take more than two years and cost an estimated $1.5 million.

There’s little point in getting worked up about this expenditure now. What’s done is done. We hope Feinstein is right in asserting that the academy’s review could lead to more informed decisions about the Delta’s water and fish. We’ll wait and see.

But if the academy’s review only reaffirms the current science, then Feinstein will need to be held accountable.

We’ve been fighting over the Delta for decades. In each one, various native species draw closer to extinction. The time for stalling and smoke screens is long past.

Help for potential dropouts

Re “Homework: Burden or Benefit?” (Forum, Jan. 17): The three articles in Sunday’s Forum discussing the value of homework say to me, “Can our middle-class children get into good colleges with less homework?”

The chatter about problems in education is overly focused on college-bound children. What about the fates of the 24 percent of students who drop out of high school? Those who will probably drop out can be identified in grade school. Most come from homes in poverty, many with single moms who mostly earn a substandard wage. Large numbers are immigrants. Yet their needs seem treated as inconsequential.

These dropouts need the skills and information to help them get work providing a proper living and not “just try harder and you, too, can go to college.” Are there large, properly funded national programs to provide them with work skills? What do other nations do? An example: Steven Hill’s new book “Europe’s Promise” relates that one of Germany’s “social capitalism” programs uses European Social Funds for “opening up the labor market to young immigrant school leavers.” The EU accepts that most dropouts (and graduates) will not attend college and focuses on preparing them for the work force. We don’t. We’ve gotta do better.

– Pete Martineau, Fair Oaks

Homework, not make-work

Re “Homework: Burden or Benefit?” (Forum, Jan. 17): As a high school senior in Sacramento, I can tell you honestly that nothing kills a teenager’s weekday evening more than a dreaded stack of homework to be completed before day’s end.

Debate has arisen over the effectiveness of homework and whether or not appropriate amounts are assigned to students. However, a student’s aptitude for homework is not what should assess the effectiveness of homework. Homework’s “worth” should rather be evaluated based on how a teacher uses assigned work in the lesson plan. If a teacher tells you to do 30 math problems purely for practice or to get ahead, there is absolutely no incentive to do the assigned work.

On the contrary, if a teacher assigns three chapters of Shakespeare to read, and you know that the reading will be discussed and actually utilized in the classroom, one is much more likely to complete it. Thus, homework policies should correspond directly with lessons and discussion in class instead of merely to develop good study habits.

So teachers, stop imposing a homework quota on your students, and parents, stop asking for more homework. Just because your kid isn’t doing three hours of homework a night doesn’t mean they’re dumb.

– Jeremy Akiyama, Sacramento

Mixing education metaphors

Re “Running schools as business is wrong course” (Viewpoints, Jan. 16): Walt Gardner’s column confirms the old cliché, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” As a long-time teacher and college lecturer, Gardner illustrates the failure of most of those who are teaching in our schools and universities – no real world experience.

Gardner claims that failure of the St. Louis school district to operate as a business is because schools can’t be run like a business. Gardner makes a significant mistake in his description of how a school should be run like a business. He claims that schools are the employers and the students are the workers. Clearly, Gardner has never worked in a business. The actual example is that the schools are the business (the employers), the teachers are the employees and the students are the customers – not workers.

Instead of lamenting that public schools “must accept virtually all who show up at the schoolhouse door,” the schools should look upon the students as customers who want to “purchase” the school’s service – education. Using the retail store as an example, they (the retail store) accept all customers. This is not “the antithesis of how business operates,” but is exactly how businesses operate.

– Don Simons, Carmichael

Save classrooms for learners

Re “Running schools as business is wrong course” (Viewpoints, Jan. 16): Walt Gardner writes that after a series of legal cases, students have gained the right to due process protections in an effort to guard against abusive actions by educators attempting to curtail disruptive students. He further notes that the expansion and broadened interpretations of students’ legal rights has placed educators in a precarious position which has “had a chilling effect on efforts to maintain an atmosphere conducive to learning.”

As an educator for more than 20 years, I have witnessed countless disruptions where these laws have effectively undermined teachers and administrators in their efforts to remove disruptive students from the classroom, either temporarily or permanently. No doubt these laws have protected students from unjust actions, but they have also permitted disruptive students to remain in class longer than they should.

While attention has focused on incompetent teachers, parents and taxpayers should not lose sight of the fact that disruptive students shortchange all students of their education. Failure to adequately address this question will leave the education of our students in an educational triage characterized by special programs and other Band-Aid approaches employed to raise test scores rather than addressing the root of the problem – ensuring classrooms conducive to learning.

– Sharon Quinsland, El Dorado Hills

Consolidate schools to save

Re “Budget plan puzzles schools” (Our Region, Jan. 14): There were several comments related to how school districts had cut administrative costs “to the bone” and how difficult it will be to achieve the governor’s request to reduce administrative costs by 10 percent. And then there was the striking comment from Twin Rivers Unified School District Superintendent Frank Porter that through consolidation of three elementary school districts that “by July the district will have cut administrative costs in half.” In related news, I learned that more than 55 percent of California’s 1,130 school districts serve fewer than 2,500 students – 80 percent of these serve fewer than 1,500 students. Seems like the course California should take is obvious.

– John Finegan, Sacramento

Haiti needs a new start

The devastation and loss of life in Haiti caused by the 7.0 earthquake is just one chapter of its tragic history. The rest is slavery – started in 1517 by the Spaniards, brutal and rapacious French colonialism and neglect by the world after a successful slave revolt and independence gained in 1804, self-misrule and corruption. The end result has been a country mired in poverty and instability, long considered one of the poorest nations in the world.

I agree with those who advocate a complete rebuild of Haiti: schools, hospitals, infrastructure, clean food and water, political and social stability, a free enterprise market economy, favorable trade agreements, foreign capital and investment – all the things we hear and read about so essential to becoming a viable and self-sustaining nation.

A tall order indeed, but a wonderful humanitarian undertaking in contrast to the senseless killing and destruction so rampant in this world.

– Bill Harder Sr., Auburn

His epitaph is a catchphrase

Re “The ‘D’ Word; In most published remembrances, loved ones dance around death – but does it really help anyone?” (Living Here, Jan. 19): As a former avid fisherman, I have told my wife and kids that I want my “passing away” to be phrased this way: “Got my limit, going home!”

– Dick Rooney, Lincoln

Daniel Newman

A river of money underlies all decisions in Congress and in Sacramento. This week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision on Citizens United v. FEC will flood this river, unleashing unlimited corporate spending on ads to influence elections. We will still be electing the best fundraisers, rather than the best leaders.

Research by MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan nonprofit that reveals relationships between campaign donations and legislative votes, has repeatedly shown that politicians’ relentless fundraising has a payoff to interest groups that provide the funds. We find that on issue after issue, how lawmakers vote aligns with the interest groups that fund their campaigns. For example:

• Prescription drug imports: In the current health care debate in the U.S. Senate, senators voting to block drug imports from other countries, as drug companies wanted, received an average of $85,779 each from drug companies. That’s 69 percent more than given to senators who voted to allow imports.

• Financial bailout: House members who voted for the $700 billion bank bailout received 54 percent more campaign contributions from banks and securities firms than House members voting against the bailout. That is an average of $231,877 in bank contributions received by each House member voting “Yes,” $150,982 for each member voting “No.”

• Telecom immunity: House Democrats who flipped their positions to favor immunity for telecom firms received an average of 68 percent more money from AT&T’s, Verizon’s and Sprint’s political action committees, compared with Democrats who remained opposed to immunity. That’s $4,987 to each Democrat who opposed immunity and $8,359 to each Democrat who flipped positions to favor telecom firms.

Do legislators vote a certain way because they received money, or do they receive money because they vote a certain way? Either way, interest groups are still buying votes. Even in cases where a legislator does not change his or her views, legislators favorable to industry interests raise more money to campaign, to conduct polls, to buy ads and to get elected. Congress, and Sacramento, are bought and biased in favor of the interest groups that fund campaigns, even if no individual politicians change their beliefs or their vote.

We can expect an escalating arms race in California House and Senate races. Corporations from across the country will pour millions in shareholder funds into TV ads and direct mail attacks, to buy California’s seats and votes in Congress.

We can also expect California’s candidates to pay even less attention to voters, as they spend even more time courting the deep-pocketed corporations who have the newly granted power to make or break their quest to “represent the people.”

Despite the ruling Thursday, there is hope. Seven states allow candidates to run for office and win without accepting funds from private interests seeking favors. In Connecticut, for example, after just one election with their new citizen-funded election system, 81 percent of sitting Connecticut legislators were free of seeking big donations from interest groups investing in politics. They are free to make decisions based on citizens’ best interests.

Imagine the California Legislature, and U.S. Congress, elected without influence-seeking dollars. It may be hard to imagine, but it is reality now in these forward-thinking states. It could be a reality in California and Washington, D.C., very soon.

In Congress, the Fair Elections Now Act (fairelectionsnow.org) has more than 125 sponsors in Congress, including Sen. Barbara Boxer.

And, closer to home, here in California, the California Fair Elections Act will be on this June’s ballot (yesfairelections.org). Endorsed by the League of Women Voters of California, this measure will take key steps forward to let state officials focus on governing instead of fundraising.

This week’s Supreme Court decision takes a system that’s already bad and makes it worse. Fortunately, solutions are already tested and ready to be enacted – by Congress and by California voters this June.

The Supreme Court on Thursday upended a century’s worth of campaign finance law. An immediate question raised by the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision is whether this will flood elections with corporate money. Less understood but deeply significant is what this shows about the court and its relationship to the Obama administration and Congress.

This far-reaching ruling augurs a significant power struggle. For the first time since 1937, an increasingly conservative federal judiciary faces a progressive and activist Congress and president. Until now, it was unclear how the justices would accommodate the new political alignment. The Citizens United decision suggests an assertive court, eager to overturn precedent, looming as a challenge to President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Through most of American history, courts have usually stood to the right of the elected branches, especially on issues concerning business. Progressive Era federal judges routinely voided social legislation, from the income tax to the minimum wage and limits on the hours worked by women and children.

Republican presidents have appointed 12 of the 15 new justices over the past four decades. But those justices had few liberal laws to react to.

Now, though, as elected branches have moved haltingly to the left, the court has moved sharply right. Chief Justice John Roberts has mustered five votes for a conservative judicial approach that eluded his predecessors Warren Burger and William Rehnquist. Long-germinating conservative legal theories have begun to guide opinions, most notably in the 2008 case that found an inviolable right to own a handgun that the court had never discerned in the previous 200 years.

Many expected the first big clash of the Obama era to come in voting rights. Last year the court considered reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark civil rights statute. In oral argument, Roberts and Samuel Alito made clear their distaste for the law. But voting 8-1, the justices pulled back from making a constitutional ruling at all. It upheld the landmark law but left it open to future challenges.

Such restraint seemed a faint memory in Citizens United. For starters, the court reached out to consider a major constitutional case when it didn’t have to. The case itself addressed an arcane issue: whether campaign finance laws were properly applied to an infomercial critical of Hillary Clinton.

The justices easily could have ruled on narrow statutory grounds. Instead, last summer, they announced a rushed re-argument, making clear they were itching to overturn a century of constitutional doctrine, even though the case offered no factual or trial record on the broad question of corporate spending.

This week the justices struck down laws in 22 states and overturned key decisions from 1990 and 2003 – all in the middle of a new election cycle. It is hard to remember an instance in which the justices reached so far to make major constitutional law. It will have immediate political consequences. Business managers now will be able to spend at will Bloomberg-level sums in congressional races across the country. In partisan and political impact, this rivals Bush v. Gore.

The decision portends an even more deregulatory thrust in campaign finance. Another big campaign finance case soon likely to reach the high court would test the ban on large “soft money” contributions to political parties, last upheld by the court in 2003. Just days after John McCain’s presidential campaign ended, the Republican National Committee sued to overturn the provision that was his proudest legislative accomplishment. That would mark a true plunge into partisan wars. Explaining the case, the RNC’s political director was blunt: To have a chance of matching Obama’s small donations, “we need to be on an equal footing, and we think that law (McCain-Feingold) keeps us from doing that.”

What will this mean for Obama’s broader agenda? Health care, climate change, financial reregulation, the auto bailout – all heighten government’s role in the economy. The Citizens United ruling suggests the court may smile on even the most audacious conservative legal theories, such as those alleging that regulations are an improper taking by the government. And it shows an unsettling eagerness to overturn precedent in line with ideological predilection.

The five votes may be fleeting, depending on who leaves the court next, but the Roberts majority appears ready to use its power while it has it. The Supreme Court and its role may well become a contested issue in this and upcoming elections – as it has been through much of American history. This time it will be progressives demanding an end to judicial activism.

A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can make excuses and fail the test of history.

Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election means that Democrats can’t send a modified health care bill back to the Senate. That’s a shame because the bill that would have emerged from House-Senate negotiations would have been better than the bill the Senate has already passed. But the Senate bill is much, much better than nothing. And all that has to happen to make it law is for the House to pass the same bill, and send it to President Barack Obama’s desk.

Right now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate bill. But there is no good alternative.

Some are urging Democrats to scale back their proposals in the hope of gaining Republican support. But anyone who thinks that would work must have spent the past year living on another planet.

The fact is that the Senate bill is a centrist document, which moderate Republicans should find entirely acceptable. In fact, it’s very similar to the plan that Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts just a few years ago. Yet it has faced lock-step opposition from the GOP, which is determined to prevent Democrats from achieving any successes. Why would this change now that Republicans think they’re on a roll?

Alternatively, some call for breaking the health care plan into pieces so that the Senate can vote the popular pieces into law. That ignores the actual policy issues.

Think of health care reform as being like a three-legged stool. You would, rightly, ridicule anyone who proposed saving money by leaving off one or two of the legs. Well, those who propose doing only the popular pieces of health care reform deserve the same kind of ridicule. Reform won’t work unless all the essential pieces are in place.

Suppose, for example, that Congress took the advice of those who want to ban insurance discrimination on the basis of medical history, and stopped there. What would happen next? The answer, as any health care economist will tell you, is that if Congress didn’t simultaneously require that healthy people buy insurance, there would be a “death spiral”: Healthier Americans would choose not to buy insurance, leading to high premiums for those who remain, driving out more people, and so on.

And if Congress tried to avoid the death spiral by requiring that healthy Americans buy insurance, it would have to offer financial aid to lower-income families to make that insurance affordable – aid at least as generous as that in the Senate bill.

There just isn’t any way to do reform on a smaller scale.

So reaching out to Republicans won’t work, and neither will trying to pass only the crowd-pleasing pieces of reform. What about the suggestion that Democrats use reconciliation – the Senate procedure for finalizing budget legislation, which bypasses the filibuster – to enact health reform? That’s a real option, which may become necessary (and could be used to improve the Senate bill after the fact).

But reconciliation, which is basically limited to matters of taxing and spending, probably can’t be used to enact many important aspects of reform. In fact, it’s not even clear if it could be used to ban discrimination based on medical history.

Finally, some Democrats want to just give up on the whole thing.

That would be an act of utter political folly. It wouldn’t protect Democrats from charges that they voted for “socialist” health care – remember, both houses of Congress have already passed reform. All it would do is solidify the public perception of Democrats as hapless and ineffectual.

And anyway, politics is supposed to be about achieving something more than your own re-election. America desperately needs health care reform; it would be a betrayal of trust if Democrats fold simply because they hope (wrongly) that this would slightly reduce their losses in the midterm elections.

Now, part of Democrats’ problem since Tuesday’s special election has been that they have been waiting in vain for leadership from the White House, where Obama has conspicuously failed to rise to the occasion.

But members of Congress, who were sent to Washington to serve the public, don’t have the right to hide behind the president’s passivity.

Bear in mind that the horrors of health insurance – outrageous premiums, coverage denied to those who need it most and dropped when you actually get sick – will get only worse if reform fails, and insurance companies know that they’re off the hook. And voters will blame politicians who, when they had a chance to do something, made excuses instead.

Ladies and gentlemen, the nation is waiting. Stop whining, and do what needs to be done.

By overturning a longstanding precedent banning corporate spending on campaigns, the U.S. Supreme Court almost surely will affect the race for U.S. Senate and congressional campaigns across the state and nation.

The 5-4 majority made up of conservative justices took a decidedly activist stand, applying the same First Amendment rights that individuals enjoy to corporations and, by extension, labor unions.

Voters will see the result – and it may not be pretty. There will be yet more attack ads, Internet assaults and mailers to clutter inboxes and airtime leading to Election Day.

The justices have been whittling away at restrictions on corporate and union financing of presidential and congressional elections since 1976. But Thursday’s ruling makes clear that corporations (and unions) can directly spend money on ads urging the victory or defeat of candidates.

Such interests have had to use political action committees (PACs) to get around previous restrictions. No more. The majority in the Citizens United v. FEC decision called PACs “burdensome alternatives” in part because they are limited to voluntary contributions from shareholders, employees or union members. So the five justices swept the PAC requirement away.

Previous decisions had opened the door to “issue ads” directly from corporate and union treasuries. An example is the “Americans for Responsible Health Care” ads that appeared Thursday in newspapers in five states (including The Bee), after a TV ad campaign in Massachusetts.

Previously, such ads couldn’t expressly urge the victory or defeat of a particular candidate. With the court’s ruling, that has now changed.

Here in California, you can expect to see corporations, unions and other interests create front groups modeled after Citizens United, a conservative non-profit that produced a caustic Hillary Clinton documentary in 2008, leading to Thursday’s court decision. Millions will likely be spent in high-profile contests, ranging from the seat now held by U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer to Richard Pombo’s attempt to return to Congress.

Is there anything left of federal campaign finance law? The 1907 ban remains on contributions from corporate treasuries directly to political candidates, which was extended to unions in 1943. That ban is in doubt.

Fortunately, the court upheld disclosure and reporting requirements – although Justice Clarence Thomas was willing to jettison even those requirements. Any corporation that spends more than $10,000 in a year to produce or air ads must file a report with the Federal Election Commission revealing the names and addresses of anyone who contributed $1,000 or more to the ad’s preparation or distribution. And the broadcast of the ad must say who is responsible for its content, plus the name and address of the group behind the ad.

The disclosure laws have big holes, however. Federal disclosure is turgid at best. It remains difficult for voters to decipher who are the true donors to various front groups.

The message to voters is: “Buyer Beware.” As election day nears, businesses and unions that have a huge stake in the election of certain politicians will have more power than ever to influence the outcome.

There’s some rare good news for a change on the county health and welfare front. Thanks to First 5 Sacramento, all young children whom Sacramento County takes into custody because of suspected abuse or neglect once again will receive medical and dental screenings before they are placed in foster homes. These screenings protect children as well as adults.

Under state law, only children taken into protective custody because of allegations of physical abuse must undergo a medical exam. Sacramento County had gone further than the state mandate, examining all children, suspected victims of physical abuse as well as those removed from their homes because of allegations of neglect or drug use in the home or other reasons.

Those expanded exams have proved to be worthwhile. According to the UC Davis Medical Center, which previously performed the exams, 38 percent of all physical injuries were found in children who were in county custody for reasons other than physical abuse. The early exams not only accelerated treatment for the injured kids, they served to protect foster parents from false allegations of abuse.

Budget cuts forced county supervisors to curtail the extra screenings last October. First 5 Sacramento initially declined to backfill the funding, in part because Child Protective Services had failed to specify exactly how the money was to be spent.

Whatever confusion existed has been cleared up. First 5 Sacramento commissioners voted unanimously this week to provide $743,281 in tobacco tax revenues for the new program. That money will be matched dollar for dollar with federal funds. In all, the county will have almost $1.5 million. That’s enough not only to restore screenings through June 2012 but to expand the program to include home visitations, developmental screenings and prevention and education services, too.

Although there are not many silver linings in the county’s bleak budget, it’s a relief to see Sacramento’s most vulnerable kids get a boost.

Bruce Maiman

Time for a face palm.

On Thursday, the University of California’s governing Board of Regents formally approved $3.1 million in incentive pay to 38 senior medical executives for meeting 2009 performance goals.

The payouts range from $30,120 to $218,728. Not salaries – bonuses.

The UC system is broke. It’s raising tuition and fees. Rank-and-file hospital employees are taking pay cuts and suffering layoffs. The board says it doesn’t like doing this but there’s no state money and they have no choice, so everyone has to share the pain.

Yet they’re paying bonuses? Know what they’re based on? Lowering infection rates and increasing patient satisfaction. At a hospital.

In other words, we’re hiring a professional at six figures to run a hospital, the expectation being that it’s infection-free, but he gets paid a bonus if he cuts down the rate of infection.

Hello? Yes, we’re hiring a big-shot administrator for six figures to run my hospital and he’s saying, incidentally, I’ll make sure more of your patients are satisfied if you give me a $100,000 bonus.

I don’t know about you, but that’s about the time I go to job applicant B.

Obviously, no hospital is infection-free and not every patient is satisfied, but you’d think that keeping a hospital clear of infection would be a primary function for any salaried hospital employee, not something to be incentivized.

So why do we pay the chief executive officer and the rest of the executive hospital staff a bonus to reduce the rate of infection? Rank-and-file workers have a legitimate gripe. When Board of Regents officials explained that times were tough and everyone, including the rank and file, had to bite the bullet, the labor organizations cooperated. They didn’t like it, but they understood and sacrificed for the common good.

And now, despite tough times, executives are getting bonuses. The average bonus is around $82,000. Many UC workers make less than $40,000 annually and they took 4 percent pay cuts.

UC officials quickly noted that about 22,000 rank-and-file employees also earned incentive pay last year, but their average bonus was $1,391, with many receiving far less and often on top of pay cuts.

Mind you, the people getting bonus checks for amounts like $89,000, $181,000 and $219,000 – these are people already making significant salaries.

UC officials said they had no choice: They were contractually bound to pay the bonuses.

Otherwise they could be sued.

Wait a minute, you had a contract with the employees through labor organizations that have the power to strike your shop and you didn’t hesitate to ask that they take a pay cut. Why didn’t you have the same compunction to tell the high-flying executives they’d have to forego their infection bonus or their customer satisfaction bonus?

Understand: This isn’t about not paying executive bonuses and this isn’t a pro-union pity party.

This is about whether it makes any sense to incentivize someone to do the job they’re already being paid a salary to do.

It’s about whether performance measures are based on cutting direct health care staffing, and that the people mainly responsible for the efficiencies are the lower-paid line staff and professional staff, many of whom don’t make in annual salary what these bonuses call for.

It’s about insensibly poor timing given the current economy, and it’s absolutely disingenuous to ask workers to take one for the team while excluding some of the players and then turn around to complain about a lack of state funding while raising student tuitions.

There’s a disconnect between the regents and these administrations and the understanding that these are public service jobs, not private industry jobs. Someone in the ivory tower thinks that these people should be given salaries comparable to people in private industry. That’s not the deal. You serve the public and that’s understood before you enter the profession while also being cognizant that you’re spending public money.

To be clear, the bonuses aren’t coming from state coffers. They’re coming from medical center revenue. But that’s money made thanks to state dollars invested but not returned to the system.

Instead, that money lines the pockets of senior administrators.

We should not be paying bonuses to people who are getting a salary to do what we expect them to do. Isn’t it about time the regents demonstrated that they understand the concept of fairness and ask that senior executives of the system share the burden being placed on the backs of the working stiff?

And what are we doing paying people bonuses to do what we pay them to do already? Who came up with that cotton-headed idea?

If President Barack Obama has decided to give up on health care reform, he should just come out and say so. Then we could all get on with our lives – those of us with health insurance, that is.

But I don’t see how his talk about some sort of slimmed-down package, reduced to its “core elements,” could possibly inspire Democrats in Congress to do anything but run for the hills.

Republican Scott Brown’s victory Tuesday in Massachusetts, grabbing the Senate seat that was held for decades by the late Ted Kennedy, left Democrats rattled. Actually, frantic would be a better word. Thus far, Obama has said nothing that would help calm the waters – or help the party get out of what now can officially be called the Health Care Mess. If anything, Obama is making it messier.

In an interview Wednesday with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Obama said this about health care: “I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on.” He said that we have to keep insurance companies from “taking advantage of people,” that we have to contain costs, and that we have to give small businesses help to provide health insurance to their employees.

That’s all well and good. But there is already a measure on the table that would do these things – the bill passed on Christmas Eve by the Senate. Now that the Democrats no longer have a filibuster-proof majority, it is all but inconceivable that the Senate could produce a new bill with all those elements. And it’s not possible to do health care reform a la carte.

One thing that “people agree on” is prohibiting the insurance companies from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

But doing that in isolation would cause insurance premiums to skyrocket. To make it work, you need a mandate that forces everyone – including millions of young, healthy people – to buy insurance, thus effectively subsidizing the older, sicker people whom the insurance companies would be forced to cover. But if you make low-income and moderate-income people buy health insurance, you have to give them financial assistance because otherwise they can’t afford it.

Later in the interview, Obama acknowledged this chain of “interconnected” imperatives that any workable health reform package would have to accommodate. And why shouldn’t the House just pass the Senate bill?

“I think it is very important for the House to make its determinations,” Obama said. “I think, right now, they’re feeling obviously unsettled and there were a bunch of provisions in the Senate bill that they didn’t like, and so I can’t force them to do that.”

Would a full-court press by the president have been able to cajole or coerce the House into passing a reform bill that many in the Democratic caucus consider insufficiently progressive? It looks as if we’ll never know.

On Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi flatly declared that for now, at least, she cannot find the 218 votes needed to pass the Senate bill.

“I’m not going to get into the legislative strategy,” Obama said in the ABC interview. That has been the White House approach all along, and it managed to bring meaningful health care reform legislation closer to final passage than ever before. But close doesn’t count: Reform didn’t make it across the finish line.

Yet.

Pay no attention to the Cheshire Cat claims by Republicans that they’d love to cooperate on a bipartisan reform bill. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has already ruled out modifying the current bill, insisting that the Senate has to start the process from scratch. There remains another way, and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., mentioned it Thursday: Pass a reasonable reform package using the parliamentary tactic known as budget reconciliation, which would require only a simple majority of 51 to get through the Senate rather than a supermajority of 60.

The problem with budget reconciliation is that it would require considerable intestinal fortitude on the part of nervous Democratic senators following the Massachusetts result, even though it left them with an 18-vote majority. I don’t know if that courage can be summoned. I’m certain that it won’t be if the message from President Obama is: “Whatever.”

The president can surrender and blame Republicans for killing health care reform yet again, or he can fight tooth and nail on behalf of the 46 million Americans who remain uninsured. But he has to do one or the other.

He can’t do both.

If Tuesday had been a national election, Scott Brown’s victory merely would have been the high-water mark of a Republican deluge.

A five-point win in Massachusetts would have translated into blowout Republican victories throughout the country. Every Democrat with political skills short of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s would have suddenly seemed a “weak candidate.” President Barack Obama now is left with three options as he stumbles toward the State of the Union: He can try to ignore the anger, embrace the anger or blunt the anger.

Ignoring the anger is the advice of the health reform fundamentalists: With victory only a shady maneuver away, just ram it through. Have the House pass the Senate bill unchanged – a bill that is, in Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s inspiring rallying cry, “better than nothing.” This is politics as psychological delusion, entirely unmoored from reality. Democratic health reform is unpopular, for goodness’ sake, in Massachusetts. Exit polls on Tuesday showed 52 percent opposed to the health bill and 42 percent who cast their vote with the specific intention of killing reform.

What serious Democrat would prefer this flawed, compromised, expensive bill to the political future of their party? Each time the legislation has rolled forward, it has gathered criticism and opposition like dirty slush on a snowball. Who can argue that a final push – this one smacking of desperate, anti-democratic trickery – would rescue the situation? Following Tuesday night, the most dangerous enemies of the Democratic Party are not Republicans. They are the advocates of the current health care bill.

Astute Democrats understand this. Rep. Barney Frank immediately ruled out “any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened.” The hope, says Frank, is that “some Republican senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of health care reform.” And “revised” health reform certainly would be more limited. Frank is not being a gutless Democrat. He is being a loyal Democrat – defending his party against ideologues who care little for its prospects.

Another option for Obama is to try embracing public anger – continuing to rail against plutocrats who get bailouts and bonuses.

But Obama can’t change his own history. He generally avoided this kind of populism during the worst days of the economic crisis, for the good reason that the stabilization of financial markets precluded attacks on the financial industry. At this point, Obama’s outrage would lack credibility.

Why, for over a year now, has health reform been his consuming priority while financial reform simmered on a back burner? But Obama’s main limitation as a class warrior is this: He is the least convincing populist I have ever seen. His manner is cold and cerebral. He loves to analyze and transcend ideological controversies. When he engages a debate on one side, he can be brittle, humorless and nasty.

What could possess a Harvard-trained lawyer to express scorn for Scott Brown’s pickup truck? Obama is skilled at intellectual scorn; it is not a populist talent.

Finally, Obama could try to blunt public anger by parting ways with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and moving to the ideological middle.

“Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the … party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country,” observes Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, “that’s not going to work too well.” This argument is incomprehensible to many in the media and political class, because they already view Obama as a pragmatic centrist. He didn’t insist on the public option in the health bill. He didn’t bug out of Afghanistan. He didn’t release Guantánamo detainees on the streets of Akron.

To some, this may look like the center – but only because the boundaries of their ideological world run from hard left to center left. To Massachusetts’ independents, the Obama agenda looked a lot like liberalism.

Is Obama capable of scaling back health reform, taking the deficit seriously and working with Republicans to promote economic growth? We have no idea, because Obama is a stranger to governing. But unless he blunts the anger we saw Tuesday, he will feel it again.

“We are on the precipice of an achievement that’s eluded congresses and presidents for generations.”

– President Barack Obama, Dec. 15, on health care legislation

Precipice, 1. a headlong fall or descent, esp. to a great depth.

– Oxford English Dictionary

Trying to guarantee Americans the thrill of the precipice, the president dashed to Massachusetts on Sunday, thereby conceding that he had already lost Tuesday’s Senate election, which had become a referendum on his signature program. By promising to cast the decisive 41st vote against the president’s health care legislation, the Republican candidate forced all congressional Democrats to contemplate this: Not even frenzied national mobilization of Democratic manpower and millions of dollars could rescue one of the safest Democratic seats in the national legislature from national dismay about the incontinent government expansion, of which that legislation is symptomatic.

Because the legislation is frightening and unpopular, Democrats have had to resort to serial bribery to advance it. Massachusetts voted immediately after the corruption of exempting, until 2018, union members from the tax on high-value health insurance plans. This tax was supposedly the crucial component of what supposedly was reform’s primary goal: reducing costs.

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., thought Bill Clinton’s presidency was crippled by the 1993 decision to pursue health care reform rather than welfare reform. So slight was public enthusiasm for the former, Clinton’s program never even came to a vote in either the House or Senate, both controlled by Democrats. There was such fervor for welfare reform that in 1996, after two Clinton vetoes, he finally signed the decade’s most important legislation.

The Democrats’ sole remaining reason for completing the damn thing is that they started it. They seem to have convinced themselves that Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994 because they did not pass an unpopular health bill in 1993.

Actually, their 1994 debacle had more to do with the arrogance and malfeasance arising from 40 years of control of the House of Representatives (e.g., the House banking scandal), a provocative crime bill (gun control, federal subsidies for midnight basketball), and other matters.

With one piece of legislation, Obama and his congressional allies have done in one year what it took President Lyndon Johnson and his allies two years to do in 1965 and 1966 – revive conservatism. Today conservatism is rising on the stepping stones of liberal excesses.

Today, Democrats worrying about a reprise of 1994 should worry more about a rerun of the 1966 midterm elections, which began a Republican resurgence that presaged victories in seven of the next 10 presidential elections.

The 2008 elections gave liberals the curse of opportunity, and they have used it to reveal themselves ruinously. The protracted health care debacle has highlighted this fact: Some liberals consider the legislation’s unpopularity a reason to redouble their efforts to inflict it on Americans who, such liberals think, are too benighted to understand that their betters know best. The essence of contemporary liberalism is the illiberal conviction that Americans, in their comprehensive incompetence, need minute supervision by government.

Last week, trying to buttress the bovine obedience of most House Democrats, Obama assured them that if the bill becomes law, “the American people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like.”

Suddenly? If the Democrats’ congressional leaders are determined to continue their kamikaze flight to incineration, they will ignore Massachusetts’ redundant evidence of public disgust. They will leaven their strategy of briberies with procedural cynicism – delaying certification of Massachusetts’ Senate choice, or misusing “reconciliation” to evade Senate rules, or forcing the House to swallow its last shred of pride in order to rush the Senate bill to the president’s desk. Surely any such trickery would be one brick over a load for some hitherto servile members of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses, giving them an excuse to halt their party’s Gadarene rush toward the precipice.

Gavin Newsom still looks glossy, like someone who’d play JFK in a Lifetime original movie.

But the 42-year-old mayor of San Francisco sees his once glowing political future in less glamorous terms.

“I mean, oh, God,” he said, sipping green tea in his elegant office. “In a couple of years, you’ll see me as the clerk of a wine store.”

It’s easy to picture the lithe and charming Newsom – with the well-cut suits, the electric Tesla, the beautiful blonde wife and baby – advising a Pacific Heights couple on a cabernet with aromas of eucalyptus and mint. Before he got into politics, after all, he started a boutique wine shop in Napa Valley that blossomed into a multi- million-dollar business.

So how did this onetime poster boy for the new face of the Democratic Party get to the point where he couldn’t raise the money to compete with the old-school Jerry Brown in the governor’s race, and why is he leaving politics just when he feels as though he’s getting better at it?

“This is it. God bless. It was fun while it lasted,” he said of his career, with a rueful smile. “Guys like me don’t necessarily progress very far, which is fine.”

If Newsom feels a little sorry for himself these days, it’s perfectly understandable.

In a courthouse a few blocks from City Hall, Ted Olson and David Boies are defending same-sex marriage in a landmark case substantially financed so far by David Geffen and Steve Bing. While the mayor contemplates life as a wine clerk, the two lawyers are becoming bipartisan folk heroes to gays and lesbians and were lionized in a Newsweek cover story and a Diana Walker photo spread in Time.

Boies told the New Yorker that the “powerful images” of gay couples flocking to San Francisco to tie the knot had helped move him to get involved in the case to overturn Proposition 8.

Like many pioneers who go first – from the “Ellen” sitcom to the Hillary drama – the mayor who staked his career on giving equal rights to gays may have to settle for paving the way. The lawyers get praised, but he got pilloried?

“Grand understatement,” he said dryly, noting that he still remembers press coverage from before the 2004 same-sex marriage eruption about shooting stars of the Democratic Party.

“There were five of us,” he said, with a teasing nostalgia.

“A guy named Obama. I’m like, ‘Why is he in here? This is ridiculous. I mean, he’s a state senator. I’m kind of insulted.’

“Life was really good, and then it came crashing down. ‘You’re not going to be speaking at the convention. We overbooked.’ And then it becomes the house of cards with the Democrats excusing themselves from visits to this city and being in the same room with me.

“I went in with the beginner’s mind. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I never imagined 4,036 couples getting married over a month. And this is by no means an excuse for the governor’s race.

“But you just couldn’t escape from the perception ‘he’s just a single-issue person.’ I remember standing there at the window, and I swear to you, I resigned myself to not even being re-elected mayor. This is a much more conservative town than people give it credit for.”

And now Jerry Brown might be governor redux?

“It’s frustrating,” Newsom admitted. “It’s not a critique, but he wasn’t particularly helpful at the time. I think he came around very recently, and I think there was some pragmatism to that as well, candidly.”

I asked whether President Barack Obama, who said at a Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration that the civil rights movement was partly about “changing people’s hearts and minds and breaking out of old customs and old habits,” had disappointed him given that the president is a triumph of civil rights himself.

“Oh, I can’t get in trouble here,” Newsom said with a playful wince. “I want him to succeed. But I am very upset by what he’s not done in terms of rights of gays and lesbians. I understand it tactically in a campaign, but at this point I don’t know. There is some belief that he actually doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage.

“But it’s fundamentally inexcusable for a member of the Democratic Party to stand on the principle that separate is now equal, but only on the basis of sexual orientation. We’ve always fought for the rights of minorities and against the whims of majorities.”

He said the promise of Obama sparking an “organic movement” has faded and “there’s a growing discontent and lack of enthusiasm that I worry about. He should just stand on principle, put this behind him and move on.”

The mayor, who met with Olson and Boies the day after we talked, said he wanted to go to court and see them in action. After all, they’re the local heroes.

Former Sacramento Police Chief Albert Nájera, the candidate with the most impressive résumé, has dropped out of the race for Sacramento County sheriff. That ought to alarm county residents, supervisors and deputies.

In his official withdrawal statement, Nájera said that, after reviewing the department’s budget and talking to deputies and managers, he was forced to face a “harsh reality. … The department is not structured or financed to support the vision I have for public safety.”

Privately, Nájera was more blunt. “I’m not a demolition kind of guy. I’m a construction guy … I keep getting slapped by reality. This department is going to shrink.”

The county’s fiscal crisis convinced Nájera that he would not be able to deliver the law enforcement services people in the unincorporated areas of the county want – more patrols, faster response times and more deputies trained to address neighborhood problems.

Beyond money issues, he saw destructive levels of factionalism, with even high-ranking managers bluntly stating that they were in “Blanas’ (former sheriff Lou Blanas) camp,” suggesting that a Sheriff John McGinness camp existed as well. Nájera feared that his candidacy might potentially create a third faction within an already divided department.

He also worried about the institutional constraints on his ability to build an effective management team. The sheriff has authority to appoint only one member of his command staff, the undersheriff.

County civil service rules, union contracts and deeply ingrained past practices make it difficult for the sheriff to assign top management staff where they would be most effective. Nájera says he was surprised by how many high-cost, top-ranking sworn officers occupied positions that are filled by lower-cost civilians in the city Police Department. For example, in the Sheriff’s Department, the head of information technology is a captain.

Nájera recognized that changing those long-standing practices would have required divisive, internal personnel fights at a time the sheriff’s focus is urgently needed to deal with budget, training and crime-fighting issues. In the end, he decided he did not want to take on a job where he saw too little chance of success.

County leaders need to take note. Even if they can’t give the next sheriff more funds, they need to give him greater flexibility to do this critical job in the most cost-effective way possible. Sacramento’s next sheriff confronts a world of challenges, and they won’t go away because Nájera dropped out of the race.