Author: SacBee — Opinion

Sacramento area atheist Michael Newdow has said he will appeal the latest 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling rejecting his argument that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance constitute an unconstitutional state endorsement of religion.

In this newest ruling, the 9th Circuit reversed its controversial 2002 decision that upheld Newdow’s side of the case.

Reasonable people can disagree on whether the words “under God” inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 violate the separation of church and state as required under the Constitution or are “merely an endorsement of our form of government, not of religion of any particular sect,” as Justice Carlos Bea wrote in his majority ruling last week.

The Newdow suit follows a recent legal battle in San Diego County involving a math teacher who displayed patriotic banners in his classroom that some complained overemphasized God. What’s wrong with these cases, and dozens of other fracases like them across the country, is that they drain time, money and energy from public schools that can ill afford to waste their limited resources.

Committed atheists or religion haters regularly sue school districts because they want to excise all expressions of faith from public institutions.

On the other side, true believers file lawsuits for various reasons – because they want to assert their rights to freely express their faith, or because they want a new platform to engage in a broader culture war. The end result is costly litigation that leaves school administrators paralyzed and overly cautious – clamping down on all expression because it might offend a few.

The silent majority – a broad swath of citizens in the muddled middle – are sick of the whole debate. They want school boards and principals focused on education, not the lawsuits of zealots.

In the Newdow cases, the Elk Grove Unified School District initially and then Rio Linda School District were named defendants. Never mind that the schools gave Newdow the right to excuse his daughter from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. That protection, embodied in state law, was not enough. Newdow wanted to impose his version of right on everyone. When he sued for damages, insurance carriers were forced to defend the districts. The case has dragged on now for nearly a decade, consuming hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of court time.

Given Newdow’s pledge to appeal, it is likely to drag on for many more years – and to what end?

In an effort to avoid expensive litigation, the most sophisticated school districts have developed elaborate protocols to protect themselves. Even before school starts, parents are given opportunities to review curriculum content, books, videos and other instructional materials. They also have the chance to excuse their children from activities that offend their values.

In instances where parents want more, to remove what they deem offensive, be it a book, movie or the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance from the classroom for all students, the best local boards of education regularly set aside time, affording all sides a respectful public hearing.

Usually the dispute resolves itself but sometimes, as in the Newdow case, the firmly committed sue.

What should be easily resolved at the school level becomes a federal case, a chance for true believers to push their private agendas at the expense of beleaguered local public schools. In the end, no matter how the courts rule, no one really wins.

The immigration debate is back. And it’s hard to find anyone who is pleased to see it return.

Not Democrats, who see the immigration issue as one that divides their party, with labor on one side and Latinos on the other. Not Republicans, whose usual demand for a guest worker program won’t go over too well with a national unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.

Yet the debate must go on. This isn’t just one of the toughest issues.

It’s also one of the most pressing. What else do you call it when tens of thousands of people feel they have to march on Washington to demand that President Barack Obama keep his campaign promise to work toward comprehensive immigration reform? The activists are fed up with foot-dragging by the administration, the fact that immigration merited only 37 words in the State of the Union address and speculation by pundits that Obama intended to follow up health care reform with a focus on jobs and education and save the immigration issue for a possible second term. Immigration-reform advocates – many of whom supported Obama – decided to push back.

Just the idea of an anti-Obama protest from the left was enough to embarrass the White House. Days before the event, Obama announced his support for a comprehensive immigration reform bill scheduled to be unveiled by Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. It’s a good bet that the legislation will try to accomplish the seven goals that Schumer spelled out in a speech last summer – curtailing illegal immigration, controlling the borders, creating a biometric employee verification system, requiring illegal immigrants already here to become legalized, keeping family reunification a priority, encouraging high-skilled immigrants to come to the United States and making it easier for people to come here legally.

The key is the employee verification system. According to media reports, it would consist of a national biometric identification card for all U.S. workers designed to tell employers who is eligible to work and who isn’t. With such a system in place, the government could more easily sanction employers who break the rules – and attack the problem at the root.

In fact, an ID card is so important that when I asked former Sen. Alan Simpson, the father of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, why that legislation wasn’t as successful as it could have been, he said it was for lack of a “secure identifier.” Congress can fix what is broken if members stand up to those elements in both parties that are willing to scuttle immigration reform because there’s one part of the package they find unacceptable.

For those Republicans who cater to nativists, the deal-breaker is any legislative language that gives illegal immigrants a pathway to earned legalization, which cultural conservatives mischaracterize as amnesty. For those Democrats who cater to organized labor, the unthinkable is guest workers, which labor-friendly liberals misrepresent as a threat to U.S. workers.

Interestingly, the majority of Americans are not direct stakeholders in the immigration debate. The closest they come is when they think back to their own immigrant parents or grandparents and sympathize with the foreigners of today who are getting much the same rude reception that earlier arrivals did. But most people don’t feel as if their lives will be affected one way or another if illegal immigrants get a chance to earn the right to remain in the United States as part of a reform package that also helps secure the border and streamlines the process for people to come legally.

They just see a system that needs fixing, and they’re perplexed as to why their leaders can’t seem to do anything about it. Especially when it’s so obvious that the answer is a compromise that goes right down the middle, where both sides get their concerns addressed but neither side gets everything it wants. For instance, let’s give illegal immigrants a pathway to legal status but put in enough conditions so it isn’t a walk in the park. The right to live in the United States legally is worth a lot, and any reform effort should reflect that.

Immigration doesn’t have to be the latest item on a list of issues deemed too tough for Congress to even talk about, let alone solve. By summoning creativity and courage, lawmakers can repair a system that is out of order. And America will be better for it.

Chlotilde Pelteau plants corn seeds on a craggy hillside in the hamlet of Nan Roc in Fond-des-Blancs, Haiti on March 6. Before a devastating earthquake hit, the country had been stripped almost bare of trees by people desperate for firewood or cooking charcoal.

Soon after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, I wrote that the hundreds of millions of dollars pledged by the international community to rebuild the country would be a waste of money unless accompanied by a massive reforestation effort.

I said each of us should donate one tree for Haiti.

Nearly two months later, we’re beginning to see the first – admittedly limited – steps in that direction.

On March 12, the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations launched “a tree for a child in Haiti” campaign.

The FAO, which at the time applauded my column, is calling on people to donate at least $5 to plant a fruit tree in a Haitian school garden.

“Your donation pays for an avocado, mango or other fruit tree seedling, its planting, a small amount of fertilizer and watering and weeding for the first year,” the campaign goes.

It will help schools teach children how to care for the environment, and at the same time provide food for the students, it says.

Simultaneously, several other international institutions and non-government groups are studying other approaches, such as urging Haiti’s diaspora or foreign visitors to the country to each donate one tree for Haiti.

Deforestation has long been one of the main reasons behind Haiti’s chronic poverty. For more than a century, people have cut down about 98 percent of Haiti’s trees to use as firewood or charcoal for cooking. That has left the ground almost useless for agriculture. It also dried up water supplies.

At the same time, deforestation causes devastating floods.

When it storms in Haiti’s mountains, the water flows into nearby villages with nothing to absorb or stop it. Thousands die.

Why aren’t you more ambitious and going beyond trees for schoolyards, I asked three senior FAO officials in a telephone conference.

They said schools will be the first step of the reforestation campaign, while experts figure out how to overcome legal problems with land ownership in Haiti.

Unless people own the land and own the trees, they will cut them down sooner or later, they said. There have been massive international tree planting campaigns in Haiti in the past and most have failed because people ended up cutting more trees than were planted.

FAO forestry experts Walter Kollert said it would take 220 million trees just to raise Haiti’s forested areas from the current 2 percent to 10 percent.

“If you calculate realistic planting activities by year, if they had a good forestry department, it would take 44 years to reach a forest cover of 10 percent of the country,” Kollert said. “That tells you something about the magnitude of the problem.”

My opinion: The FAO deserves a round of applause – and our $5 for a tree – for its campaign (www.fao.org). But we should aim for a more ambitious plan.

Why not urge the more than 1 million Haitians living abroad to donate one tree each for Haiti, much as Jews around the world have done for generations for Israel? The Jewish National Fund, which has planted more than 240 million trees in Israel, offers “tree certificates” for births, graduations, weddings, anniversaries and memories of deceased loved ones, so that people can donate a tree in their honor.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to do the same for Haiti? And why not start a “Tree per Tourist” campaign in Haiti? Royal Caribbean cruises alone are taking 650,000 tourists to Haiti’s northern coast annually and the company is already working with the Inter-American Development Bank to try to maximize the visitors’ economic impact by luring them to visit some of the country’s historic sites.

Why not ask cruise passengers to each leave one tree behind in Haiti? It’s true that it would be irresponsible to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Haiti’s reforestation before experts resolve complex legal and technical issues.

But it’s also true that if we let more time go by, world attention will turn somewhere else, and it will be more difficult to get funds for the regreening of Haiti. The time is now.

“Prisons Cut the Rehab Training” (March 8, Page A1) points out the importance of rehabilitating inmates, but missed a key point: Old ways of doing business have not been effective enough in reducing recidivism.

In my previous position as inspector general overseeing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, I found that its substance abuse programs were “a $1 billion failure.” We have done a great deal since then to improve outcomes.

Yet, some seem to want to stay stuck in the past with no attention to whether programs worked.

Due to the state budget crisis, spending on CDCR’s offender rehabilitation programs has been reduced by more than a third, but we are now focusing on cost-effective programs that reduce recidivism and have eliminated programming that did not prove successful.

As recommended by an expert panel, we are using evidence-based assessments to target services to offenders at the highest risk of returning to prison.

We are shortening our in-prison substance abuse programs to three months from the past six to 36 months to reach more inmates and emphasizing community aftercare treatment – a combination that has been shown to reduce recidivism. We will still be able to provide substance abuse services to 8,450 inmates annually – not 2,400 as stated in the article.

We are strongly emphasizing GED attainment, which can reduce recidivism up to 7 percent, according to the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. More students – not fewer – will be enrolled in GED classes by utilizing teachers’ aides and combining classroom instruction with independent study. We are emphasizing vocational programs that can be completed in 12 months – which can reduce recidivism up to 9 percent.

For the first time, California is insisting that an inmate satisfactorily pass program requirements to earn time-off credits. New legislation authorizes as much as six additional weeks of credit for completing re- habilitation programs.

CDCR is training long-term inmates as certified drug- and alcohol-abuse counselors to help their fellow inmates recover and attain a marketable skill upon release, training inmates as literacy tutors and doubling funding for prisons to sponsor community volunteer activities such as Alcoholics Anonymous and other self-help programs.

Instead of staying mired in the failed policies of the past, our decision to focus on high-risk offenders, maximize use of existing resources and focus on programs proven to reduce recidivism is the right thing to do under challenging circumstances.

When The Bee has to resort to name calling (“AB 32 Foes are Slick – and Predictable,” Editorial, March 14), it’s a pretty good bet that they’re short on facts and logic.

The upshot of the piece is the same old song that we’ve heard for years: that man-made carbon dioxide is causing the planet to overheat, and only severe restrictions on energy production, cargo and passenger transportation, agriculture, brewing, distilling and baking, cement production, manufacturing and construction (to name a few affected industries) can save us – while creating lots of “green jobs.”

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 32 into law in 2006, and although the most draconian of the provisions don’t go into effect until 2012, restrictions began taking effect in 2007 – the so-called “early action items.” Businesses have been making investment decisions for nearly four years now anticipating the full impact of the law.

So where is the cornucopia of new jobs? Until the enactment of AB 32, California’s unemployment rate tracked very closely to the national unemployment rate. Since then, the state’s jobless numbers have steadily outpaced the national figures.

California’s unemployment rate has now climbed a record 2.8 points ahead of the national rate.

In a candid moment, The Bee admits that, “a single-state effort would put California at a competitive disadvantage.”

How could that be, if AB 32’s restrictions are so economically beneficial? Despite the growing chorus of climate scientists who refute the dogma of man-made global warming, and despite the mounting scandals striking at the heart of global warming data, The Bee clings to the notion that radically restricting our economy would save the planet.

Perhaps. But a far more likely scenario is that California would continue to suffer from an exodus of jobs and investment as it has since AB 32 was enacted and the planet would continue to warm and cool as it has done for billions of years.

Sierra resorts such as Northstar-at-Tahoe contain both graded and
cleared ski runs, with very different
environmental impacts.

For many, being “green” means finding high-tech – and, by extension, high-cost – fixes for familiar environmental problems.

But sometimes the greenest solutions lie in reviving sensible and economical practices from the past.

Ski run construction presents one clear example.

In bygone days, when skiing operations were smaller in scope, ski runs were mostly created in ways that avoided long-term environmental degradation. In forested areas, ski area operators simply cut down trees and tall shrubs in the path of the new run, creating an open slope through the forest. Skiers flew over unseen snow-buried stumps, small shrubs, and undisturbed soils. Because the soils were left undisturbed, these ski runs were not subject to great erosion, and native plant communities regrew vigorously from the existing seedbank.

In subsequent decades, ski run construction changed dramatically. The predominant practice shifted from clearing to grading, or bulldozing ski runs to create a smooth under-snow surface, stripping the slope of vegetation, stumps, rocks, roots and seeds. The topsoil is scraped and often buried beneath the subsoil, and soils are compacted, creating a harsh environment for plant establishment and growth.

In collaboration with Dr. Kevin Rice, a professor of plant science at UC Davis, I decided to conduct a scientific investigation and analysis of precisely what environmental impacts this change has wrought in ski areas of the Sierra Nevada.

We compared cleared ski runs to nearby graded ski runs across seven ski areas – Kirkwood, Sierra-at-Tahoe, Heavenly, Diamond Peak, Mount Rose, Northstar-at-Tahoe, and Sugar Bowl. All contain both graded and cleared ski runs. Across this wide range of ski resorts, we found that grading causes significant long-lasting environmental damage. Compared with ski runs that were simply cleared, there was much reduced soil depth and soil nutrients and increased soil compaction, exposed bare ground and visible erosion on machine-graded ski runs.

Such impacts to mountain soils are of particular concern in the Lake Tahoe basin, where runoff from degraded upland slopes has been responsible for much loss of lake clarity. Graded ski runs also tend to be sparsely covered by nonnative grass plant communities (introduced by active seeding for erosion control), while cleared ski runs are characterized by more robust plant communities composed of native shrubs and perennial herbs that sprouted from the intact seedbank.

Similarly, my research in abandoned ski areas indicates that cleared ski runs recover and converge more quickly and predictably than graded ski runs, speeding up the process of forest regeneration. By contrast, ski runs that were graded and then abandoned did not return to natural forests as quickly or recover in terms of natural soil structure. Other scientific studies of machine-graded ski runs from around the world also indicate that ski run grading causes negative environmental impacts.

For some people, it may seem counterintuitive that downhill ski runs can be constructed without decimating the local ecosystem. Our research in the Sierra Nevada found that ski runs cleared of only trees and other tall vegetation are ecologically more similar to undisturbed forests than they are to graded ski runs. These cleared slopes actually harbor greater species diversity than undisturbed forests in many adjacent sites.

Ecologists know that disturbance can be a natural component of ecosystem health. Our research showed that clearing trees for ski runs mimics in some ways natural disturbances, such as fires, avalanches and treefalls. While clearing ski runs introduces larger-scale issues of forest fragmentation and crowds of winter (and sometimes summer) tourists in a formerly natural area, the clearing technique reduces overall harm, compared to the more destructive bulldozing.

Nevertheless, machine-grading of ski runs is prevalent worldwide. In the Sierra Nevada and many other parts of the West, the vast majority of ski runs are graded. At Whistler-Blackcomb near Vancouver, British Columbia, where the so-called “Green Olympics” were held, 90 percent of conventional ski runs are graded. Graded ski runs are also common elsewhere in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Why is bulldozing so widespread? Graded ski runs require less snow to open, allowing ski resorts to capitalize on the “shoulder” seasons of early and late winter, when snow coverage is sparser. But a ski area doesn’t need to open all of its runs at once to be open for business.

As an alternative to allow earlier ski run openings, clearing may be done with greater precision and attention to detail so that less snow is required to open the ski run. Large rocks and boulders can be fragmented in place using the same methods used on runs that are later graded. Stumps can be ground down to soil level.

Spot-grading can also be used, if a rock outcrop or other irreconcilable irregularity impedes a workable run. But wherever grading is used, restoration of soil function and native vegetation should be carried out, including planting with appropriate native species after tilling subsoils with wood mulch and redistributing saved topsoil.

The conventional wisdom is that the “green” way of doing things is necessarily more expensive. But clearing ski runs is far more economical in construction costs in both the short and long terms. Clearing trees and breaking up large rocks on a new ski run in a forested area are the first steps of ski run construction, regardless of whether the ski run is then smooth-graded.

Furthermore, graded ski runs have additional inherent upfront costs in that they require both bulldozing and often more mitigation at the time of construction, along with the time and money that are then put into often repeated attempts to establish vegetation on the graded ski runs in the off season. These erosion control practices are generally not necessary on cleared ski runs because the soils and native seedbank are left essentially intact during the clearing process and plants can readily grow in these conditions without active assistance.

Some surveys show that skiers, as a group, are highly committed to environmental protection. So the question becomes: Are resort managers, along with skiers and snowboarders, willing for some runs to open a little later and potentially close earlier so that resorts rely more on clearing instead of grading?

Jennifer Williamson Burt

A skier heads down the World Cup run at Heavenly ski resort in December.

Other sources of information on the environmental practices of ski resorts:

National Ski Areas Association

www.nsaa.org/nsaa/

Part of this trade organization’s Web site notes efforts by ski areas to reduce their environment footprint by investing in green power, reducing idling of vehicles at resorts and other measures. It also includes a link to the industry’s “Sustainable Slopes” charter. In that document, the ski industry pledges, “We are committed to improving environmental performance in all aspects of our operations and managing our areas to allow for their continued enjoyment by future generations.”

California Ski Industry Association Green Programs

www.californiasnow.com/green_programs.asp

This Web site focuses on programs by California ski resorts to reduce their environmental impact and adapt to a changing climate. As the site says, “Global warming is a very serious threat to the world of wintersports. As the effects of global warming are expected to manifest themselves most severely at northern latitudes and higher elevations, skiers, snowboarders and all-around winter revelers face the prospect of less snowfall, a reduced snowpack and a shorter season for snow sports.”

Ski Area Citizen’s Coalition

www.skiareacitizens.com

This coalition of conservation groups publishes the annual Ski Area Environmental Report Card. The coalition describes the report card as “a non-industry, independent mechanism that gives all outdoor and mountain recreational users a way to assess the environmental performance and policies of their favorite ski areas and resorts. By making eco-friendly business choices, you can encourage the improvement of environmental business policies and practices.”

California faces a Sophie’s Choice, except that the decision doesn’t involve which child to save. This tragic choice will involve elderly Californians.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes to slice $135 million from the budget by eliminating “adult day health care,” a program that helps 37,000 old and infirm men and women remain in their homes, out of far more costly nursing homes.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office concurs, citing the $20 billion budget deficit and the need for immediate cuts.

So far, legislators are balking. We hope they continue to refuse. Cutting adult day care would be a false savings. The LAO has said as much, noting the proposal “does not adequately account for general fund cost shifts that could result from the proposed elimination of this benefit.”

If you’re not familiar with adult day health care, you soon may be. California has a rapidly aging population. A parent or maybe even you may need the program. If you do have need for it, you will find it to be a lifesaver.

In adult day care programs, elderly people can spend several hours a day in facilities where they play cards, talk with friends, or become engaged in exercise and crafts. This is not a program for the wealthy. It is for old folks, many of whom served their country, and didn’t have the good fortune to acquire large sums of money along the way.

Candidates and lawmakers who blithely call for cuts to welfare as a way to “save” money might count adult day care as one such program. But there is nothing trivial or extravagant about it.

Social and health care workers track changes in the health or cognitive skills of the people who attend, and help avert major problems. Adult day care is a humane and enlightened alternative to far more costly nursing homes.

The Schwarzenegger administration is in a bind. In past years, the administration tried to preserve welfare programs by paring them back. In several instances, interest groups sued and won court orders restoring the cuts.

Although it may be illegal to trim programs, the state appears to be entitled to eliminate entire programs. Toward this end, lawmakers cut all state money last year for indigent adults for dentistry, cream and washes for people who are incontinent, audiology, optometry, psychology, podiatry, acupuncture and chiropractic services.

The federal government deems all those programs to be “optional.” California now provides only a handful of medical services for indigents that it could cut: prescription drugs, physical and occupational therapy, medical equipment such as wheelchairs, prosthetics and adult day health care.

California faces a deficit of $20 billion, and a structural deficit that will go on for years until there is a fundamental overhaul.

Legislators and Schwarzenegger must focus on the budget before anything else. We recognize more stark choices loom. But in a state as wealthy as California, surely there is money to help our elders maintain a little dignity in their final years.

I received an e-mail a few weeks ago from a colleague in Laos regarding yet another deadly accident. On Feb. 22 a cluster bomb that the U.S. dropped on Laos more than four decades ago killed five children and severely injured another. The children, ages 10 to 14, were feeding their water buffalo in a rice field when they found the bomb. They were the latest victims among the more than 300 new casualties that occur every year – one-third of them children, according to Lao government figures.

The e-mail went on to say that if this happened in the U.S., it would be a national outrage. Here, it is happening with sickening regularity, as it has for 40 years. Is anyone outraged? I am outraged, as all Americans should be, by this senseless and preventable killing. It is morally unconscionable that the U.S. has allowed this suffering to go on for four decades.

My first visit to Laos was in 2006. Standing on the Plain of Jars in Xieng Khouang province, I heard explosions. My guide explained an unexploded ordnance clearance team was detonating cluster bombs found by local villagers. At least he hoped it was the clearance team and not an unsuspecting farmer who had hit a cluster bomb with his hoe.

Like most Americans, I did not know about the massive bombing campaign the U.S. waged over Laos from 1964 to 1973 during the Vietnam War. Or the estimated 8 million to 24 million unexploded cluster bomblets and vast quantities of other unexploded ordnance we left behind in a country about half the size of California. Or the Lao government’s estimate of 34,000 civilian casualties caused by unexploded munitions since the war ended in 1973.

On returning home, I began working with the U.S.-based organization Legacies of War to educate the public on this issue and advocate for increased U.S. funding for clearing unexploded ordnance (UXO) from Laos.

As one of the poorest nations in the world, Laos has been dependent on the United Nations, the United States and other countries to fund their UXO clearance programs in place since 1994. While the U.S. has been the largest contributor, funding remains woefully inadequate.

The United States has contributed an average of nearly $3 million a year for 16 years. In contrast, we spent $2 million a day (about $10 million in today’s dollars) for nine years bombing Laos. As a consequence, less than 1 percent of the contaminated lands have been cleared. And the casualties continue.

Now, an international agreement to ban cluster munitions is focusing attention on Laos and other countries affected by these weapons, bringing hope for an end to this tragedy. Just six days before the latest accident in Laos, the Convention on Cluster Munitions received final ratification. The agreement bans all use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions and commits countries to clearing contaminated areas and providing victim assistance.

The 104 parties to the convention include all of Western Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia and other nations from every continent. Regrettably, the U.S. has not signed the agreement and is unlikely to do so. However, the convention marks an important milestone for Laos, the country most severely affected by cluster munitions: the Lao government will host the first gathering of the parties to the convention in Vientiane in November 2010. As one of the first countries to sign and ratify the agreement, Laos has transcended its status as a victim of cluster munitions to become a key voice for their eradication.

By signing the convention, the Lao government committed to clearing cluster munitions from their country. Given the immense number of munitions and the remote mountainous terrain of many areas, it is not feasible to cost-effectively clear all contaminated lands. Instead, the Lao government adopted a 10-year strategy focused on clearing populated areas, and reducing UXO casualties from 300 to 100 per year.

It will take substantial increases in U.S. funding if Laos is ever going to make meaningful progress. As the rest of the world watches, the U.S. cannot continue to ignore its obligation to clean up the mess it left behind 40 years ago. Legacies of War and partner organizations are asking Congress to approve $7 million in fiscal year 2011, with additional increases in subsequent years. (Congress approved $5 million for 2010.) We must make the land safe once more for the people of Laos.

I am sure the U.S. government never intended for tens of thousands of civilians to be killed or maimed by bombs dropped so many years ago.

But that is exactly what is still happening today. And Americans should be outraged.

Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez’s opening act is making us squirm in our seats.

California needs him to succeed, and bring some decorum and propriety back to the People’s House.

So far, we’re seeing too many pratfalls.

Pérez was in charge when the Legislature’s attorneys engaged in a ham-handed attempt to help a union and the Democratic Party win a suit to water down the open primary initiative, Proposition 14 on the June ballot. The effort largely failed in the courts, but not for a lack of trying.

The speaker said he wasn’t involved in the play. But the Legislative Counsel cannot act without approval of its bosses.

If he didn’t know, why didn’t he? There is no good answer.

Then there is the business of his transition to his new and powerful job. We’ve known since December that Pérez would be speaker, and he was sworn in at the beginning of this month. But he waited almost three weeks before selecting committee chairs and assigning legislators to various committees.

Speaking of swearing-in, Pérez felt compelled to take the oath twice, once in Sacramento and again in Los Angeles. Our state is mired in the worst recession most of us have ever experienced. All of us know people who have been laid off, haven’t found work, and are losing health insurance. This is hardly the time for Pérez to strut as if he is an Imperial Speaker.

As Pérez took office, word leaked that his predecessor, speaker-turned congressional candidate Karen Bass, had given raises to her legislative staff.

Pérez could have rescinded those pay hikes.

Instead, as The Bee’s Jim Sanders wrote, he followed by handing out even bigger raises to his staff, giving his chief of staff a $65,000 raise to $190,008, the level that Speaker Bass’ chief of staff received.

Making matters worse, Pérez did not reduce the pay for Bass’ aide to a level commensurate with her reduced duties.

These blindered moves are corrosive to the morale of hardworking legislative aides who will receive no raises, and they are infuriating to Californians who have been furloughed, or, worse, are out of work.

The curtain is closing on Pérez’s opening act. When Act II begins, he needs to focus on what is important – closing the multibillion-dollar budget gap, and taking whatever steps he can to help put Californians back to work.

Republican gubernatorial front- runner Meg Whitman is calling for a part-time Legislature.

The Citizen’s Compensation Commission will consider taking another bite out of legislators’ pay in April.

Neither idea is good. But Pérez needs to understand that his time upon the stage is no dress rehearsal.

As the vote nears on health care legislation, members of Congress need to ponder how history will view them.

Will they try to save their jobs, or will they aspire to live up to the more courageous leaders who preceded them? The time is now to cast a vote for the ages.

Presidents since Harry Truman have tried to create universal health care. This bill won’t go that far. But flawed though it is, this legislation could be remembered like the 1965 vote to create Medicare.

Benefits clearly outweigh the alternative of leaving the system as it is. Americans are being denied coverage. Their premiums are spiraling up and out of reach. One in four Californians are going without health coverage, including 1.5 million children. Doctors and hospitals are being shorted on payments for services they provide.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee brought home the need by publishing an estimate of the number of people without insurance by congressional district. Imagine entire cities of moderate size where no one has health coverage (www. energycommerce.house.gov):

• Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento: Congressional District 5 has 58,500 uninsured residents who would gain coverage. An additional 70,000 young adults would be able to remain on their parents’ policies until they turn 26. In addition, 14,600 small businesses would be able buy insurance by joining new health insurance exchanges, getting group rates and a choice of insurers. The cost to hospitals and other health providers of uncompensated care would be reduced by $93 million.

• Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove: The 4th District has 44,500 uninsured residents who would gain coverage. And 64,000 young adults could stay on their parents’ plans, while 20,600 small businesses could join an exchange. Providers’ uncompensated costs would be cut by $36 million.

• Dan Lungren, R-Gold River: The 3rd District has 34,000 uninsured residents who would gain coverage. An additional 56,000 young adults could stay on parents’ policies, and 14,800 small businesses could join an exchange. Providers’ uncompensated costs would be cut $16 million.

• Wally Herger, R-Chico: The 2nd District has 83,500 uninsured residents who would gain coverage. And 68,000 young adults could stay on their parents’ plans. In addition, 15,200 small businesses could join the exchange. Providers’ uncompensated costs would be reduced $59 million.

• Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena: The 1st District has 63,500 uninsured residents who would gain coverage. An additional 69,000 young adults could stay on their parents’ policies, and 17,200 small businesses could join the exchange. Providers’ costs would be reduced by $67 million.

Republicans will vote like a herd to oppose the legislation, as most did in 1965 when Congress approved Medicare. History proved them wrong then, and it will again with the upcoming votes.

House Minority Leader John Boehner declares that Republicans will do whatever they can to make sure “this bill never, ever, ever passes.”

Democrats need to look beyond the fear-mongering and pandering. This has been a 16-month-long debate.

But really it began six decades ago when Truman was president. The time to act is now.

In an effort to cut what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger claims is rampant fraud in the state’s In-Home Supportive Services Program, the Department of Social Services is pushing a pilot program to assess the efficacy of an expensive high-tech system to fingerprint and photograph care providers and their recipients.

The MorphoTrak device, which the state is testing in three counties, including Sacramento, has been used by the military in Iraq. It can fingerprint, snap a photo and transfer data instantaneously. The machines cost up to $5,000 a copy. If deployed statewide, the state would need 600 to 1,000 of these devices potentially. But let’s hold on a minute.

Before the state commits to buying this expensive equipment and building yet another expensive police bureaucracy that treats all IHSS recipients and their caregivers as potential criminals, it needs to perform a far more thorough assessment of the potential for fraud within IHSS and the best way to address it.

In the welfare realm, fingerprints and photo IDs are used primarily to prevent duplicate fraud, cases in which aid recipients go to different counties and apply for welfare or food stamps under different names. IHSS services are delivered in recipients’ homes. It’s hard to conceive of an elderly frail or disabled IHSS recipient traveling from Sacramento to Yolo to apply for help bathing or feeding him- or herself at two different addresses.

To the extent that IHSS fraud exists, the vast majority involves caregivers claiming payment for services that were not provided, or elderly and frail IHSS recipients exaggerating the extent of their disabilities.

An expensive bureaucratic apparatus to capture and store fingerprints and photos of recipients and caregivers does nothing to address those problems. A $5,000 camera-fingerprint device would pay for 500 hours of in-home care to poor elderly and disabled people.

Although the administration needs to look out for taxpayers, it shouldn’t waste money on anti-fraud efforts that make little sense.

As a physician, I find myself awake at night – concerned not about a patient but rather all patients and about the future of medicine. I recognize fully that the rising cost of health care requires that there be modifications to the system and ways to reach those without access to care. The bills currently being debated in Congress are on balance very bad medicine that puts health care at risk in the near and more distant future.

I have had the great good fortune to practice medicine in my hometown in a long-established private practice of three doctors. I love caring for patients. However, I am not only a doctor – I’m also a small-business owner. I contribute to my community’s financial health with more than a dozen employees. I have faced an environment of flat or decreased payment for services at a time when the cost to run our practice increases 10 percent to 20 percent a year due to government mandates and increasing requirements. In order to keep the “business” of my medical practice viable, I’ve continued to see more patients each day and stretch everywhere I can.

The current health reform bill proposes structures and regulations that will push those of us running medical practices beyond the over-stressed levels in which we already practice each day. One of our concerns is the Independent Physician Advisory Board. While this may sound like a “reasonable” idea by its title, it is not. It is an appointed group of 15 individuals who would be creating all future payment methodologies without congressional approval or public accountability. This single change puts the future of a physician’s ability to run a practice at risk, and removes the balance of democracy that our wise forefathers laid out. And, due to a political side deal with the White House, hospitals will be exempt from this change.

The bill also contains a provision to penalize doctors who order more tests than average. That means that, as a doctor, you would be penalized for taking care of those who require more time and more care – the sickest patients. That just seems more than wrong.

Health care policy is too important to legislate behind closed doors and load up with sweetheart deals .

I can sadly predict that if this bill becomes law, in a few years it is likely many private practices will close. I would likely be forced to consider leaving my hometown and home state. Practicing here, I bear the burden of being in a high-tax state that is unfriendly to employers like me, with more regulation and lower payments than many other regions of the country.

California will also be forced to take on a tremendous Medicaid burden to meet the bill’s requirements. To meet those, the California Legislature will be forced to cut education, transportation, and so much more. As a result, there will be a continued outflow of physicians from our state and a dismal ability to attract new physicians to care for Californians.

In case you doubt this prediction, you need look no further than MediCal – where physicians may be paid $13 to see a patient. At that rate, with overhead costs exceeding $50 per appointment, and even taking no wages for the physician’s time, a physician loses roughly $40 for every patient seen. You can’t make that up in volume.

I agree that changes need to be made. This bill is the wrong way to do it.

Be bold, stand tall, and just say “No.” The future of the physician-patient relationship and our ability to care for patients depends on it. I believe history will look back at those who were bold and believed there was a better way to do it and commend them for having the courage to say that more time is needed to make the necessary improvements in our health care system.

One way or another, the fate of health care reform is going to be decided in the next few days. If House Democratic leaders find 216 votes, reform will almost immediately become the law of the land. If they don’t, reform may well be put off for many years – possibly a decade or more.

So this seems like a good time to revisit the reasons we need this reform, imperfect as it is.

As it happens, Reuters published an investigative report this week that powerfully illustrates the vileness of our current system. The report concerns the insurer Fortis, now part of Assurant Health, which turns out to have had a systematic policy of revoking its clients’ policies when they got sick.

In particular, according to the Reuters report, it targeted every single policyholder who contracted HIV, looking for any excuse, no matter how flimsy, for cancellation. In the case that brought all this to light, Assurant Health used an obviously misdated handwritten note by a nurse, who wrote “2001” instead of “2002,” to claim that the infection was a pre-existing condition that the client had failed to declare, and revoked his policy.

This was illegal, and the company must have known it. The South Carolina Supreme Court, after upholding a decision granting large damages to the wronged policyholder, concluded that the company had been systematically concealing its actions when withdrawing coverage, not just in this case, but across the board.

But this is much more than a law enforcement issue. For one thing, it’s an example those who castigate President Barack Obama for “demonizing” insurance companies should consider. The truth, widely documented, is that behavior like Assurant Health’s is widespread for a simple reason: It pays. A House committee estimated that Assurant made $150 million in profits between 2003 and 2007 by canceling coverage of people who thought they had insurance, a sum that dwarfs the fine the court imposed in this particular case. It’s not demonizing insurers to describe what they actually do.

Beyond that, this is a story that could happen only in America.

In every other advanced nation, insurance coverage is available to everyone regardless of medical history. Our system is unique in its cruelty.

And one more thing: Employment-based health insurance, which is already regulated in a way that mostly prevents this kind of abuse, is unraveling. Less than half of workers at small businesses were covered last year, down from 58 percent a decade ago. This means that in the absence of reform, an ever-growing number of Americans will be at the mercy of the likes of Assurant Health.

So what’s the answer? Americans overwhelmingly favor guaranteeing coverage to those with pre-existing conditions – but you can’t do that without pursuing broad-based reform. To make insurance affordable, you have to keep currently healthy people in the risk pool, which means requiring that everyone or almost everyone buy coverage. You can’t do that without financial aid to lower-income Americans so that they can pay the premiums. So you end up with a tripartite policy: elimination of medical discrimination, mandated coverage, and premium subsidies.

Or to put it another way, you end up with something like the health care plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts in 2006, and the very similar plan being considered by the House. Comprehensive reform is the only way forward.

Can we afford this? Yes, says the Congressional Budget Office, which on Thursday concluded that the proposed legislation would reduce the deficit by $138 billion in its first decade and half of 1 percent of GDP, amounting to around $1.2 trillion, in its second decade.

But shouldn’t we be focused on controlling costs rather than extending coverage? Actually, the proposed reform does more to control health care costs than any previous legislation, paying for expanded coverage by reducing the rate at which Medicare costs will grow, substantially improving Medicare’s long-run financing along the way. And this combination of broader coverage and cost control is no accident: It has long been clear to health policy experts that these concerns go hand in hand. The United States is the only advanced nation without universal health care, and it also has by far the world’s highest health care costs.

Can you imagine a better reform? Sure. If Harry Truman had managed to add health care to Social Security back in 1947, we’d have a better, cheaper system than the one whose fate now hangs in the balance.

But an ideal plan isn’t on the table. And what is on the table, ready to go, is legislation that is fiscally responsible, takes major steps toward dealing with rising health care costs, and would make us a better, fairer, more decent nation.

All it will take to make this happen is for a handful of on-the-fence House members to do the right thing. Here’s hoping.

The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged.

Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The tea party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond.

He grew up in working-class Liverpool. “I lived in the city when it was being eviscerated,” he told the New Statesman. “It was a beautiful city, one of the few in Britain to have a genuinely indigenous culture. And that whole way of life was destroyed.” Industry died. Political power was centralized in London.

Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage.

The free-market revolution didn’t create the pluralistic decentralized economy. It created a centralized financial monoculture, which requires a gigantic government to audit its activities. The effort to liberate individuals from repressive social constraints didn’t produce a flowering of freedom; it weakened families, increased out-of-wedlock births and turned neighbors into strangers. In Britain, you get a country with rising crime, and, as a result, 4 million security cameras.

In a much-discussed essay in Prospect magazine in February 2009, Blond wrote, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bipolar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.” In a separate essay, he added, “The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct and mutually supporting failures.” The task today, he argued in a recent speech, is to revive the sector that the two revolutions have mutually decimated: “The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.”

Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: Remoralize the market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.

To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants, the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power, giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined with the towns around them.

Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations. His ideas have made a big splash in Britain over the past year. His think tank, ResPublica, is influential with the Conservative Party. His book, “Red Tory,” is coming out soon. He’s on a small U.S. speaking tour.

Britain is always going to be more hospitable to communitarian politics than the more libertarian United States. But people are social creatures here, too. American society has been atomized by the twin revolutions here, too. America, too, is suffering a devastating crisis of authority.

The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up.

Perhaps members of the anti-abortion movement are growing a bit desperate. Though they’ve managed to crimp women’s reproductive rights through decades of legislative maneuvering and extra-legal harassment, they still cannot overturn Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 Supreme Court decision. Nor have they moved public opinion much: A majority of Americans still believe current law should stand.

Perhaps that’s why some factions in the “pro-life” crusade are professing a newfound concern for the well-being of African American children.

Perhaps that’s why “racism” has become the battle cry of anti-abortion groups whose members – overwhelmingly white, conservative and Republican – like to think racism no longer exists.

In Georgia, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, Georgia Right to Life, is presenting itself as the last line of defense against a widespread plot to wipe out black people – a pogrom of sorts. The group has mounted billboards throughout black Atlanta neighborhoods, claiming that “black children are an endangered species” because of abortions.

While anti-abortion activists have long derided Margaret Sanger, considered the mother of modern family planning, for her endorsement of eugenics, they have more recently taken aim at such mainstream organizations as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, claiming it, too, is run by bigots. Two years ago, a faith-based group with ties to black clergy sent a letter to the Congressional Black Caucus denouncing Planned Parenthood for its “racist and eugenic goals.”

Well, paranoid theories are usually impervious to facts, but let’s try some facts, anyway. Despite the obstacles many African American children face on the road to adulthood – poverty, crime, poor schools – their numbers are not threatened. Black women have a higher birth rate than the national average.

But it is also true that black women use abortion services disproportionately. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for reproductive health, the abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women. About one-third of all abortions are obtained by white women and about 37 percent by black women (who account for less than 7 percent of the population), according to Guttmacher staffer Susan Cohen.

Those numbers are certainly troubling. But are racists persuading black women to have abortions? Is there some group of grim executioners looking to carry out a shadowy genocide? That’s not only nutty, it’s also insulting. It’s both sexist and racist to suggest that black women don’t have the intellectual and emotional firepower to make their own decisions.

(Largely owing to easier-to-use contraceptives, abortion rates have declined for the last 25 years, with black women’s rates falling along with those of other ethnic groups. However, Latinas and black women still terminate pregnancies at higher rates than white women.)

“The truth is that behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. … Because black women as a group want the same number of children as white women, but have so many more unintended pregnancies, they are more likely than white women to terminate an unintended pregnancy by abortion to avoid an unwanted birth,” Cohen wrote in a paper titled “Abortion and Women of Color: The Bigger Picture.”

If conservatives are sincere about curbing abortions – among all women: white, black and brown – they should support efforts to broaden women’s health care, which includes reproductive health care. Easy access to contraceptives would encourage their use, thereby reducing unintended pregnancies – and abortions.

“The health disparities for low- income women and women of color are enormous,” noted Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, which provides full-service reproductive health care – including noncontroversial procedures such as annual pelvic exams – to women who cannot get it elsewhere.

But social and religious conservatives have been fighting health care reform, which would broaden access to reproductive health care, with the passion they normally reserve for bashing Roe v. Wade. That’s why it’s hard to believe they really care about black women – or their children.

Faced with what city officials called the “most severe economic recession since the Great Depression,” the Rocklin City Council approved a complicated plan last year that encouraged several top city officials to retire early and then return to work in their old jobs on a part-time basis.

The practice, common in state and local governments, is known as double dipping. In the right situations, it can save money while retaining experienced workers.

But Rocklin didn’t just retire workers and bring them back at a lower cost. It boosted retirement pay for those same workers – or a bonus on top of a bonus on top of a bonus, a kind of triple dip.

In the short run, the city of Rocklin saves $700,000 by having its city manager, police chief and other top officials retire early and then come back to work part time the very next day. Not only will the city pay less in salary to the part-timers, because they are “retired’ the city doesn’t have to pay their health and retirement benefits.

But over the long run, the city will end up paying out fatter pensions over a longer period of time for those same workers. That’s because Rocklin granted them enhanced pensions in exchange for early retirement, specifically credit for two years of extra service they never actually worked.

To pay for those extra two years, the city will have to fork over an additional $758,698 to the state retirement fund over the next 20 years. In the case of City Manager Carlos Urrutia, the extra two years will cost the city $134,984. Police Chief Mark Siemens’ extra two years will cost even more, $178,277.

Besides fatter pensions, Urrutia, Siemens and the handful of other Rocklin retirees who’ve returned to work part time will earn substantially more this year than they did their last full year on the job. Urrutia, a primary beneficiary of the scheme, sold it to the Rocklin City Council. Under it, he will collect $309,000 in salary and pension this year, almost $80,000 more than the $230,000 in base pay he earned in 2009.

Faced with a drastic drop in revenue, Rocklin City Council members say they voted for the pension scheme to save money and avoid layoffs this year. But in a year or two when the part-timers are replaced by a new full-time city manager and a new full-time police chief, the temporary salary savings will evaporate while the extra pension payouts continue to flow.

In the long run, the city does not save money. It merely pushes higher retirement costs out into the future, when other City Council members will have to deal with the consequences. By spreading the cost of the enhanced benefits over 20 years, the city has assured that those costs will be borne by future taxpayers who derive no benefit.

That’s unfair. It’s worse than that. With so many government and private sector workers facing layoffs and furloughs, some top officials are using their power, influence and knowledge of arcane pension rules to take advantage of troubled times.

During a cross-country meet in Monrovia during the 1970s, I watched the runner ahead of me disappear into a curtain of smoggy haze. At the finish line runners would gasp, collapse and puke, so severe was California’s air pollution.

Fast forward four decades to today’s dramatically improved air quality in all the state’s major metropolitan areas. Emissions in the Los Angeles area have been slashed about 90 percent, Californians drive cars that emit one-tenth the exhaust they once did and the state leads the nation in low levels of per capita energy use.

Of all the things broken in California today, the campaign for clean air is not one of them.

But an initiative proposed for the November ballot would suspend a key element of California’s clean-air program. It targets the California Global Warming Solution Act, or AB 32, which requires greenhouse gas emissions reductions to 1990 levels by 2020.

The initiative is a response to recession fatigue and fear that pollution curbs could drive out jobs and harm the economy. But it is the wrong path for California.

To be sure, the economy is in handle-with-care mode, yet it’s difficult to say exactly how a law will affect economic growth years into the future.

The state Air Resources Board says AB 32 will add green jobs in the long term, the Legislative Analyst’s Office says it will cost some jobs in the near term. Energy prices will likely rise as California adds renewable power, but costs can be offset by efficiency measures.

The ballot measure – called the California Jobs Initiative – is a cynical bit of doublespeak as it’s sponsored by Texas-based oil firms Valero Energy Co. and Tesoro Corp. – two of the state’s biggest carbon emitters – and conservative politicians who see economic distress as opportunity to roll back environmental protections. It would require California to abandon greenhouse gas controls, including renewable energy and clean-fuel rules, until the state unemployment rate falls to less than half today’s rate of 12.5 percent.

The proposal is a step backward at a time when California needs to surge forward to new energy solutions. It marks a radical departure from how California has controlled air pollution for more than a half century, because this will be the first time voters have been asked to repeal a cornerstone of California’s clean-air program. A win at the ballot box would telegraph to the world that the state no longer has the political will to press the fight against global warming at a moment when leadership in Washington, D.C., and at the United Nations is slipping.

California’s success against emissions is the result of technical experts who functioned independent of political influence to successfully resist powerful Detroit automakers and oil companies when the federal government or other states could not.

Cherry-picking clean-air laws at the ballot box is not likely to perpetuate success because air pollution control is a mosh pit of arcane specialties, including engineering, epidemiology, chemistry, law, physics, toxicology and economics – arguably the most complex undertaking in government.

Furthermore, California’s core strategy relies on “technology-forcing measures” that push the limits of know-how beyond what’s comfortable to drive cutting-edge solutions that clobber emissions. The strategy produced game-changing remedies such as catalytic converters, unleaded gasoline, hybrid-electric cars and reformulated consumer products. The state’s climate-protection law will open a new front in the campaign for clean air, pressing transformative technologies that not only clean up smokestacks and tailpipes, but force the state’s economy to de-carbonize. Time and again, California’s clean-air regulations have opened new markets, which attracted investment that led to technological innovation, new jobs and improved efficiencies.

But the new ballot initiative would stop that momentum cold because it would suspend AB 32 until unemployment in California holds at 5.5 percent or lower for four quarters – a level achieved only twice in the past 24 years. Without a stable regulatory climate, businesses will be unwilling to invest in clean, new technologies, choking needed innovation and capital at the moment when California is poised to leap toward a sustainable society.

Over the years, California beat air pollution because we stayed the course, despite boom or bust cycles, war or peace, or whether Democrats or Republicans were in power. It wasn’t always easy or cheap, but our skies are bluer, people’s health is better, and growth propelled California into the eighth-largest economy in the world.

If we don’t hold fast now, innovation will pass us by as other countries capitalize on advanced energy technologies and green jobs to grow their economies. California needs AB 32 to retain its edge and ensure we don’t become the rust belt of the 21st century.

Why did President Barack Obama choose to turn a gaffe into a crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations? And a gaffe it was: the announcement by a bureaucrat in the Interior Ministry of a housing expansion in a Jewish neighborhood in north Jerusalem.

The timing could not have been worse. Vice President Joe Biden was visiting, Jerusalem is a touchy subject, and you don’t bring up touchy subjects that might embarrass an honored guest.

But it was no more than a gaffe. It was certainly not a policy change, let alone a betrayal. The neighborhood is in Jerusalem, and the 2009 Netanyahu-Obama agreement was for a 10-month freeze on West Bank settlements excluding Jerusalem.

Nor was the offense intentional. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not know about this move – step four in a seven-step approval process for construction that, at best, will not even start for two to three years.

Nonetheless, the prime minister is responsible. He apologized to Biden for the embarrassment. When Biden left Israel on March 11, the apology appeared accepted and the issue resolved.

The next day, however, the administration went nuclear. After discussing with the president specific language she would use, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Netanyahu to deliver a hostile and highly aggressive 45-minute message that the Biden incident had created an unprecedented crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations.

Clinton’s spokesman then publicly announced that Israel now was required to show in word and in deed its seriousness about peace.

Israel? Israelis have been looking for peace – literally dying for peace – since 1947, when they accepted the United Nations partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. (The Arabs refused and declared war. They lost.)

Israel made peace offers in 1967, 1978 and in the 1993 Oslo peace accords that Yasser Arafat tore up seven years later to launch a terror war that killed a thousand Israelis.

Clinton’s own husband testifies to the remarkably courageous and visionary peace offer made in his presence by Ehud Barak (now Netanyahu’s defense minister) at the 2000 Camp David talks. Arafat rejected it.

In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered equally generous terms to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Refused again.

In these long and bloody 63 years, the Palestinians have not once accepted an Israeli offer of permanent peace, or ever countered with anything short of terms that would destroy Israel. They insist instead on a “peace process” – now in its 17th post-Oslo year and still offering no credible Palestinian pledge of ultimate co-existence with a Jewish state – the point of which is to extract pre-emptive Israeli concessions, such as a ban on Jewish construction in parts of Jerusalem conquered by Jordan in 1948, before negotiations for a real peace have even begun.

Under Obama, Netanyahu agreed to commit his center-right coalition to acceptance of a Palestinian state; took down dozens of anti-terror roadblocks and checkpoints to ease life for the Palestinians; assisted West Bank economic development to the point where its GDP is growing at an astounding 7 percent a year; and agreed to the West Bank construction moratorium, a concession that Secretary Clinton herself called “unprecedented.” What reciprocal gesture, let alone concession, has Abbas made during the Obama presidency? Not one.

Indeed, long before the Biden incident, Abbas refused even to resume direct negotiations with Israel. That’s why the Obama administration has to resort to “proximity talks” – a procedure that sets us back 35 years to before Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Jerusalem.

And Clinton demands that Israel show its seriousness about peace? Now that’s an insult.

Why this astonishing one-sidedness? Because Obama likes appeasing enemies while beating up on allies – therefore Israel shouldn’t take it personally (according to Robert Kagan)? Because Obama wants to bring down the current Israeli coalition government (according to Jeffrey Goldberg)?

Or is it because Obama fancies himself the historic redeemer whose irresistible charisma will heal the breach between Christianity and Islam or, if you will, between the post-imperial West and the Muslim world – and has little patience for this pesky Jewish state that brazenly insists on its right to exist, and even more brazenly on permitting Jews to live in its own ancient, historical and now present capital?

Who knows. Perhaps we should ask those who assured the 63 percent of Americans who support Israel – at least 97 percent of those supporters, mind you, are non-Jews – about candidate Obama’s abiding commitment to Israel.

The Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency is only making things worse for itself with an appalling lack of openness.

Last week, The Bee reported about the deplorable, if not dangerous, conditions that the Valdez family was living under until a public health nurse blew the whistle.

The family was using an agency voucher to pay most of the $1,050 monthly rent to a landlord with a history of housing code violations.

The Bee wanted to know when the agency last inspected the small house in North Sacramento and whether the conditions were spotted during the inspections.

SHRA’s response, however, made it impossible to find out. It demanded an official public records request for even basic information on its inspections program.

Then it blacked out much of what it released.

It also required another public records request to find out the name of the outside contractor that the agency says does most of the inspections.

All the secrecy begs the question: What is it trying to hide?

SHRA’s defense is that it is protecting the privacy of clients. In a statement, SHRA’s executive director, La Shelle Dozier, said the agency must “ensure that satisfying the public’s right to know does not jeopardize the basic premise of the right to privacy.”

But the resident talked to The Bee’s Robert Lewis about her family’s situation. And California’s public records law says that to keep a document under wraps, an agency must show that the public interest in confidentiality outweighs that for disclosure.

SHRA has not come close to meeting that test.

While the agency may operate below the radar, it plays a significant role in the lives of Sacramento’s less fortunate.

Created jointly by the city and county, it is responsible for affordable housing and community redevelopment. It is one of the area’s largest landlords, operating 3,500 units and administering 11,000 rental vouchers used at privately owned units. And with a budget of $269 million this year, it is the steward of millions in taxpayer money.

With that responsibility comes accountability and transparency to the public. In this case, the agency is falling woefully short. Taxpayers and the residents it serves deserve much better.