Author: SacBee — Opinion

Reading the fine print can be a hassle, but tiny type can be a matter of life and death when it appears on prescription drug labels. That’s why it’s so disappointing the California Pharmacy Board appears poised to adopt a weak prescription drug labeling standard that puts the health of Californians at risk.

As the Institute of Medicine noted in its 2007 “Preventing Medication Errors” report, when patients have a hard time reading prescription drug names and instructions printed on medication bottles, there’s a high potential for harmful errors, especially among seniors.

A 2007 law written by state Sen. Elaine Corbett aimed to curb medication errors and improve drug regimen adherence by making prescription drug labels easier to read. The law requires the State Board of Pharmacy to enact regulations that require a standardized, patient-centered, prescription drug label on all prescription medicine dispensed to patients in California. Under the law, the board is supposed to consider improved font types and sizes, placement of information that is patient-centered, improved directions for use, the needs of seniors, and the needs of patients with limited English proficiency.

It also requires maximum public comment. True to that mandate, for over a year the board held town hall meetings around the state and formal regulatory hearings in Sacramento, and received oral and written testimony from organizations representing consumers, seniors, patients, communities of color, and industry groups.

The board concluded, through a search of the academic literature, that 12-point typeface was the appropriate size. Taking all this into account, last November the board recommended a regulation that called for minimum 12-point type and increased assistance for patients with language barriers.

But just two months later, the board did an abrupt about-face, acceding to industry demands, and proposed a 10-point typeface minimum and reduced help for those with limited English skills.

What changed between November and January? Not the academic research or the needs of seniors and other consumers. The day before the January meeting, the governor appointed Deborah Veale, director of managed care for CVS Pharmacy, to the board. Veale cast the deciding vote to reject the more consumer-friendly regulation. The board then opted for a drug label standard requiring 10-point type and language interpretation only at the pharmacy’s discretion.

As the board has acknowledged, not a single piece of evidence supported their vote for the 10-point type. The American College of Physicians recommends a 12-point type minimum on prescription drug labels, and a recent report by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy acknowledges 12-point type as the industry standard.

In New York City, an ordinance requires pharmacies to provide translation for drug labels, and national chains are already geared up for that translation. In a 2007 California Health Interview Survey by UCLA, nearly a quarter of respondents with limited English proficiency reported difficulty reading prescription labels.

The board will meet on April 22 to make its final decision on the drug labeling regulation. Since the January hearing, more than 1,000 Californians have sent letters to the board through Consumers Union’s Safe Patient Project site (www. SafePatientProject.org) in support of the original proposed regulation for minimum 12-point type. Numerous other groups representing seniors, communities of color and consumers have weighed in supporting the originally proposed regulation.

And in early March, the director of the state Department of Consumer Affairs, Brian Stiger, also weighed in urging the board to reverse its decision, stating, “We believe the minimum standard of 10-point font is inadequate.”

The board should heed the public outcry and listen to the experts. It is only common sense that drug labels that are unreadable by patients will more likely result in harmful medication errors. Californians shouldn’t have to take out a magnifying glass to read prescription drug labels. Make the labels readable. It can be a matter of life or death.

Five years ago, some local leaders sought to chart a different path for the Sacramento region. Instead of more of the same – endless suburban sprawl and ever worsening traffic congestion – they unveiled an alternate vision for 2050, one that seeks to confine the region’s urban footprint, encourage mass transit and preserve open space and farmland.

That alternative future, known as the Blueprint, has been embraced by many local governments across the six-county region. The Legislature followed up with Senate Bill 375, which steers transportation funding to transit-friendly projects.

Both efforts have drawn national attention to the Sacramento region’s plans to “grow up, instead of out.” That’s why hundreds of community leaders, planners and others will gather today to celebrate the Blueprint’s five-year anniversary.

But it’s way too early to pop the champagne. The next five years will be even more telling for the Blueprint’s ultimate impact, so its champions need to keep up their guard.

Because the worst recession in decades hit soon after it came out, the real test will come as development picks up again when the economy rebounds. There is cause for concern that smart-growth principles will fall by the wayside as officials seek to replenish local treasuries.

On the plus side, nearly 70 percent of new housing built in 2008 was on small lots or condos and townhouses, compared with just 20 percent in 2002, according to the Sacramento Area Council of Governments and Valley Vision, the two groups that led the charge for the Blueprint.

SACOG cites a roster of projects across the region, either completed or proposed, that follow the Blueprint. Much of the business community remains on board. And in a crucial vote last year, the Sacramento City Council approved a 2030 general plan in line with the Blueprint. So did Yolo County supervisors.

But what made the Blueprint so easy to embrace – it is voluntary – is also its biggest shortcoming.

The Environmental Council of Sacramento, among others, says the Blueprint does not include enough carrots to encourage or sticks to prod elected officials to stay true to it in their land-use decisions. Indeed, in some of the most undeveloped areas where the Blueprint is most needed, it has gained the least traction.

Elk Grove is Exhibit A. The city, barely a decade old, has grown to more than 100,000 people but is looking to expand even more by laying claim to thousands of acres south to the Cosumnes River.

For every Blueprint-friendly proposal like Township 9 north of downtown Sacramento, there’s a sprawl engine like Placer Vineyards next to west Roseville. If the housing market shifts back to large lots in the suburbs, developers are ready with tens of thousands on vacant land.

Looking ahead, a key yardstick will be whether Sacramento County supervisors will hew to the Blueprint when they update the county’s general plan this year.

There are other open questions: Will bigger urban infill projects in Sacramento and elsewhere come to fruition? How damaging will the precarious funding for Sacramento Regional Transit and other transit systems be?

One thing is certain: The fiercest battles over the Blueprint are yet to come.

If the United States hopes to secure its energy future and reduce its reliance on imported oil, it must stop being a gas hog on the road.

Currently, the United States consumes 22 percent of the world’s oil, with roughly half of that needed to produce motor fuels for cars and trucks. This wasteful consumption of fossil fuels is costly to our economy and dangerous for public health and the environment. To chart a new course, we must build smarter communities and transit systems and drive cleaner and more efficient vehicles.

On Thursday, the Obama administration took a step in that direction by adopting new standards for automobile fuel economy and greenhouse emissions. The standards mirror those adopted by California in 2004 that were fought fiercely, and unsuccessfully, by the auto industry.

These new federal standards call for new vehicles to average 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016, up nearly 10 mpg from the current average. If implemented and not sidetracked by Congress, these standards could save 11.6 billion gallons of gasoline annually starting in 2016, and reduce greenhouse pollution by 108 million metric tons yearly.

Like the California rules, the federal ones are sparking controversy. Some auto dealers complain the regulation will increase the price of new cars, and they will.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates the rules will cost consumers $434 extra per vehicle in the 2012 model year and $926 per vehicle by 2016. But car owners would save more than $3,000 over the lives of their vehicles through better gas mileage. Collectively, California consumers will save $4 billion at the pump annually, according to an analysis this week by the nonprofit group, Environment California.

This cleaner future is far from a sure thing. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, is seeking to overturn the EPA’s finding that global warming pollutants threaten human health, the basis for the new standards. Some Democrats and Republicans in the House are pushing similar measures. Congress will have to be resolute to put the gas hogs on a diet.

Race to the Top was always too good to be true. President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan sold the $4.35 billion stimulus program as education reform’s 21st century “moon shot.” But as this week’s announcement of the first two state grant recipients shows, it’s just another expensive sop to the education establishment, no less beholden to politics and bound by bureaucratic red tape.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia made the list of finalists, but only two applicants – Delaware and Tennessee – made the grade.

Delaware will receive about $100 million and Tennessee about $500 million to put their comprehensive school reform plans into practice over the next four years.

Cash-strapped states passed over in the first round are scrambling for a piece of the remaining $3.4 billion in Race cash. Any state that lost out should take a close look at not simply what plans passed muster with the Education Department but why those plans succeeded.

What exactly set Delaware and Tennessee apart from the rest? Like the other contenders, both states passed new laws to comply with 19 federally prescribed criteria. Both states focused their applications on teacher and principal effectiveness; giving administrators power to remove poorly rated teachers even if they have tenure; providing cash incentives for teachers to work in “high-need” schools, and using data to evaluate teacher performance.

But that wasn’t all. “Perhaps most importantly,” Duncan said at Monday’s announcement, “every one of the districts in Delaware and Tennessee is committed to implementing the reforms in Race to the Top, and they have the support of the state leaders as well as their unions.” In fact, Delaware had 100 percent union support and Tennessee had 93 percent support.

And there you have it. Innovation, the Obama administration’s watchword from the beginning, wasn’t nearly as vital as “statewide buy-in” from “stakeholders.” And in education politics, the teachers union is the most powerful stakeholder of all.

Both Tennessee and Delaware made substantial compromises with teachers unions to win political backing in Washington. The unions are willing to allow changes in tenure laws and tougher evaluation rules if it means higher salaries and benefits down the road. Missing from the Delaware and Tennessee applications was any innovation in school choice or competition. Both states have middling charter school laws.

Florida, Louisiana and Rhode Island, which also made the finals, made the mistake of emphasizing proposals to promote charter schools and impose rigorous teacher evaluations. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example, New Orleans has become a laboratory of educational reform and progress, which officials had hoped to replicate around the Pelican State. But Louisiana’s teachers union wouldn’t buy in 100 percent. Neither would unions in Florida and Rhode Island, where the state is already laboring under federal mandates to turn around failing schools. And so those states lost out.

California’s proposal, which was cut from the competition in March, met with fierce union opposition from the start. United Teachers Los Angeles, the largest teachers union in the nation’s biggest school district, flatly refused to cooperate with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state education officials in crafting reform legislation last year.

As one Race to the Top application reviewer noted on California’s application, “The lack of union buy-in at this stage raises serious concerns.”

The Obama administration has said Race to the Top will be its model for funding education in the coming years. Yet despite the rhetoric about improving teacher training and tying pay to performance – certainly laudable goals – Race to the Top seemed only to pay lip service to real grass-roots innovations such as school choice and “disruptive technologies” that give students access to first-class learning tools from a laptop computer.

“No one is protecting the status quo,” Duncan said. Nonsense. Placing so much importance on “stakeholder buy-ins” forces states to appease special interests instead of going for what best serves students. As a result, Race to the Top will be little more than a pricey public relations gimmick.

At its holiest time of the year, the Roman Catholic Church is being forced to confront not only the central mystery of the faith – life after death – but also a more worldly riddle: What did the Holy Father know, and when did he know it?

Questions about whether Pope Benedict XVI was personally involved, as he rose through the church hierarchy, in sweeping incidents of sexual abuse by parish priests under the rug have put the Vatican on the defensive. A top legal official of the Holy See even felt obliged to argue, in an interview with the Rome newspaper Corriere della Sera, that the Vatican is not legally responsible for any failure by individual bishops to properly handle reports of abuse – and that, in any event, Benedict is a head of state and thus beyond the jurisdiction of any foreign court.

A spokesman said that Benedict sees the sex scandal as a “test for him and the church” and is spending Holy Week in “humility and penitence.” Another official, Cardinal William Levada, took a much more aggressive approach, releasing a lengthy statement attacking newspaper stories that have sought to investigate Benedict’s role.

Levada, who is prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – essentially the Vatican’s chief enforcer on matters of faith, a post Benedict held for more than 20 years before becoming pope – singled out the New York Times’ reporting as “deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness.” The most explosive allegation is that Benedict, in his old job, did not take action to defrock a Wisconsin priest, Lawrence Murphy, who had molested as many as 200 boys at a school for deaf children. Benedict’s office halted a church trial of Murphy when it was learned that he was terminally ill; the priest was investigated by civil authorities as well but never faced charges. He died in 1998.

The particulars of this case, and another one from when Benedict was archbishop of Munich, do raise real questions about the pope’s handling of abuse allegations. It was all-too-common practice for priests found to have raped or abused young boys to be quietly reassigned, and ultimately that is what happened in these instances.

The larger problem for the church, this Easter season, is not just that the man considered the Vicar of Christ is personally being scrutinized but that the sex abuse scandal has become a major issue outside of the United States. For years, those so inclined could put the whole thing down as an overreaction by litigious Americans. Now the scandal has spread throughout Europe. German bishops are operating a hotline for abuse victims, Danish and Swiss bishops have launched investigations of old claims, and an Austrian cardinal has held a service for victims in which he admitted the church’s guilt. Last month, Benedict sharply rebuked Irish bishops for errors of judgment in handling allegations of rape.

Even more disturbing, the scandal has spread to the heart of today’s church – Latin America. In Brazil, where more Roman Catholics live than in any other country, a television network aired a video that purported to show a priest in the northeast state of Alagoas having sex with an altar boy. That priest and two others have been suspended by the church and are under investigation by police.

Here lies the real crisis for the church. The United States, with its ethic of individualism and its legions of trial lawyers, can be thought of as a special case. European societies are aging, and the continent’s majestic churches are often practically empty at Mass. It is countries such as Brazil and Mexico, with their growing population and burgeoning economic development, that represent the future for the Vatican. But there is intense competition throughout the developing world from evangelical Protestant denominations, and any suggestion of scandal and corruption can only damage the Catholic Church’s prospects.

Easter is a time for Benedict, as the spiritual leader of a billion people, to meditate and reflect. Then he must act. It is time for the pope to be comprehensively honest and open about the tragic failure of the church to prevent or punish horrific sexual abuse – including his own errors – and he must credibly assure the faithful that such crimes will never be allowed to happen again. Even more urgently, molesters still serving as priests must be defrocked and reported to civilian authorities.

Penance, as Benedict well knows, is a sacrament. It is not optional.

I need to apologize to Mitt Romney.

Here I was thinking of him as a failed politician with no discernible core values, who had once driven to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

But it’s now becoming clear that he’s the man we have to thank for our new national health care law.

“I mean, a lot of commentators have said this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts,” President Barack Obama told Matt Lauer recently on the “Today” show.

Good work leading the way, Mitt! We did not actually hear a whole lot about how Obama’s health care bill was similar to Romney’s during its long, torturous struggle through Congress. Particularly not during the parts that involved placating the Democratic left wing. Do you think Obama mentioned it during his Air Force One courtship of Dennis Kucinich? Possibly not.

But it really does seem as though the two plans are a whole lot alike, and Romney deserves credit for working with the Massachusetts Democrats to get such an ambitious, sweeping reform enacted. However, since most of his party is currently crouched in the basement, waiting for the health care apocalypse to split the earth into smithereens, they’re probably not going to be all that impressed.

The Republicans are dying for a disaster, and to be honest, even people who like the new law a lot have been worried that something really strange might be hidden in 2,000 pages of verbiage. (Did you know somebody stuck financing for abstinence education in there?) This week there was an alarming report that AT&T was going to have to reduce its long-term profit estimates by about $1 billion because of the new law – or, as the House minority leader, John Boehner, put it, the newly enacted “job-killing tax increases.” The AT&T charge was for accounting purposes, which is not as much real money as currency-based theology. But still, it did sound bad.

It turned out that the $1 billion goes back to the famous 2003 Medicare prescription drug entitlement passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and paid for through their innovative pretend-it’s-not-there financing system.

In order to keep businesses from ending their drug coverage and dumping their retirees on the federal system, Congress provided a 28 percent reimbursement for the benefits. Better still, the companies got to deduct the entire cost of the drug plans from their taxes.

Including the government subsidy.

Yes! The job-killing tax increase in the new law involves no longer allowing big corporations to take a tax deduction for spending money we gave them. Somehow, this doesn’t seem to have the makings of a tea party rally.

But there’s always the insurance mandate. When it comes to roiling right-wing hysteria, nothing whips up a crowd like the law’s requirement that everybody get health coverage.

Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter of Idaho, who is definitely the winner of the Most Fun Name for a Governor Award, kicked off the rebellion this week by signing a law requiring the state to sue the federal government over this provision. “If it is the proper role for government to mandate that citizens buy certain products, then I’m going to get potatoes in line for them just as quick as I can,” Otter announced.

Idaho, you should not let your elected officials push the potato thing so hard. The state has a lot more to talk about – lovely scenery, great people, the world’s largest factory for barrel cheese, the smallest number of doctors per capita in the country.

And what about your state fruit, the huckleberry? About that insurance requirement. Americans pay an estimated $42.7 billion a year in taxes and higher health care premiums because of the cost of medical treatment for the uninsured. So you would think that conservatives in particular would believe that everybody ought to be held responsible for having their own coverage. Unless they’re starting a new cutting-edge Let Them Die in a Ditch Movement.

“No more free-riders,” Romney said frequently, back when he was a little more vocal about defending the Massachusetts plan.

Lately, he’s been vaguer on the subject, and when it comes to the new federal law, he’s jumped on the repeal bandwagon. When someone from the liberal blog ThinkProgress asked Romney whether he thought the new federal insurance mandate – so very much like the Massachusetts one – was constitutional, he muttered something about it being “a big topic” and ducked into an elevator.

It’s possible that he hadn’t looked so uncomfortable since the time he was chased by a reporter who wanted to know if he thought Seamus the Irish setter had enjoyed driving to Canada on top of the family car.

Roger Niello

On March 19, The Bee published an article (“CSUS dean, professor take heat for global warming study”) that shed further doubt on research by two Sacramento State professors, Sanjay Varshney and Dennis Tootelian. The professors found that AB 32 (the Global Warming Solutions Act) would cost California more than a million jobs and billions of dollars over the course of its implementation.

In raising concerns about the costs of AB 32 on families and businesses, the professors joined a growing chorus of academics and experts who have said the California Air Resources Board’s original economic analysis was faulty and should not have been accepted at face value.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office was among these voices when it responded to my request for review of the AB 32 Scoping Plan back in 2008. The LAO criticized CARB’s economic analysis for being inconsistent and incomplete. Some of CARB’s own peer reviewers even noted that the agency’s analysis seemed to be justifying a preconceived outcome rather than an unbiased evaluation of a piece of legislation. In 2008, the CARB economic analysis concluded – erroneously – that AB 32 will create more than 100,000 new jobs and increase revenues to the state.

And how have our state’s regulators responded? Rather than acknowledging the significance of the Small Business Roundtable and the LAO report’s findings, AB 32’s promoters have trotted out a new strategy: Attack anyone who dares to question or challenge the proposed economic benefits of the program.

The problem with the attacks is that the facts keep validating the results of the Roundtable’s study. For example, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power recently proposed a rate increase of 28 percent to reduce its reliance on coal and fulfill the AB 32 goals. LADWP claims its electric rates could go up an additional 30 percent if CARB auctions 100 percent of pollution allowances as part of its cap and trade program. For many small companies and residents already teetering on the edge, such a rate increase would be disastrous.

Similar studies in Europe also validate the Roundtable study’s results. Spain, one of the leading proponents of energy reduction and renewable energy programs, leads Europe with 17.5 percent unemployment. A 2009 study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid shows that every “green job” created cost the Spanish economy 2.2 existing jobs.

German researchers echo the same concerns, essentially saying that studies that conclude that the number of green jobs created will fill the gap typically obscure or underestimate the offsetting impacts.

But as seen in The Bee’s article, many have uniformly closed ranks against and attacked the Small Business Roundtable’s study, perhaps because the results do not match their high hopes for AB 32. I predict that after reading this, AB 32 defenders will also attack the Spanish and German studies.

As we’ve recently seen with the national health care debate, great weight was placed on the Congressional Budget Office analysis of government policies. Unlike the numbers that AB 32 apologists promote, CBO found that the national plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Lieberman-Warner) would cost American taxpayers $1.21 trillion ($156 billion for California) between 2009 and 2018 and would impose mandates on the private sector that would exceed $90 billion per year during the 2012-2016 period.

Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded that this bill would result in annual reductions of U.S. gross domestic product from roughly $1 trillion to more than $2.8 trillion ($130 billion to $364 billion in California) in 2050.

The findings of Varshney and Tootelian are not out of line with what other studies have concluded about capping greenhouse emissions.

Unfortunately, CARB will not accept that one can question the effectiveness and costliness of AB 32 without questioning the occurrence of climate change, a scientific phenomenon. Anyone who questions the costs of AB 32 is considered a sellout, a crony, or just plain foolish.

Perhaps the most noteworthy result of the Small Business Roundtable’s study is that even AB 32 apologists now concede that it will result in lost jobs and higher energy costs. What we’re really arguing about at this point is how bad the pain will be.

Jill Duman

On most days, Jonathan Defty opens his classroom at about 7:45 a.m., a full 45 minutes before school begins. Tall and lean, with a stocking cap, jeans and a khaki-colored jacket, Defty looks more like the Marine that he was than the first-grade teacher he is now, 23 years later. On the walls of his classroom are the expectations for his small-fry students: Be Responsible. Be Productive. Be Kind. Be Your Best.

Defty, a teacher for 17 years, is at his post early for the handful of kids needing help on their way to reading fluently. At the end of the day, he’ll stay an hour after school to supervise the running club he started at Marguerite Montgomery Elementary. When he’s done, he’ll head over to the new Davis High School track where Defty, a former school athlete, is coaching DHS track and field runners over the hurdles.

“It’s all about making progress,” he tells the runners who slow their pace on the approach. “Think about going through the hurdle.”

The obstacle course is a perfect metaphor for Defty and teachers all over California. For the second time in two years, more than 20,000 of them received the dreaded Ides of March pink slips saying they may not have a job next year. Those who remain will face an array of challenges: less janitorial, counseling and front-office support, fewer resources for struggling students and larger classes, inching up to 30 students even in the lowest elementary school grades. Those ratios give even experienced teachers like Defty pause. “At 20-to-1 or 21-to-1, I can get all the kids to a place where they’re reading well in first grade,” he says. “With 30-to-1, that becomes a huge question.”

The school district that employs Defty and other districts around the state are asking teachers for salary concessions to save the jobs of colleagues and soften the blow of budget cuts threatening all levels of public education. Some educators, including teachers in the Folsom Cordova, Twin Rivers and San Juan unified districts, have already agreed to compensation concessions. Teachers in districts like Sacramento City Unified and Davis Joint Unified have been slow to do so.

Defty predicts his Davis colleagues will ultimately support some sort of salary concessions. Across the causeway, Erik Knudson, a sixth-grade GATE teacher at Sacramento’s Phoebe Hearst Elementary, is less sure. “We’re all in this together,” says Knudson, a 19-year veteran educator. “That’s what’s been heard several times in the past decade, but whenever they need something, they come to the teachers.”

“We serve the parents, we serve the community, ” says Gail Johnson, who will retire from teaching this year after 26 years at the same Davis elementary school. “Our job is such a huge job, and we don’t get paid squat for it.” The budget news for California school districts is grim. Plans for 2010-11 call for laying off 88 educators in Davis; 700 pink slips were sent out in the Sacramento City Unified School District, although the district has rescinded 170 of those warnings.

As a result, we will be asking a lot of veteran teachers in the coming year. We’ll be asking them to enlarge their classes and still bring students up to state and national standards. We’ll still want our fifth-graders up to speed on a new science curriculum, our eighth-graders whizzing through algebra, our gifted kids challenged, our special-needs kids nurtured and mainstreamed and our English learners scoring proficiently on standardized tests – all this in a safe, caring classroom environment.

And that’s just during the school day. Off the clock, we will continue to count on teachers for extras: early morning reading intervention, late-afternoon parent conferences, weekend hours to change the classroom bulletin board, grade folders and tweak English papers. And it would be great if they would continue coordinating field trips, directing plays, transforming their classrooms into living history centers and coaching the debate team.

We want all of these things from a California public school education, and we expect our teachers to do them enthusiastically and cheerfully, without making parents or the public uncomfortable about wanting them done. We’ve always wanted quality public school teaching for cheap. We worry about losing college presidents and distinguished professors to private industry, but acknowledge that we will never fully compensate K-12 teachers for the essential job of educating our kids.

This year we are asking teachers to do what they do for even less so we can triage public education. All over California, we are asking public employees to make similar concessions as the state staggers under a budget shortfall that could top $20 billion. As school districts struggle to close multimillion-dollar deficits – $30 million for Sacramento City, $6 million for Davis – it is appropriate for taxpayers and parents to ask teachers for sacrifices.

But it is also appropriate to acknowledge that we have not scaled back expectations for our children’s education – only what we are able to pay to get the job done.

Two things happened to Sandra Bullock last month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?

On the one hand, an Academy Award is nothing to sneeze at.

Bullock has earned the admiration of her peers in a way very few experience. She’ll make more money for years to come. She may even live longer. Research by Donald Redelmeier and Sheldon Singh has found that, on average, Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than nominees who don’t win.

Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

This isn’t just sermonizing. This is the age of research, so there are data to back this up. Over the past few decades, teams of researchers have been studying happiness. Their work, which seemed flimsy at first, has developed an impressive rigor, and one of the key findings is that, just as the old sages predicted, worldly success has shallow roots while interpersonal bonds permeate through and through.

For example, the relationship between happiness and income is complicated, and after a point, tenuous. It is true that poor nations become happier as they become middle-class nations. But once the basic necessities have been achieved, future income is lightly connected to well-being. Growing countries are slightly less happy than countries with slower growth rates, according to Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution and Eduardo Lora. The United States is much richer than it was 50 years ago, but this has produced no measurable increase in overall happiness. On the other hand, it has become a much more unequal country, but this inequality doesn’t seem to have reduced national happiness.

On a personal scale, winning the lottery doesn’t seem to produce lasting gains in well-being. People aren’t happiest during the years when they are winning the most promotions. Instead, people are happy in their 20s, dip in middle age and then, on average, hit peak happiness just after retirement at age 65.

People get slightly happier as they climb the income scale, but this depends on how they experience growth. Does wealth inflame unrealistic expectations? Does it destabilize settled relationships? Or does it flow from a virtuous cycle in which an interesting job produces hard work that in turn leads to more interesting opportunities?

If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.

The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.

The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.

This may be changing. There is a shelf of compelling books – including “The Hidden Wealth of Nations” by David Halpern and “The Politics of Happiness” by Derek Bok – that argue that public institutions should pay attention to well-being and not just material growth narrowly conceived.

Governments keep initiating policies they think will produce prosperity, only to get sacked, time and again, from their spiritual blind side.

Jaime Escalante

High school math teacher Jaime Escalante, a Bolivian immigrant, was a maverick in some ways in his approach to teaching – and very traditional in others. For both, he was criticized.

He taught at high-poverty Garfield High School in Los Angeles from 1974 to 1991, building a first-class math program with high rates of student success on the Advanced Placement calculus exam. In a “second act” in his 60s, Escalante taught from 1992 to 1998 at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento.

He was absolutely, resolutely opposed to what he considered insidious prejudice: That demanding excellence from low-income students somehow posed a threat to their self-esteem. Too many teachers, he said, “accept the very real disadvantages faced by poor minority students as excuses for their failures.” They rush to help students “accept their limitations.”

In contrast, Escalante held to a simple view: “When students are expected to work hard, they will usually rise to the occasion, devote themselves to the task and do the work.”

Behind this was something very traditional, captured in a sign underneath his classroom clock:

“DETERMINATION + HARD WORK + DISCIPLINE = THE WAY TO SUCCESS.”

Equally traditional was his view that successful teaching is about “identifying and implementing techniques that have withstood the acid test of classroom performance.”

Escalante said he had to laugh when people said his program depended on a teacher’s charismatic personality. “It just shows how far away we have drifted from the fundamentals of teaching,” he concluded.

Escalante’s success in Los Angeles didn’t happen overnight. Over more than a decade, he meticulously built a tremendous feeder program to prepare students for calculus, a fact overshadowed in the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver.” No one-year miracles here.

In Sacramento, Escalante was just getting started when he retired in 1998.

After a long battle with cancer, Escalante died Tuesday in Roseville, where he was staying with his son.

He was a teacher unafraid to step beyond rigid rules and ingrained habits to figure out what works for kids – no dwelling on why things can’t be done. He was not alone in this, but he showed what is possible, with persistence and commitment, in even the toughest schools.

Some candidates running for California attorney general are off to a dismally disingenuous start.

They seek to use their official designations on California’s ballots to mislead voters into thinking they are something they are not.

One top-tier Republican candidate, John Eastman, teaches law at Chapman University School of Law and is its former dean. His lawyers will appear in Sacramento court today asking that his occupation be listed as “assistant attorney general.”

Another Republican, state Sen. Tom Harman, is defending his designation as “prosecutor/attorney/senator.” Two out of three isn’t enough. He is hardly a prosecutor.

Candidates in both parties seek to stretch their occupational designations. Seeking a fourth term in Congress, U.S. Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, calls himself a “farmer/representative,” an apparent effort to minimize the fact that he spends a lot of time in Washington.

Such designations may poll well. But they fail that fundamental examination – the giggle test. It is especially onerous that candidates for attorney general would play fast and loose with the facts.

Attorneys general oversee a huge staff of investigators and lawyers, who defend the state and its taxpayers against lawsuits, sue over consumer fraud and environmental degradation, and investigate and prosecute serious crimes including public corruption.

The attorneys general argue cases before the highest courts in the nation, and, significantly, they represent the state in death penalty appeals.

Honesty is not too much to ask, starting with how they introduce themselves to voters in their official ballot designations.

Harman, an Orange County Republican, is an attorney and senator, who earlier this year took a one-week class so he could volunteer on Fridays in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office in minor proceedings. His claim to be a prosecutor is an insult to people who are.

Eastman’s “assistant attorney general” claim is spurious, too. In addition to his work as a law school dean and teacher, he represents clients. One of these was South Dakota, which hired him to defend the state in a case where an inmate claimed his religious freedoms were being violated.

More valuable than the $20,000 fee, South Dakota bestowed a fancy title on him – assistant attorney general. In South Dakota.

In his suit, Eastman insists that the rules set forth by the California secretary of state permit him to be called “assistant attorney general,” but, darn, they do not permit the further designation of “South Dakota.”

This is the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit. When he appears in court today, we can only hope that the judge exacts swift and certain justice, and sends professor Eastman to the back of the class.

Will the United States and Pakistan ever trust each other enough to cooperate fully in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida? This was the question haunting last week’s high-level strategic dialogue between top officials of the two countries, which aimed to put their prickly relationship on a new, deeper footing.

Although Pakistan’s delegation was headed by its foreign minister, the urbane Shah Mahmood Qureshi, it also included its stern-faced, powerful military commander, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani.

Washington promised to speed up delivery of economic aid and military equipment, along with compensation for Pakistan’s increased efforts at battling militants on the Afghan border.

“This is a new day,” declared Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hopes to shrink the yawning trust deficit between the two countries.

But are there grounds to believe that, when it comes to fighting militants, the two countries’ interests can converge? Skeptics abound. Washington has been frustrated in the past by Pakistan’s focus on its archenemy India and its unwillingness to root out Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida from havens along the Afghan border. Pakistan helped train the (anti-Indian) Afghan Taliban in the 1990s, and views them as a useful card should the United States quit Afghanistan soon.

Yet, times are changing. In 2009, Pakistan began seriously fighting its own militants along the border. There is intense U.S.-Pakistani intelligence cooperation on drone attacks – against their Taliban enemies and ours. And in a secret joint raid, Pakistani and U.S. intelligence forces recently captured the Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Pakistan then arrested several other senior Afghan Taliban.

Doubters may question the motives for these arrests. But I agree with Bruce Riedel, the director of President Barack Obama’s 2009 review of Afghanistan-Pakistan policy, who says, “While there is every reason to be skeptical, one shouldn’t let skepticism hide the fact that there is something going on.” Riedel said he thinks the Pakistani military realized they could no longer tolerate their own Taliban, who had broken deals and were attacking army and intelligence bases. Once the Pakistanis began a war against their own militants, Riedel said, “they found that the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban were joined at the hip, and hard to separate.” So their attitude toward the Afghan Taliban changed, too.

That doesn’t mean the United States and Pakistan now operate from the same playbook. Some U.S. officials doubt Pakistan will move against other Afghan Taliban groups in North Waziristan. The Pakistanis say they have enough on their plate for now and want to attack in sequence.

Some speculate that the arrests were part of an effort by Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency to ensure that it controls any talks between Afghan Taliban and the Kabul government of President Hamid Karzai – there were rumors one of his brothers had been meeting with Baradar. Pakistan should definitely have a seat at the bargaining table, but the ISI can’t control all.

The Pakistanis, for their part, have genuine concerns about our intentions, and how they will affect Pakistani interests. They also want to know whether the Obama administration is focused on tactics or on strategy for the long term.

With all the buzz about a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan starting in 2011, Pakistanis worry we’re going to exit hastily and leave them with an unstable border. “Part of our price,” says one Pakistani official, “is that you don’t get us into this fight and (then) you leave us holding the bag.” So there is plenty for the two sides to flesh out as they continue this dialogue. But I can think of significant moves each could make that would improve the atmosphere.

On the U.S. side: Pakistan has repeatedly asked for helicopter gunships to improve their mobility and firepower on the Afghan border. Why not get our production in gear, get them the helicopters they need and show our commitment to helping them do what they must? This should be a Pentagon priority.

On the Pakistani side: It’s time for the ISI to recognize it must confront the militants whom it trained to fight against India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Prime among them: Lashkar-e-Taiba, supposedly outlawed in 2002, which carried out a horrendous attack on Mumbai in 2008.

Lashkar-e-Taiba also wants to provoke a war between Pakistan and India. The Pakistanis must shut this group down.

Self-interest propelled Pakistan’s military toward recognizing it cannot ignore the militant menace. Further dialogue, if handled well by the Obama administration, might convince them that they must take the next necessary steps.

State officials were considering limits on how many kids a foster parent could supervise well before Amariana Crenshaw died in 2008. Yet it’s hard to imagine that the horrific circumstances of her death had no bearing on their decision, announced Monday, to limit foster homes to six children.

When 4 1/2-year-old Amariana was found burned beyond recognition two years ago, she was in the care of Tracy Dossman, a single mother with nine children – six foster kids and three of her own – living in her North Natomas home.

No matter how caring or well-intentioned a foster parent might be, it is simply asking too much for them to look after that many children, especially since many foster kids have physical or emotional scars.

And when a foster parent has issues of his or her own, it is a recipe for tragedy.

Until now, while homes were restricted to six foster children, there were no limits on the number of other children. Starting Saturday, the maximum will be six children, whether they are biological, adopted, under legal guardianship or in the foster system.

Although many foster parents do heroic work on behalf of kids, this rule change may help in weeding out unscrupulous foster parents who pack in more children to make more money.

The new limits, which bring California in line with other states, will apply first to the 3,400 or so foster homes directly licensed by the state or by a county. Eventually, they will cover the far greater number of foster homes – more than 13,000 – that are certified through private nonprofit agencies like the one that licensed Dossman.

While long overdue, this latest fix to the foster care system will need to be closely monitored by state and county officials, to ensure it doesn’t backfire in unexpected ways. According to a 2007 count, the number of foster homes statewide had dropped by 30 percent over the past decade and in Sacramento County by more than 40 percent.

That is the double challenge of foster care – finding enough parents to help kids in troubled circumstances and then looking out for their welfare.

If you’re concerned about service cutbacks at Regional Transit, the figure $172,015 should loom large.

Why? Because $172,015 is how much it costs RT to contract for just one sworn Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy to provide transit security. The district pays for seven deputies and a sergeant – a Sheriff’s Department sergeant costs $189,384 – for a total of almost $1.4 million.

Faced with the agonizing choice of slashing service 22 percent or cutting security, the Regional Transit board of directors on Tuesday took the advice of RT General Manager Mike Wiley and voted to cut service.

On the surface, it might seem like a reasonable decision. In survey after survey, regular RT riders have reported feeling unsafe on trains and buses, particularly late at night. If the district cut its security force appreciably, it likely would lose riders and revenues.

That said, RT’s board members could have avoided some of the service reductions – if they’d been willing to consider cost-effective options for keeping keep passengers safe.

RT contracts with the Sacramento Police Department, too. City police cost the district $128,099 per officer, $44,000 less than a deputy. That’s a stunning cost differential.

Most of the difference is in pension costs. Retirement for city police is capped at 90 percent of their last year’s salary. Sheriff’s deputy retirement pay is capped at 100 percent of pay.

When convoluted final pension calculations are completed, many newly retiring deputies take home more in retirement pay than they earned on the job.

Of course, the most economical security available to the transit district are non-sworn private guards. They cost just $65,000 a piece. But it was these guards that the RT board voted to cut on Monday night. Because late night train service is being curtailed to save money, the less expensive private guards who provide security at light-rail stations will be cut back, too.

So, why not replace high-cost deputies with these lower cost private guards and preserve more transit service?

Or, alternatively, as Sacramento City Council and RT board member Ray Tretheway asked at Monday night’s meeting, why not use community service officers for RT security? These non-sworn Police Department employees take cold crime reports and perform other kinds of tasks that don’t require the skills or training of a fully sworn officer. CSOs cost less than half what deputies cost. They are nearly $50,000 cheaper than police officers. They could provide a uniformed security presence on light-rail cars at night, which is what most riders want and need.

Sadly, with the exception of Trethaway, none of the elected leaders on the RT board aggressively pursued such questions.

RT is scrapping 28 of 91 weekday bus routes. All transit service that starts after 9 p.m. will be gone and weekend service decimated. For routes that remain, the wait for buses and trains will be longer.

Excessive deputy costs are not the only or even the primary reason for RT’s budget crisis, but they highlight a key problem: Sacramento County employees, and sheriff’s deputies, in particular, have priced themselves beyond what is reasonable and what the public can afford.

Trip Van Noppen

In a decision expected today, the Obama administration could save American households up to $21 billion over the next 30 years, while saving as much energy as is consumed annually in the states of Virginia and Arkansas combined.

The decision affects efficiency standards for new water heaters, an appliance that may sound insignificant and even trivial but in fact offers a huge opportunity for energy and financial savings.

The U.S. Department of Energy – the agency tasked by Congress to set standards for many household and commercial appliances – is set to announce its choice between two efficiency standards for water heaters.

The difference in energy savings between the weaker standard and the stronger standard amounts to just over 1 quadrillion British thermal units – a mind-boggling amount of energy that could supply electricity to 7.6 million homes for a full year.

In financial terms, if he chooses the stronger standard over the weaker standard, President Barack Obama could save U.S. households an additional $6 billion (that’s $21 billion in savings as compared with $15 billion).

What does all of this mean to you and me?

More efficient water heaters come with a price – an extra $82 to $102 for gas models and $96 to $160 for electric models, according to the Energy Department.

Yet within six years, the average family will recover these additional upfront costs through reduced utility bills. That cost recovery will occur under either standard under consideration, but families with larger water heaters will save much more under the stronger standard, getting back their upfront costs within as little as four years.

Though Obama has continually hailed the potential of energy efficiency and has promoted it through many of his energy and economic policies thus far, he now faces a new series of tests.

Over the next three years, the Department of Energy will set new efficiency standards for more than a dozen categories of home and commercial appliances like furnaces, refrigerators, air conditioners and clothes washers, just to name a few. If Obama chooses to adopt strong standards for all of them – standards achievable with existing and affordable technology – he will cut 126 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. That’s equivalent to eliminating the emissions from 50 power plants. He will also save consumers $19 billion a year.

Yet there is opposition. Some industry groups and appliance manufacturers are doggedly fighting strong standards to avoid making new investments in production equipment. But other companies are proving that innovation and ingenuity translate into revenue and jobs.

Some manufacturers are also claiming that customers will be turned off by the slightly higher price tags of more efficient appliances. However, the vast majority of households will quickly recover any difference in the upfront prices of these appliances through lower utility bills; in some cases, they will make double the upfront cost back in utility bill savings. And strong minimum standards like these are necessary to protect renters who otherwise would be stuck paying higher utility bills when landlords install inefficient equipment.

In today’s rule on water heater standards and in all of the upcoming standards over the next three years, Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu face clear choices.

They can help prop up the destructive and antiquated fossil-fuel industries of the 19th century, or they can improve energy efficiency – the least controversial and most widely accepted of their climate and energy policy options. Doing so will propel us toward energy independence, help the administration reach its stated carbon-reduction goals and make the United States a world leader in this field, creating jobs in the process.

When GE announced last year that it was introducing a new water heater that uses less than half the electricity of a traditional model, it also celebrated the creation of 430 new jobs at its manufacturing facility in Louisville, Ky., which will produce them. These are just some among many jobs that will be fueled by efficiency innovations.

“One of the fastest, easiest, and cheapest ways to make our economy stronger and cleaner is to make our economy more energy- efficient,” said Obama in June, citing California’s success on setting new efficiency standards as a model for change.

“In the late ’70s, California enacted tougher energy efficiency polices. Over the next three decades, those policies created 1.5 million jobs. Today, Californians consume 44 percent less energy per person than the national average. And over time, this prevented the need to build at least 24 new power plants.”

While legislation on climate change and clean energy struggle through the Senate, this water heater standard, along with every other appliance standard over the next three years, represents a huge opportunity for America. Obama should seize it.

Behind the bad news about the escalating costs of California’s proposed high-speed rail system is a familiar question: Will state taxpayers get stuck with the bill?

But there’s another reason to question the project: It could leave the state’s working poor and most transit-dependent residents with fewer travel options than they now have, while the affluent travel on a gold-plated, luxury high-speed rail system.

That has happened before. It must not happen again.

The cost increases are mind-blowing: The price tag for the first leg – San Francisco to Anaheim – ballooned from $34 billion to $43 billion when inflation-adjusted.

Reflecting the added cost, the California High-Speed Rail Authority has suggested that fares could be double what the voters were told when they authorized $9.95 billion in bond money to get the proposed 800-mile transit system going.

At the original estimate of $54, a high-speed rail ticket was almost as cheap as taking a Greyhound bus – an affordable ride for just about anybody. But under the new fare estimates, a family of four catching a train in Los Angeles for a trip to San Francisco would have to pay $464, rather than the original $216.

That would effectively make a high-speed rail ticket beyond the reach of the state’s lowest-income groups. And the fare could keep rising as costs increase, knocking more residents off the train.

Remember the project to reroute Interstate 93 under the city of Boston, known as the “Big Dig”? When the tunnel and related transit projects were first proposed in 1985, officials put the cost at $2.8 billion. When completed in 2007, the bill was $22 billion. Massachusetts’ residents paid 75 percent of the cost.

The Big Dig did something else: It devoured dollars that would have funded other state projects, including those serving ordinary transit riders.

In theory, California should avoid a Big Dig fiasco because of financing safeguards in the bond proposition. But theory and practice split fast when a project is half-finished, political reputations are at stake, payrolls need to be met and money is running out. The rail authority has secured only $11.25 billion of the $43 billion it needs, and its business plan depends on Washington pumping in another $17 billion to $19 billion.

What if the federal money doesn’t materialize? Transit agencies in California are already headed for fiscal disaster. Sacramento’s Regional Transit agency recently announced that a $25 million shortfall will force it to lay off as many as 300 workers and cut bus service. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Agency projects a $251.3 million deficit at the end of the 2011 fiscal year. And San Francisco, the state’s poster child for public transit, expects a $12.1 million deficit.

The service cuts to come will fall heaviest on immigrant workers – maids, nannies, restaurant employees – who rely on transit to get to work. If high-speed rail gobbles up a growing share of the state’s transportation general fund because of cost increases, it could leave little for transit investment within cities, which would hit low-income groups even harder.

Overspending on rail systems that ferry mostly affluent riders at the expense of transit services for low-income groups has landed regional transit agencies in hot water before. Just last month, the Federal Transit Administration withdrew $70 million in stimulus money from BART’s Oakland Airport Connector project in the Bay Area because the project failed to benefit low-income communities. Civil rights organizations have become adept at showing how these expensive rail systems reduce bus service for the poor.

California is in danger of making the same mistake with high-speed rail on a much more expensive scale. Here are four ways to ensure that the project is socially just.

• Run high-speed rail like the airlines. The National Airspace System is mostly funded through ticket fares and fuel taxes, and so should high-speed rail. If high-speed rail is going to be a service for primarily affluent people, then they can and should pay their full freight. If private investors demand revenue guarantees, Washington, not California, should provide them.

• No more general obligation bonds. The rail authority has more than enough money to pay for staffing and startup costs. If it needs to raise additional money, it should only be allowed to issue bonds whose principal and interest would be paid through fare revenues.

• Sales taxes should not be used to finance high-speed rail – ever. The sales tax is regressive. Using it to pay for high-fare high-speed rail would amount to a transfer of wealth from low-income families to the more affluent.

• Allow taxpayers a return on their investment. Rail officials want to promote high-density development around stations, a development that would help boost surrounding property values. The rail authority should be authorized to negotiate with host cities and developers to secure a share of the added revenues from higher real estate values.

Adoption of these ideas would help ensure that the state’s support for everyday transit does not disappear in the stampede to build high-speed rail.

Health care is the next-to-last thing I want to write about. The last thing is abortion, so this column is a banquet of tortures.

Usually, I would not return so soon to a topic that I tend to associate with the pleasures of head-banging, but broad misunderstanding about what’s in the health care reform law justifies another lap.

Still cloudy is whether the new law of the land allows funding for abortions and whether President Barack Obama’s executive order is of any real (judicially enforceable) value. The answer to the latter is in little dispute. It is “no.” An executive order cannot override a statute.

As to the funding issue, well, it’s intentionally complicated. And suffice to say, it shouldn’t be.

Defenders argue that: (1) nowhere does the bill say funds will go toward abortion; (2) the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion, applies.

Both assertions are true – up to a point. It isn’t what the bill says; it’s what it doesn’t say.

No one should apologize for being confused, by the way. If not for the patient tutoring of dozens of brilliant lawyers, Capitol Hill staffers, medical experts and others, I would be in a fetal curl alternately muttering “Who’s Jacob?” and “Ibid, Subsection C (1)(a).”

To the first argument: Of course the bill doesn’t explicitly state that it appropriates abortion funding. In fact, it takes pains to use terminology that seems to explicitly forbid it. But other areas are swampier. And, indeed, funds could be used to pay for abortion under circumstances that predictably will evolve.

History and precedent tell us this much.

For one thing, the Hyde Amendment is a rider that must be lobbied and attached each year to the annual Labor/Health and Human Services appropriations bill. Under its terms, the amendment applies only to those funds.

Rather than following the usual course of funding community health centers (CHCs) through the Labor/HHS budget, the health care reform measure does an end run around Hyde by directly appropriating billions of dollars into a new CHC fund.

Because the Obama administration’s “fix-it” bill did not include the abortion-ban language proposed by Rep. Bart Stupak, those billions appropriated to CHCs simply are not covered by Hyde.

Now, the president’s executive order purports to address this gap by extending the Hyde Amendment to these dollars as well. The problem is that, regardless of Obama’s stated intentions, he can’t actually do this without an act of Congress.

As Dorinda Bordlee, an attorney with the Bioethics Defense Fund, wrote: “If a president could do that, there would be no need to have a majority of Congress pass the Hyde Amendment each and every year to prevent abortion funding using Medicaid dollars for low-income government health care.”

Several supporters of the bill have argued that this debate is otherwise irrelevant because abortions aren’t performed at CHCs. While currently true, this doesn’t mean that CHCs wouldn’t like to offer abortion among their reproductive services.

Under the new law, they can. There’s nothing to stop them.

Here’s why. By statute, CHCs are required to provide all “required primary health care services,” defined to include “health services related to … obstetrics or gynecology that are furnished by physicians.” Based on federal precedent, a statute requiring provision of “health” services must be interpreted to include abortion unless it is explicitly excluded. Voilà.

One may believe that poor women should have affordable access to abortion. This is a reasonable position, and it likely will be the outcome as a result of this bill. But it is not what Americans have been led to believe is true, nor is it what most want.

Prediction: Abortions will be performed at CHCs – you can bet your foreclosed mortgage on that.

Health reform is the law of the land. Next up: financial reform.

But will it happen? The White House is optimistic because it believes that Republicans won’t want to be cast as allies of Wall Street. I’m not so sure. The key question is how many senators believe that they can get away with claiming that war is peace, slavery is freedom and regulating big banks is doing those big banks a favor.

Some background: We used to have a workable system for avoiding financial crises, resting on a combination of government guarantees and regulation. On one side, bank deposits were insured, preventing a recurrence of the immense bank runs that were a central cause of the Great Depression. On the other side, banks were tightly regulated, so that they didn’t take advantage of government guarantees by running excessive risks.

From 1980 or so onward, however, that system gradually broke down, partly because of bank deregulation, but mainly because of the rise of “shadow banking”: institutions and practices – like financing long-term investments with overnight borrowing – that recreated the risks of old-fashioned banking but weren’t covered either by guarantees or by regulation. The result, by 2007, was a financial system as vulnerable to severe crisis as the system of 1930. And the crisis came.

Now what? We have already, in effect, recreated New Deal-type guarantees: As the financial system plunged into crisis, the government stepped in to rescue troubled financial companies, so as to avoid a complete collapse. And you should bear in mind that the biggest bailouts took place under a conservative Republican administration that claimed to believe deeply in free markets.

There’s every reason to believe that this will be the rule from now on: When push comes to shove, no matter who is in power, the financial sector will be bailed out. In effect, debts of shadow banks, like deposits at conventional banks, now have a government guarantee.

The only question now is whether the financial industry will pay a price for this privilege, whether Wall Street will be obliged to behave responsibly in return for government backing. And who could be against that? Well, how about John Boehner, the House minority leader?

Recently Boehner gave a talk to bankers in which he encouraged them to balk at efforts by Congress to impose stricter regulation. “Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you, and stand up for yourselves,” he urged. By “taking advantage” he meant imposing some conditions on the industry in return for government backing.

But Boehner isn’t the problem: Frank has already shepherded fairly strong financial reform through the House. Instead, the question is what will happen in the Senate.

In the Senate, the legislation on the table was crafted by Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut. It’s significantly weaker than the Frank bill, and needs to be made stronger. But no bill will become law if Senate Republicans stand in the way of reform.

But won’t opponents of reform fear being cast as allies of the bad guys (which they are)? Maybe not. Back in January, Frank Luntz, the GOP strategist, circulated a memo on how to oppose financial reform. His key idea was that Republicans should claim that up is down – that reform legislation is a “big bank bailout bill,” rather than a set of restrictions on the banks.

Sure enough, a few days ago Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, in a letter attacking the Dodd bill, claimed that an essential part of reform – tougher oversight of large, systemically important financial companies – is actually a bailout, because “the market will view these firms as being ‘too big to fail’ and implicitly backed by the government.”

Um, senator, the market already views those firms as having implicit government backing, because they do: Whatever people like Shelby may say now, in any future crisis those firms will be rescued, whichever party is in power.

The only question is whether we’re going to regulate bankers so that they don’t abuse the privilege of government backing. And it’s that regulation – not future bailouts – that reform opponents are trying to block.

So it’s the punks vs. the plutocrats – those who want to rein in runaway banks, and bankers who want the freedom to put the economy at risk, freedom enhanced by the knowledge that taxpayers will bail them out in a crisis. Whatever they say, the fact is that people like Shelby are on the side of the plutocrats; the American people should be on the side of the punks, who are trying to protect their interests.

California is reeling from the worst drop in state revenue since the 1930s.

Statewide, unemployment stands at 12.5 percent. In the Sacramento area, it’s 12.8 percent. People have seen their homes lose value and many with jobs worry about losing them.

School districts, like other areas of the public sector, are feeling the pinch of declining tax revenues.

There is no sugarcoating this harsh reality.

Yet the Sacramento City Unified teachers union, alone among large school districts in our region, is acting as if business as usual should reign. The leadership believes that the union should not sit down and negotiate with the district until the summer of 2011, when the current teacher contract expires.

In taking this stance, the Sacramento teachers union seems to be following the advice in a January 2009 memo from the negotiations committee of the California Teachers Association: “Maintaining salary and benefits at current levels is a priority; keeping the status quo is a constructive victory” and “Do not agree to re-open a closed contract. If the contract remains closed, the district cannot impose cutbacks. It is OK to just say no!”

Every person in this community should know just exactly what this “protect the status quo, just say no” stance means: It means throwing young teachers under the bus. It means increasing class sizes for kids. It means cutting back on art and music programs, books, labs, computers, academic programs.

Just who does such a decision benefit? It benefits veteran teachers.

People of goodwill in this community need to stand up and say loudly: Forcing arbitrary teacher layoffs, based almost exclusively on seniority, is harmful to schools.

Alternatives do exist – and exploring them does not mean that anyone hates teachers. It simply is an acknowledgment of tough choices.

For example, the Sacramento City Unified district could save the jobs of:

• 16 teachers, if all employees accept a $15 co-pay for health visits. (Most teacher co-pays in the Sacramento area range between $15 and $25.)

• 25 teachers, if employees contribute $50 a month toward health premiums.

• 43 teachers, if employees accept three furlough days a year.

• 32 teachers, if the union accepts a temporary freeze of automatic “step and column” pay increases for years of service and education.

In the long term, of course, the district must continue to make progress in dealing with declining enrollment and too many school buildings – and with paying 100 percent of retiree health benefits.

Business as usual simply is not an adequate response to the challenges that we all face in the current economy.

Amid all the vague talk and some pie-in-the-sky proposals for a “green” economy, here’s something real that will move California toward that goal, more slowly perhaps, but surely.

As of last week, Placer County property owners could begin applying for loans to make their homes or businesses more energy efficient. While the focus has been on solar panels, program officials are encouraging steps such as weatherproofing windows or buying more efficient hot water heaters first, saying that it doesn’t make sense to install solar panels on an otherwise energy-wasting house.

The loans are expected to average $25,000 to $30,000, with the payments added to property tax bills. Plus, much of the work will go to local contractors and companies.

While Placer is leading the way locally, others will soon be following to capitalize on Assembly Bill 811, the 2008 law allowing cities and counties to make property tax loans to help homeowners with the upfront costs of energy and water conservation improvements.

Next month, the California Energy Commission plans to award $30.5 million in federal stimulus money to support similar programs. The biggest chunk, $16.5 million, will go to Sacramento County, the lead agency for a project covering 13 counties and 12 million people. By fall, the commission says, three-fourths of state residents will live in areas with such programs.

But give Placer credit for getting the ball rolling with its own money. Initially, it is putting up $33 million from the $1 billion deposited in the county treasury from the budgets of local governments and school districts that would otherwise be invested on Wall Street. Eventually, Placer County Treasurer-Tax Collector Jenine Windeshausen says she hopes to bundle the loan repayments into securities that can be sold so the program will have permanent funding.

Since starting to take loan applications a week ago, Placer officials have received two dozen. They hope to approach the success in Sonoma County, which is averaging $1 million a month in loans.

With the lessons of the housing meltdown in mind, they’re also being cautious with the loans. To be eligible, property owners will have to be current on their property taxes for at least three years and current on their mortgages for at least five years. The loan, which will stretch over five to 20 years, stays with the building, not the borrower. So if it is sold, the benefit of the improvements, and the debt, pass on to the new owner.

The Placer initiative, and others like it, represent a common-sense step in the green revolution.