For those only vaguely familiar with this name, let us recap some pertinent facts of his life. He was born in New Mexico of Yemini parents. His father received his master’s degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of New Mexico, which is why Anwar al-Awlaki is an American citizen. His father then got his doctorate from the University of Nebraska and taught at the University of Minnesota. He then moved back to Yemen, where he served as agricultural minister.

Al-Awlaki was 7 when he moved back to Yemen, living there 11 years. Though he was an American citizen, he came back to the U.S. claiming to have been born in Yemen. He received a degree in Civil Engineering in 1994 from Colorado State University. He spent his summers training with the Afghan mujahideen.

Though he did further studies at San Diego State University and George Washington University, his real interest came to be Islamic radicalism. He became an imam, preaching in San Diego and later Falls Church, Va. In both those places he was closely associated with three of the 9-11 hijackers. It has always been suspected he arranged quarters for them. A fourth person involved in the 9-11 conspiracy was found to have al-Alwaki’s phone number when German police raided his home.

He left the U.S. for London in 2002 and returned to Yemen in 2004. Yemen imprisoned him in 2006-07 for kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché.

Fluent and at ease in English, his jihad Website inspired Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hassan. He is also associated with the Christmas 2009 underwear bomber.

Though al-Alwaki is dead, his Website and the magazine he helped start, Inspire, still inspired and helped radicalize the Boston Marathon bombers, though they likely downloaded his lectures before al-Alwaki was droned out of existence.

His English language lectures still live on in cyberspace. What’s needed is the U.S. military to put its best cyber warfare specialists to work destroying al-Awlaki’s cyber presence. Cut off the multi-headed monster with a samurai sword of cyber slicing and dicing. Put a destructive cyber bug in Inspire. Don’t let this dead man keep inspiring more self-radicalizing killers in this country.

That influence was subtle. Sometimes these things don’t become evident until the parent is gone, and you’re looking back in a manner you almost never do until they are gone.

I was reflecting that way the other day, about our dad’s fondness for old cowboy songs. He used to sing them to my sisters and me while strumming his ukulele, an instrument that now sits on the “memory shelf” in my office. Dad knew so many of those sweet old songs. It never occurred to me at the time, but now I have to wonder how he committed so many lengthy lyrics to memory.

The horse-oriented ballads were among our favorites, as all five Forsberg girls were horse lovers. There was “Strawberry Roan,” about the bronco that refused to be busted. He turns his old belly right up to the sun / He sure is a sun-fishin’ son-of-a-gun.

And “Old Paint,” about a cowboy riding a pinto on a cattle drive. I remember being troubled that “the fiery and the snuffy” had tails that were “matted” and backs that were “raw.” Clearly, cowboyin’ was hard on all concerned.

We also loved the ballads relating dramatic and sometimes devastating life events. “Cool Water” tells of a man who sees a mirage as he’s dying of thirst in the desert. Keep a-movin’, Dan, don’tcha listen to him, Dan / He’s a devil not a man / And he spreads the burnin’ sand with water.

“Big Iron” relates how an outlaw might have gone on living but for one fatal slip: When he tried to match the ranger with the big iron on his hip.

(By the way, if you want to hear any of these songs, simply search their names at YouTube.com.)

Saddest of them all, however, was “Streets of Laredo.” In this heartrending ballad, one cowboy comes upon another who is “wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay.” The injured cowboy pleads: Come an’ sit down beside me an’ hear my sad story. /  I’m shot in the breast an’ I know I must die.

He then recounts the happy times of his life: dashing and riding and card-playing, plus courting at Rose’s. We never learn exactly how he went wrong, though I’ll bet Rose had something to do with it. In the end, he gives instructions for his funeral:

Then beat the drum slowly, play the fife lowly.
Play the dead march as you carry me along.
Take me to the green valley, lay the sod o’er me,
I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.

That hits home, doesn’t it? I can still remember the wistful look on my father’s face as he came to the end of the song. He was a tender-hearted soul.

And so is his daughter Caroline. That’s one of the reasons I wondered if perhaps the early impressions of these cowboy songs wound up influencing her choice of genre as a writer. To date, she’s written five Western historical novels, including “Where the Wind Blows,” winner of the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart Award. In this book, a cowboy agrees to pretend to be a husband — just for three days, mind you — to help a young widow adopt a child.

“Where the Wind Blows” was published in 2009; its long-awaited sequel, “Before the Larkspur Blooms,” hits shelves tomorrow (carolinefyffe.com). In it, a cowboy released from prison — following a crime he didn’t commit — returns home to discover his parents dead and his neighbors eager to suspect him when things start to go wrong. All the neighbors except one, that is: a young woman who still remembers him as the boy she once loved.

It’s a great story and, like all of Caroline’s books, it owes much to the sensibility of those old cowboy ballads our dad used to sing. At least that’s what I thought as I was mulling things over the other day. So I asked her about it.

“Funny, I do think of Dad a lot when I’m writing,” she admitted. “You may’ve stumbled onto something, there.” Then came the kicker. Regarding the book that debuts tomorrow, Caroline explained that Jake, an important side character and a bit of a misfit, finds himself tempted by drink and gambling. At that precise point, what cautionary tale comes wafting his way courtesy of the singer at the saloon piano? The sad strains of “Streets of Laredo.”

“That song in particular always makes me think of Dad,” Caroline mused. “I remember asking him over and over when we were little to ‘sing the song where the cowboy dies.’ That always made Dad smile.”

I’m sure it did. But I’m sure he never imagined that song would one day wind up in a novel written by his youngest daughter.

Such is the subtle yet powerful influence of a parent. We miss you, Dad.

Jennifer Forsberg Meyer, a biweekly columnist with the Mountain Democrat, favors Marty Robbins’ renditions of old cowboy songs on YouTube.com.

Lance Corporal Buchanan’s company was participating in Operation Allen Brook in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam. His unit was moving against well-entrenched North Vietnamese Army (NVA) forces in the village of Le Bac when it was ambushed by an enemy force, separating two Marine platoons from the remainder of their company.

As Corporal Buchanan’s platoon quickly maneuvered toward the beleaguered Marines, it suddenly came under intense small-arms and automatic weapons fire from an NVA unit that was entrenched in a series of bunkers and spider holes. In the initial burst of fire, several Marines were killed or seriously wounded, including the platoon commander, platoon sergeant, all the squad leaders and the radio operator.

“Observing a well-hidden enemy bunker,” Lance Corporal Buchanan’s Navy Cross citation reads, “fearlessly assaulted the position and directed accurate rifle fire into the emplacement. Then, retrieving the platoon radio and shouting to his comrades to follow, he led the Marines to the relative safety of a nearby pagoda where he established a hasty defense.

“Unable to establish radio communication with his company and upon observing several medical evacuation helicopters in the vicinity, he relayed a request for armed helicopter support. As he directed numerous air strikes on the enemy positions, often within 10 feet of his position, he courageously rushed into the fire-swept area to move the casualties to better protected positions.

“Upon discovering an adjacent bunker occupied by several NVA soldiers, Corporal Buchanan boldly assaulted it single-handedly, silencing the hostile fire.” The award citation described the three-hour battle as intense, though throughout it all he remained in command and with a calm presence of mind that saved numerous Marine lives and inspired all who observed him.

At 11 a.m. today in Placerville, 45-years nearly to the day that he was cited for “outstanding leadership, intrepid fighting spirit and selfless devotion to duty,” Richard Buchanan will join other El Dorado County veterans and citizens at the Veteran’s Monument to honor all who have worn the uniform of our nation and served it in war and peace.

When asked to describe the meaning of Memorial Day, he thought long then said, “It’s there for all of us to remember and honor veterans of all wars and peacetime service who paid the ultimate price to keep America free … that they will long be remembered in our hearts. However, when you’ve been shot in the ass, it means a hell of a lot more than that. It’s not something you take lightly.”

Nothing will be taken lightly in today’s ceremony at the El Dorado County Veteran’s Monument at the Government Center in Placerville. With military precision, the ceremony will begin at 1100 hours. Thereafter, a presentation of colors, the pledge of allegiance, the national anthem sung by the Ponderosa High School Choral Group, a fly-by of four historic WWII T6 Texans by Vulcher’s Row Aviation of Cameron Park, an invocation by chaplain Lt. Col. Tim Thompson, USA and a second fly-by in the missing-man formation will occur.

El Dorado County District I Supervisor Ronald Mikulaco — himself a veteran of the U.S. Army’s Third Division — will serve as master of ceremonies, welcoming the assembled veterans, recognizing recipients of the Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross and Air Force Cross, as well as participating flag officers and dignitaries.

California Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Theresa Gunn, a recipient of the state Military Department’s highest civilian honor, will deliver Gov. Jerry Brown’s Memorial Day Proclamation to an audience of veterans from World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Gulf War, the War on Terror and who served in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world.

Gary Cambell, a member of Friends of the Monument that led the effort to build and maintain the Veteran’s Monument, will then present the keynote address. Campbell comes from a military family. He served in the U.S. Air Force and California Air National Guard; his father was a career Canadian Army officer; and his youngest brother served 37 years in the California Air National Guard. The 35-year El Dorado County resident and defense logistics expert’s talk will be followed by a changing of the guard by Staff Sgt. Pat Smothers, USMC who has been the monument’s sergeant at arms since 2006. Gunnery Sgt. Sean Smothers, USMC — his son — will assume his father’s duties.

Jim Cahill will award the Veterans Monument Scholarship to Ann Donegan of El Dorado High School. Ms. Donegan is the daughter of Navy nurse, Lt. Cmdr. Janet Donegan, USN. The ceremony closes with a wreath laying, including a 21-gun salute, hymn, benediction, playing of bagpipes by Lt. Cmdr. Bill Tubbs, USCGR-Ret, retiring of colors and taps.

Following the ceremony, John Conforti has invited the public and veterans to Smith Flat House in Placerville (2021 Smith Flat Rd.) from 1 to 4 p.m. for a program of music, bagpipes and dining with proceeds ($5 entry) benefitting the “Welcome Home Fund” to build a Veterans of the 21st Century Monument and additional seating at Veterans Monument Plaza.

Whether or not you attend today’s Memorial Day event, visiting Veterans Monument Plaza is a moving memorial on any day. From its carefully tended heights, the crest of the Sierra is seen along the far horizon, symbolic of the places throughout our county from which service men and women — like the Placerville Marine who stood his test of honor 45 years ago — came. It’s not something you take lightly.

John Poimiroo is a Cold War-era sailor who served as a cryptologist from 1965 to 1996.

“Holiday weekends are a great time for friends and families to go out and enjoy the outdoors, but we must all remain aware of the fire danger and the risks posed in the outdoors,” said Chief Ken Pimlott, director of Cal Fire. “We urge safety and preparedness when in wildland areas. California’s extremely dry conditions are primed for wildfires, and it takes diligence from everyone to avoid sparking a fire.”

With one of the driest winters on record, officials have already seen a drastic increase in fires. In an average year, by late May Cal Fire responds to approximately 850 wildfires. Already this year, Cal Fire has responded to nearly 1,600 wildfires; that number is up 50 percent from last year at this time, when there were just under 1,050 wildfires.

Cal Fire would like everyone to remember important steps this holiday.

Camping:
· Obtain a campfire permit
· Check for local fire restrictions
· Clear away grass, leaves and other debris within a 10-foot perimeter of any campfire
· Have a responsible person in attendance at all times
· Ensure all campfires are completely extinguished before leaving
· When barbequing, never leave the grill unattended.

With temperatures up, California’s water ways are running high as remaining snow melts. Many take advantage of cooling off in local rivers, but this fun outdoor activity does come with risks. Drownings claim adults and children alike, and Memorial Day weekend tends to see a spike in drownings. Under local agreements, Cal Fire responds to hundreds of water rescues across the state each year and even the strongest of swimmers can be caught off guard by strong currents or cold water. Following these tips below can save lives:

In the water:
· Always wear a life jacket
· Children should always be supervised by a responsible adult
· Never swim alone
· Drinking and swimming is just as dangerous and drinking and driving.

For more ways to be safe during Memorial Day visit the Cal Fire Website at fire.ca.gov.

Robert E. “Bob” Flynn, 1919-2011, U.S. Forest Service 1936-1975

Bob Flynn, born in Georgetown, went to work for the Forest Service before he got out of high school. He became district ranger of four districts and fire control officer on the Shasta-Trinity and the Sierra.

As a teenager, Bob’s first job was on a trails crew at Hells Delight Meadows, north of Highway 88. Pay was $4 a day. His next job was at Bald Mountain Lookout, near Quintette, east of Georgetown. Transportation was by burro.

In 1937, Bob shared an apartment in Davis with his older brother, Joe, and their buddy, Ray Lawyer, when all three men enrolled in the university to study forestry. The trio would each eventually get their degrees from Oregon State University.

While working for the Forest Service in 1941, Bob received orders to report for military duty. The Forest Service made all its employees available to serve, but requested that Bob stay until the end of fire season. He joined the Army Air Corps and trained at Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Tex. as a bombardier. He proceeded through navigation school and was posted to the Galapagos Islands. For the remainder of World War II, he operated the radar on B24s, flying security patrol on the western approaches to the Panama Canal.

Back stateside, Bob enrolled in Oregon State University on the GI Bill. During summers, he worked as fire foreman at South Lake Tahoe.

His first assignment after graduation was desert fire control assistant in the Cuyama District on the Los Padres Forest. His first appointment to District Ranger was on the Los Padres. He was District Ranger on the Mariposa and Shasta Trinity Forests, and retired in 1975 as Sierra National Forest District Ranger.

Bob was uniformly described as a cheerful man. He was good-natured and never complained, even though conditions were sometimes harsh, with minimum shelter, isolation and no fresh food. He was known as a good boss, one that people liked to work with.

Bob did not marry until he was over 50 years old and near the end of his forestry career. When he did marry, he chose a woman who had worked for him one summer.

Bob and his wife, Sue, retired to Georgetown, where he served for 24 years as a director of the Georgetown Divide Public Utility District. Since most of the water district facilities–canals, tunnels, Edson Dam and Stumpy Meadows Reservoir, and the Lake Walton treatment plant–were within the Eldorado National Forest boundaries and familiar to him, he was able to make important contributions to the operations of the district.

Ralph E. Balderston, 1929-2012, logging contractor 31 years

Born in Pocatello, Idaho, Ralph’s parents, George and Grace, moved to Georgetown, where his grandfather, John Balderston, ran a store called Balderston Station next to his home seven miles east of Georgetown. Ralph, the eldest of 15 children, grew up in the woods.

At age 14, Ralph was splitting firewood to feed the steam donkey for $2.50 a cord. A steam donkey, or donkey engine, is the nickname for a steam-powered winch that was designed to lift, drag and move logs from its stump to a landing, and to load logs.

By the time he was 16, Ralph was falling timber. He developed into a jack-of-all-trades in the woods.

Before he went into the service during the Korean War, Ralph worked as a tail sawyer at Michigan-Cal Lumber Company for a year. A tail sawyer removes cut boards from the mill. After the war, Ralph worked as an operating engineer and teamster, running big equipment. He also ran a service station at Twin Bridges.

For 31 years, Ralph worked as an independent logging contractor. He operated as Ralph Balderston Co., Somerset, and Ralph Balderston Logging, Inc., also in Somerset.

When his son, Mark, born in 1962, was growing up, the family spent summers living in a comfortable trailer in the woods. Scheritta, his wife, and Mark would join Ralph as soon as school was out.

He had a reputation as a specialist at working in sensitive areas along streams. Ralph ran his jobs from his loader. His team was a faller, a bucker, a cat skinner (bulldozer operator) and a skidder operator. When the crew left for the day, Ralph and his family enjoyed the quiet of the forest.

Healthy and active as the years advanced, he continued his logging business. At 74, he had a contract with Michigan-Cal to manage the Table Rock Timber sale. He carried on his routine schedule, logging during the day and fixing trucks at night.

Ralph was described as hard working and honest, a man who looked out for others and was quick to share his coffee or sandwich out in the brush.

Robert “Bob” Harris, 1940-2013, U.S. Forest Service 1967-1997

In his 30 years with the U.S. Forest Service, Bob Harris served on only four forests, all in Region 5, the Western Region, and was never a district ranger. Nevertheless, his legacy is profound.

Early on, Bob challenged the prevailing military-style attitude in the Forest Service that casualties while fighting forest fires were to be expected. He facilitated a dialogue about the loss of firefighters that helped change that perception.

Bob grew up in Oakland, where his father was assistant fire chief. The camaraderie among firefighters impressed him at an early age.

He studied civil engineering at UC Berkeley, graduating in 1963. America was building and it was a boom time for engineers. Bob went to work for the county and the state, but shortly moved his family to Illinois, where he worked for the highway department for four years.

He was tiring of engineering roads when a boyhood friend alerted him to opportunities with the U.S. Forest Service. As a Boy Scout, he had spent time in the mountains and learned to love the environment. When he applied for a job, he was given the choice of the Sequoia, the Eldorado or the Stanislaus. Bob started as a forest engineer on the Eldorado in March 1967, and found the number of different projects almost overwhelming.

His first big challenge was working on a restoration project that followed the failure of Hell Hole Dam in 1964 just before construction was completed. A 100-year storm caused catastrophic flooding in northern California and the Pacific Northwest. When Hell Hole, on the Rubicon River, failed, a wall of water took out several bridges downstream and caused serious destruction. Bob was involved in replacing bridges, roads and trails. He worked cooperatively with Michigan-Cal Lumber Company to agree on road standards and design. It was his first experience in changing from a technical approach to a negotiated one.

Bob adapted well to the change. Throughout the rest of his career, he was a member of many multidisciplinary teams within the Forest Service–recreation planners, landscape architects, hydrologists, silviculturists, archeologists and district employees. He went on to become an interagency leader with federal, state and county agencies. He took pride in his ability to work with what he called “externals.” Externals included the Job Corps, state fire personnel, honor inmates, the Civilian Conservation Corps, local communities, railroads, Native Americans, the U.S. Navy and the Offices of the President and Vice President.

He expanded his knowledge by learning from his superiors and taking advantage of trainings. In turn, he made a point to pass the knowledge along to new recruits. Bob worked on the Women in Engineering program, helping women assimilate to professional cultures.

Even though it was not required at the time, he became a California licensed civil engineer in 1968.

In 1970 he transferred to the Shasta-Trinity. When the solid waste program started, Bob had to negotiate with the county supervisors to close the dumps, which were on Forest Service land. Responding to a new water pollution abatement program, Bob and a team designed floating toilets and wastewater treatment systems.

Another task was co-leader of a design team for the Pacific Crest Trail.

He transferred to the Cleveland National Forest, east of San Diego, in 1974, where he remained for one and a-half years. His experience there encouraged him to take on more administrative responsibilities. Bob enjoyed the challenge of working with people who had adversarial points of view and trying to get to a resolution.

Bob spent the years 1975-1983 as forest engineer on the Tahoe National Forest. While there, he put together the first forest off-highway vehicle management plan. The National Environmental Policy Act was in effect, resulting in more public involvement. Bob’s favorite book at the time was “Getting to Yes.”

One of the postings considered an essential for top leadership in the Forest Service is Washington, D.C. Bob turned down an assignment in the capital because his three children were teenagers and he and his wife did not want to disrupt their high school years. Instead, he went to work at the Region 5 office in Pleasanton in 1984 and stayed for four years. He worked on the Mono Lake Visitors Center and a multi-agency administrative facility at Big Sur. He received the Forest Service Engineer of the Year award

The culmination of Bob’s career was when he became administrator of the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. He worked there from 1988 to 1997, with the exception of nine months when he took leave to serve as Interim Forest Supervisor on the Eldorado. The Basin Unit was created in the 1970s to provide coordinated administration of the Tahoe, Toiyobe and Eldorado forests in the area adjacent to Lake Tahoe.

Bob was instrumental in restoring the Pope House, Valhalla and Camp Richardson, and helped with the Tahoe Rim Trail. One of his major achievements was the installation of the Taylor Creek Stream Profile Chamber, where visitors can view salmon in Taylor Creek from a walkway.

He and others attempted to make the Basin Unit a national forest, but were defeated. He also wanted to see waterborne historic tours around the lake; however, other duties took priority.

Bob became involved in wildland-urban interface issues. Following a series of drought years in the mid-1980s, stands of white fir became infested with the fir engraver beetle and died. Attempts at salvage operations became embroiled in political skirmishes. To educate decision makers on the issues at Lake Tahoe, Bob worked to invite regional administrators, and eventually President Clinton and Vice President Gore, for personal visits.

One result of the visits was a $50,000 donation from Gore to create the Tahoe-Baikal Institute. South Lake Tahoe is now a sister city to Baikalsk, a small town with a pulp mill on the lake.

Following retirement, Bob put his energies into the Tahoe-Baikal Institute. His first trip to Baikal was in 1998. He developed land and resource plans for Mongolia and Russia. He trained the Russians in trail building. He created a high school student exchange in watershed education.

Bob also encouraged Forest Service retirees to remain active, saying they are an important resource. He was involved in an oral history program that resulted in a book called, “The Unmarked Trail.”

Bob Harris’s life is a history of the U.S. Forest service in a period of great changes. The man who decided that road building was not exciting enough helped make the Forest Service what it is today.

Bob’s son, Andy, who attended the dinner, gave $100 from the Robert Harris Trust to support the activities of the Amador El Dorado Forest Forum. Andy said, The U.S. Forest Service was and still is a terrific ‘family.’ His father was a great problem solver. He believed in the mission of the Forest Service, and always brought reading home with him to study in the evenings while the family watched television.”

For more information, visit aeforestforum.org, or call Diane Dealey Neill at 530-417-1960.

It’s not that I’m always in a bad mood or anything. It’s actually easy for me to find pleasure in many of the joys life brings, just as a pessimist it can often be clouded by a looming dark shadow of something I worry will happen in the near future.

For instance, when I get home from work to smiling faces and sprinting kids yelling “Daddy,” I can’t possibly focus on anything else but how great my life is. Then they go to bed, though, and the worries of their health and upbringing, bills, our future as a family and the fate of our great country sinks in. And it all worries me, greatly.

How can one not worry when the news is plastered with tragedy and despair on a nightly basis? Working in the media myself, I know producers aren’t (always) purposely selecting only bad news to broadcast. There’s just a lot more out there. You can only run so many stories about a local kid’s inspiring senior project before you end up back talking about robbery, drive-by shootings and national debt. It’s a public service to keep the community informed, but it doesn’t help a pessimist trying to look at the brighter side of things.

I try to escape reality whenever I can. Optimists would say I just shift my focus to the positive things in life, and that makes me happy. They’re right. A good movie, a dinner date with my wife, wrestling with the kids, all can be great equalizers to the harsh world awaiting us outside the front door. Unfortunately, at some point, we all have to step outside again.

So I’ve been working on reflecting on everything I have and not on everything I don’t, and it’s really helping. Instead of being envious my neighbor has nicer cars, a boat or whatever else, I try to realize that I like my car, and my wife’s, and I’m pretty fortunate to not be taking the bus to work. Rather than stressing about how I work in what some would call a dying field, I’m thankful that I have a full-time job doing what I love, and that I’m at a place that has been here over 160 years and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I’m realizing that life is all about perspective. You can always find things wrong with it. You’ll always be able to vividly point out the days you were stressed out the most, the ones you never thought you’d get through due to tragedy or hard times. You’ll always worry days like that are on the horizon, destined to happen at some point again. It’s easy to forget that you got through those times to get to today, and when those days come again, you’ll probably get through them too. Why worry about them before they come?

I really wish it were that easy. For some, it might be, and boy do I envy them. For others, like me, life is a constant work in progress, an effort to establish a foundation through hard work to provide such opportunities for happiness. The battle is a daily one, but can be quite fruitful with the right set of glasses. I’m still trying to find mine, but as I get older, I’m discovering there are a lot of things that help make them rose-colored. As hard as it may be, that’s what I need to focus on.

Then, and only then, can I make lemonade out of those stupid lemons.

Patrick Ibarra is the managing editor of the Mountain Democrat. 

Not satisfied with $1 billion that was included in the so-called Affordable Care Act, Kathleen Sibelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, kept asking Congress for more money to implement the new health care law. With Congress borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends, the House of Representatives naturally declined to give this profligate agency more money for a $2.6 trillion law.

Frustrated by not being given more money, Sibelius is now asking the health industry her department regulates to make large donations, according to the Washington Post. She has been working the phones for the past three months, in fact, calling health industry executives, community organizations and church groups to contribute to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll the uninsured.

“To solicit funds from health care executives to help pay for the implementation of the president’s $2.6 trillion health spending law is absurd. I will be seeking more information from the administration about these actions to help better understand whether there are conflicts of interest and if it violated federal law,” said Sen. Orin Hatch, R-Utah, in a prepared statement.

The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff wrote, “Federal regulations do not allow department officials to raise funds in their professional capacity.”

Justice Department regulations say cabinet members can raise funds as private citizens “if you do not solicit funds from a subordinate or from someone who has or seeks business with the department and you do not use your official title.”

The health industry may not be seeking business with HHS, but it sure is being and will be regulated by HHS, which has been issuing regulations of the health care industry by the busload in preparation for the 2014 implementation of Obamacare.

As far as we’re concerned hitting up health care executives for contributions is a clear conflict of interest and just plain wrong.

HHS is already setting up the economy for a shock. In February Sibelius announced that health insurance plans will have to pay for mental health and substance abuse treatments next year. When that trickles down to employers count on it costing employees a lot more in health insurance payroll deduction — if the employer doesn’t just pay the $2,000 fine and let the employees go on Obamacare.

The rules finalized in February affect health plans for individuals and small businesses. “Insurance plans offered by most large employers aren’t affected by the requirements,” the Wall Street Journal wrote back then. But we’re not holding our breath on that one. Anyone who doesn’t think it’s not going to affect employer-provided health care has been living in a bubble.

By the way, the subsidies from Obamacare “will be offered on a sliding scale for people who earn about four times the federal poverty level — about $94,000 for a family of four — or less,” according to the Feb. 21 WSJ.

Insurance premiums for a family have gone up $3,000 compared to the $2,500 President Obama said premiums would decrease by the end of his first term.

Providing insurance for people who only want to buy it after they get sick is going to get more and more expensive.

Obamacare is a complex and messy bill hatched in a backroom long after midnight. Now the HHS secretary is twisting arms of the health care industry to make this insurance disaster work. They should hold on tight to their wallets. They are going to need as much money as they can as this health care act moves into implementation.

Property Assessed Clean Energy is a fancy name for having home improvements financed through a third party contracting with the county and then put the loan on the county’s property tax rolls. The primary improvements to be financed are solar installations, but it would include other energy efficiency improvements such as new window, furnaces and insulation.

It is a worthy goal, getting more solar installations, et cetera. That is something that is already happening, however. In 2012, the county issued solar electrical and plumbing permits for a total value of $6.95 million. In the first quarter of 2013, permits totaled $2.65 million. The total for five quarters is $9.6 million. That’s a lot of solar installation without the benefit of a complicated county program.

What’s complicated about it? Two words: Mello-Roos. Bonds for the PACE program would be financed through a Mello-Roos Community Facilities District. There would be hearings. There would be Proposition 218 hearings in which a majority could file formal protests and scuttle it. Good luck with that, especially with a countywide Mellos-Roos that includes South Lake Tahoe.

The real problem with putting home improvements on the tax roll comes when some homeowner can’t afford the higher taxes and the county sells the home at a tax auction.

Don’t think it won’t happen, and bet on it that the Board of Supervisors will get blamed for the Mello-Roos district. Smart home buyers already ask if a home has Mello-Roos bonds. Mello-Roos taxes on top of property taxes and home owners association dues can be a deal breaker. If this PACE program goes, Realtors will have to disclose the 20-year loan added to the tax bill. It will not add much resale value to a house as home buyers are going to be reluctant to take on that higher tax bill.

What’s more, any home financed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, whether directly or by a mortgage-backed security after the bank sold the loan to one of these two, cannot receive a loan that goes on the tax rolls. Sonoma County already lost that case in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals March 19. The Federal Housing Finance Authority will not allow a property assessed financing program. Putting home improvement costs on the property tax bills makes them senior to the government-backed loans. The government-sponsored enterprises will not allow that.

Fannie and Freddie control half of the mortgages in Sonoma County, according to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. Figure El Dorado County has a similar percentage.

And finally, the county administrator is seeking a sole-source deal with one outfit. We call that crony capitalism. There are other companies that do the same thing.

Further, PG&E  has a list of incentives and financial resources for solar photovoltaic programs, including the California Solar Initiative program. None of these PG&E-listed programs go on the tax rolls or mess with the Federal Housing Finance Authority.

We don’t need another Mello-Roos district, especially a massive one like this. And putting home improvement loans on the tax roll is asking for trouble.

And I didn’t have a camera.

That was about a year ago. Then the whole family saw them on the day after Thanksgiving as we were exiting the St. Francis Hotel on Powell Street where we were looking over the sugar castle and model train in the lobby. I had my camera, but it was dark and I was far back. The flash didn’t quite catch up with the twins.

It was the last time we would see them. In January Vivian Brown, who was 8 minutes older than her sister, died at age 85. Apparently she had Alzheimer’s.

The late Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote about them, though I don’t remember specifically reading about them. I kept reading Herb Caen when I worked in Woodland and then for the year I was at the paper in Ione. My first encounter with the twins was two years ago at the Rue Lepic on Pine Street.

The twins, according to an obit written by Lee Romney of the Los Angeles Times, were natives of Kalamazoo, Mich. They held degrees in business administration, moving to San Francisco in 1973. Vivian became a legal secretary and Marian, the surviving twin, worked in a bank.

“About a quarter century ago the twins admitted to an interviewer that after a six-month attempt to dress differently in their 20s, they had abandoned the project forever. Even their lingerie matched,” Romney wrote.

Besides the shock of seeing the twins and their matching fashions I also noticed that they smiled a lot. They were very friendly and didn’t mind having their photo taken.

• • •

In 2006 when my son’s college basketball team won the Big West Tournament in Anaheim, qualifying for the NCAA tournament, my wife and I drove by the Crystal Cathedral on the way to a restaurant. We stopped and looked around at the home of the Hour of Power broadcast. Besides a very nice garden and some statues, the cathedral itself was impressive. It was bright and airy because of the wall of windows on three sides and the ceiling. Several years later when we visited Boston and toured the Old North Church we realized light and airy was an American tradition. The same with St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

The Hour of Power and Crystal Cathedral were long associated with the Rev. Robert H. Schuller. He began 52 years ago by conducting weekly prayer services atop the snack bar of a drive-in movie. (By the way, how many people remember the drive-in movie here on El Dorado Road?)

But in 2008 the Crystal Cathedral ran into financial difficulty and filed for bankruptcy in 2010. In 2011 the cathedral and its 40-acre Garden Grove campus were sold to the Catholic archdiocese for $57.5 million. They have started a $100 million capital campaign to renovate it and rename it Christ Church. It still has one of he biggest organs in the world, with pipes and even trumpets situated around the cathedral for surround sound.

I doubt the Catholics will use the wire contraptions that brought women dressed as angels swooping above the audience.

Designed by architect Philip Johnson, the Crystal Cathedral took three years to build and was finished in 1980 at a cost of $18 million. The 10,000 glass panes are glued together with silicone rather than being bolted. This helps it withstand a magnitude 8.0 earthquake.

I hope the Catholics allow weekday tours like the Crystal Cathedral Ministries did. It is a special experience.

Michael Raffety is editor of the Mountain Democrat. His column appears biweekly.

I appreciate the president’s sudden interest in getting to the bottom of this. But I must remind the House that more than a year ago, I and other members rose on the floor to warn of these tactics directed at Tea Party groups by the IRS.

At the time, the administration responded by saying that this was just a normal backlog.

Now we know that was a deliberate and premeditated lie.

It now appears that nearly 500 conservative groups were subjected to invasive review and intimidation. The IRS demanded the names of every participant at every meeting these groups held over a period of years, transcripts of every speech given at those meetings, what positions they had taken on issues, the names of their volunteers and donors — and in some cases their families — and copies of privileged communications they had with elected officials. In some cases, the person filing the request was then subjected to a personal income tax audit.

There is no way to estimate the number of additional groups that were discouraged from organizing because of these tactics. Meanwhile, it appears that leftist groups had their applications routinely approved. The impact this had on the 2012 election is incalculable.

We are also learning that these tactics extended well beyond a few low-level rogue employees in Cincinnati.

Lois Lerner, the official in charge of tax exempt organizations for the IRS was awarded more than $42,000 in bonuses while she was directing what the president now calls outrageous behavior.

Highly intrusive and unwarranted demands for information also originated from the Washington, D.C., office and at least two satellite offices in California.

Dr. Anne Hendershott, a Catholic sociologist, professor and writer came under a personal income tax audit after she exposed a George Soros front group masquerading as a grass-roots Catholic organization. She said the questions put to her during a grueling audit were largely political. This occurred from the New Haven, Conn., office.

It appears that evangelical groups were also targeted, as were Jewish groups supporting Israel.

Nor was this misconduct limited to groups applying under Section 501.

There is now reason to believe that IRS officials leaked confidential tax information to top officials in the Obama campaign, and to liberal groups such as Pro-Publica and the Huffington Post, which may then have illegally published that information.

During the campaign, Austan Goolsbee and Harry Reid appeared to reference confidential tax information involving Charles and David Koch and Mitt Romney, only to back off when pressed for the source.

Nor does this conduct appear to be limited to the IRS.

Shortly after businessman Frank Vandersloot was attacked by the Obama campaign for his support of Mitt Romney, he came under audits by both the IRS and the Labor Department.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has just released a damning survey of fee waivers granted by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Freedom of Information Act. Left-leaning groups had their fees waived 92 percent of the time. Conservative groups just the opposite – about 7 percent of the time.

And this week it also became clear that the FBI is using general warrants — banned by the Fourth Amendment — to rifle through the phone records of Associated Press reporters with a clear intention to intimidate whistle blowers and to obstruct the operation of a free press.

We are seeing a pattern of conduct throughout this administration that is absolutely toxic to a free society: government using its powers to intimidate private citizens who are simply trying to take part in the public policy debate.

This cries out for a full investigation by the Congress, and I utterly reject the notion that the ritual naming and firing of a few hapless scapegoats is sufficient. Every government employee who abused their power must be identified, exposed, disgraced, dismissed and debarred from ever again holding a position of authority or trust within this government.

Tom McClintock represents the 4th Congressional Distict.

One of the recent news reports that I found disturbing along these lines focused on the Reader’s Digest “100 Most Trusted People in America” list issued earlier this month. Apparently the fabled publication and a polling company surveyed more than 1,000 Americans who voted four actors as the most trusted public figures, crowning Tom Hanks as the most trusted person in our great nation.

Hanks was followed by actors Sandra Bullock, Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep in order on the list before author Maya Angelou rounded out the top five. Even Jeopardy game show host Alex Trebek topped the top 10 at No. 8. Guess the viewers believe he really does know the questions to most of the show’s answers?

Seven Supreme Court Justices (Stephen Breyer is the top-ranked justice at No. 43) made the list of 100, but not one of them ranked higher than a TV judge (Joe Brown at No. 39). Several athletes also made the list including the Manning brothers (Peyton, No. 27) and Eli (No. 58), along with Tim Tebow (No. 40) — all of whom ranked higher than President Obama (No. 65).

The list of curiosities goes on and on; you can view in its entirety online. While the list shouldn’t really surprise anyone, given American culture, it is disturbing nonetheless because it coldly confirms our nation worships fame and fortune above all else. Our fellow Americans selected four actors who largely play the role of other people for a job as someone they publicly trust above anyone else!

Granted, the survey was focused on public figures, so responders couldn’t indicate they trusted their principal, police chief or pastor more than people in the public eye like Steven Spielberg (No. 6 on the list for inquiring minds). But to call Tom Hanks America’s most trusted public figure is, frankly, embarrassing. I like a Tom Hanks movie as much as the next guy, but come on people, the guy plays someone else for a living. We act like we know these celebrities personally.

Maybe the actors scored so high on the list and politicians scored considerably lower because we as Americans are increasingly only interested in living in the fairy tale world of make-believe. Most of us certainly don’t put our trust in political leaders who prove time and again to be ineffective, inept or corrupt.

Maybe believing in actors and athletes who are selling image versus substance is a welcome escape from the avalanche of negative news we face daily. And let’s not forget a handful of actors have gone on to be effective leaders in areas from elected office to social causes.

Yet I suspect many of you would rather live in the real world where we have a better handle on whom and what we’re putting our trust in. Call it a hunch, but I’m holding out hope.

Dan Francisco is an El Dorado Hills-based public relations consultant to the high-tech industry. 

I have to admit, the new car has changed me.

The car came with a technology package which I didn’t care about, and it was in a color that I did care about (something other than silver, grey, black or white). Adrian, my salesperson, gave me an enthusiastic tutorial on my new car, beginning with, “This car can do everything your Smart Phone can do.” Since I have a digital dinosaur dumb phone, this makes my new car arguably more prepared for life in our social media-driven age than me or my phone. It was a bit intimidating.

Did I have a nickname for my new car Adrian asked as he registered it in the system. Are you kidding? We just met. Would I like to hear my horoscope? “Hello, Virgo,” purred a voice from the car’s mid-section. “Today is a 10 for you.”

I have to go to a class to find out all the amazing things my smart car can do, even if I never again plan to have it tell me my horoscope. There is a Brake Coach to tell me the percentage of energy  being returned to the battery when I brake. I’m up to 99 percent. I think that’s good, but the BC always reads “OK.” If I really stomped on the brakes to avoid a squirrel, in addition to having severe whiplash, what would the Brake Coach do to me? Would the BC read “BAD?” Is that in the 250-page manual?

The car has Efficiency Leaves which grow on the panel in front of me when I am driving in a fuel-efficient manner, aka slow and boring. When I left the dealership I had two leaves. By the time I arrived home, they had fallen off. Today, my vine overflowed with leaves and it took me a lot longer to get to work. In addition to being manipulated into driving like I’m 100, I’m also learning to sound like a centenarian since the computer lady in my car has a hearing problem.

“Increase fan,” I bellow at her. “Increasing temperature,” she responds as a blast of heat fries my face.

I have been understandably cautious with the new vehicle. Unwilling to park it on the side of Leisure Lane, my usual spot when taking the dog for a walk, I parked in the market parking lot, towards the back, far away from any other vehicles. When we returned, a white pickup had angled in very close to my car on the right side and another vehicle was squeezed up against the left side. A red-eyed old gent, part of the Bullitia that meets every morning outside the market to discuss life’s vagaries, was standing by the pickup’s open tailgate with his coffee. He informed me that he’d been parking in the same spot every morning for 21 years and I was in it. If I turned my wheel sharply all the way, I could probably get out, he said. I wasn’t sure I could safely squeeze a paper clip out of the space. A vision of my mutilated car still wearing its paper tags flashed before my eyes.

The Red-Eyed One mimed how to turn the wheel sharply. I slid into my car and began to back up. He nodded approval. Then he shouted, “Now just straighten it out. You got plenty of room.” The steam from his coffee clouded my side windows, we were so close.

When a fire off Fair Lane caused a power outage at our new building, a fellow reporter and I took off in my car to sneak a peek at the fire and find out who we could interview. We discovered a short dirt road across the creek from the still-smoldering fire and my colleague demanded we take it. I told her that my new car was not, repeat not, traveling down a dirt road. We would walk. Teetering down the slope and down the red-dirt road in my girlie heels was tough, but at least my car was unscathed.

There will be dings and scrapes in my car’s future, I know, but for now, it’s  schooling me in how to drive like an old lady before I become one.

Wendy Schultz is a staff writer and columnist for the Mountain Democrat. Her column appears bi-weekly

Something about discovering lost civilizations or creatures that no one had ever known of before appealed to me quite a bit. It might have been the fantasies promised by the slick, yellow cover of National Geographic Magazine. It was way before Indiana Jones.

I’d read the Henry M. Stanley and Dr. Livingstone adventures, the Tarzan books and the books about the building of the Panama Canal, the books about the Conquest of Mexico and the Conquest of the Incas, Marco Polo and Genghis Khan, and later Dr. Leakey’s discoveries in the Olduvai Gorge and Professor Raymond Dart’s investigations into human origins.

All of those featured people in exotic climes like the Sahara or Darkest Africa or the steamy jungles of Central America or the frigid Andes or the Gobi Desert, which had a particular come-hither for some reason. They all sounded like a 10- or 12-year-old’s vision of heaven to me.

I’m only recalling those thoughts because while waiting for several calls returning my calls, I checked the CNN Website and looked at a story about humankind’s roots in Africa. The chief researcher was affiliated with South Africa’s Wits University. I laughed at first.

Wits University. If I’d known there was a Wits University, I wouldn’t have spent all those years at Bob’s Easy College. I’d have gone to Wits University which surely cranks out archeologists and paleontologists by the ark-load as well as people who are just plain witty and others who have their wits about them. Half-wits would probably be more comfortable at Bob’s. Then the calls I’d been waiting for started coming in.

******************

Here, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to my fellow Californians, all of them. I got mail from the State Controller’s Office. Ahhh, an upward adjustment to my monthly PERS retirement check I guessed. Oh, boy, I hope it’s a good one. I ripped into the envelope with the little window that signifies there’s a check inside. What could we do with a couple of hundred dollars? Lots of things. And sure enough, there was Controller John Chiang’s signature on that check just like at the first of every month. But it wasn’t an adjustment to my pension. It was a tax refund.

The great State of California had sent me a check for $4.29, for the overpayment I’d evidently made on my 2012 tax return. Four dollars and twenty-nine cents! What we could do with that kind of money just staggers the imagination. We could buy a gallon of gas or nearly or a tad more. We could outfit ourselves with a new sock. It could make a good run on a twelve-pack of Pepsi at most places or knock down a half-dozen doughnuts at other places.

I surely didn’t intentionally miscalculate my tax obligation by $4.29. If I had known the trouble it would cause, I would have rechecked my figures a dozen times. Who can guess how many of our state’s taxpayers had to pay something extra to cover what it must have cost to process that $4.29 check — 3 cents, 9 cents, 1 cent or even 4 dollars and 29 cents? It’s to them that I owe this apology. Now, I have a dilemma. What will it cost my fellow taxpayers, and me, to have the state process that check again if I cash it? It will have to go through someone’s hands to get it into a machine that slits the envelope open and feeds the check into some kind of counting mechanism. The information will have to be recorded somewhere and at some point it will be noted by a human being who assigns the data to my account.

No doubt there will be at least one auditor or monitor or supervisor who confirms and signs off on the completion of the transaction and closes my file for tax year 2012. All of that has to cost a lot of money. Sure, no one outside the system will ever see it or know that it was me who caused that wasteful expense, but I know it, and now you know it. And for that I am heartily sorry.

Chris Daley is a staff writer and columnist for the Mountain Democrat. His column appears each Friday. 

Not just Tea Party groups, but “Patriots,” “9/12 Project,” groups concerned about “government spending, government debt or taxes,” ”advocacy/lobbying to make America a better place to live” and “criticize how the country is being run.”

A report by the Inspector General for Tax Administration obtained by media outlets Tuesday said the IRS “used inappropriate criteria to identify applications from organizations with the words Tea Party in their names.” Then one unit sent it up the IRS food chain and that outfit expanded the inappropriate criteria further and even more inappropriately.

“The Determinations Unit developed and began using criteria to identify potential political cases for review that inappropriately identified specific groups applying for tax-exempt status based on their names or policy positions instead of developing criteria based on tax-exempt laws and Treasury Regulations,” the IG’s report stated.

This began in 2010 and continued through 2012.

In addition to tying the applications for tax exempt status up in bureaucratic knots, the questions the IRS asked “it should not have requested” and were “unnecessary,” such as names of contributors and whether any contributor or director has run for political office, “the type of conversations and discussions members and participants had during the activity.”

What in the heck would the IRS want with this information? Monday the National Organization for Marriage said someone leaked its confidential tax info to a gay rights group. In March 2012, the Huffington Post published the names of donors to the pro-marriage group listed in its IRS filing from 2008, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The IRS has demonstrated the most disturbing, illegal and outrageous abuse of government power,” said Darwin Throne of the Tea Party Patriots of El Dorado Hills Sunday. “This deliberate targeting and harassment of tea party groups reaches a new low in illegal government activity and overreach. President Obama must also apologize for his administration ignoring repeated complaints by these broad grassroots organizations of harassment by the IRS in 2012, and make concrete and transparent steps today to ensure this never happens again. We reject a simple apology that does nothing to alleviate the danger of this happening again. Only immediate and public actions on the part of the IRS and the president will suffice.”

The IRS takes its cues from the top. A group of more than half a dozen Democratic senators wrote the IRS  and demanded it crack down on the Tea Party or it would have officials dragooned before a Senate committee. Is it any wonder that two different IRS commissioners knew about the targeting and yet told Congress that it wasn’t happening and ignored letters of complaint from Republican senators, the minority party?

President Obama expressed outrage over the targeting once an official revealed it by apologizing at a legal conference. If he is really outraged he should fire the IRS commissioner, which he did Wednesday. We congratualte the president for taking a big step toward cleaning up one mess. Let’s just hope the IRS Commisioner, on the job since November 2012, hasn’t already spent $25,000-$40,000 on an official portrait. It shouldn’t take much for Attorney General Eric Holder to find the current and immediate past IRS commissioners in contempt of Congress.

We find the actions of the IRS un-American and anti-democratic.

The reason for this broad fishing expedition conducted in April and May 2012 is to find out who told AP information about a CIA effort in Yemen that stopped a plot to set off a bomb on a U.S.-bound airplane.

This is the famous bomb in a copy machine incident that was set to go off on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death May 2, 2011.

Here is the real rub. AP delayed reporting the story at the request of the government, which said it would endanger national security. As reported by Associated Press, “Once government officials said those concerns were allayed, the AP disclosed the plot because officials said it no longer endangered national security. The Obama administration, however, continued to request that the story be held until the administration could make an official announcement.”

CIA Director John Brenan, in written testimony to the Senate, complained about AP’s “damaging leak,” but added, “Once someone leaked information about interdiction of the IED and that the IED was actually in our possession, it was imperative to inform the American people consistent with government policy that was never any danger to the American people associated with this al Qaeda plot.”

So the government is really ticked that AP revealed the plot before the government could.

Pulling the records on 20 AP phones is overdoing it.

That said, it is a cause for worry that the national media seem to have a penchant for revealing national security secrets. The most egregious example of that is when the New York Times revealed how the Bush administration was tracking terrorists through international banking transactions. Once the Times revealed how it was being done that anti-terror tactic no longer became useful. The only persons who benefitted from the Times story were al Qaeda and other terrorists.

We consider the AP story more of a toss-up. Knowing al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula could turn copy machines into bombs big enough to bring down airplanes was a worrisome revelation. We would have preferred that Brennan had concentrated on how its revelation may have prevented the CIA from tracking the device back to its maker and delivery agents; how they could have maybe caught them in the act on the second attempt. That would have been a better explanation to the Senate Intelligence Committee than complaining the AP story got the jump on the government’s announcement.

For generations rural residents have utilized these roads into and around our national forests and have enjoyed the freedoms that our public lands offered. Among the longtime rural residents, more and more urban people and their families are recognizing the improved quality of life in and near our national forests and adjacent rural lands and are moving in. They are coming for the jogging, for the views, exercise, serenity and seasonal cues, wildflowers, biking and a songbird’s clutch, photography, prospecting and mining as such, logging, hunting, fishing and firearms training, four-wheeling, snowmobiling, skiing and recreating.

It really is our heritage, part of our culture we call American. We are connected to these places physically or spiritually and memories don’t cut it. Today we are being sold: “The gates are closed for road repairs and/or forest studies.” We have gotten used to these green gates being locked to winter traffic, but having them locked during summer weather is not just inconvenient, it constitutes a taking of our freedom. To delay our freedoms is to deny them. We need these roads open; it is public land after all and we pay taxes to keep them available. The forest service was charged with managing our public land, not just being keeper of the keys. If we continue to be locked out then the forest service is not really managing forests anymore … they are managing us. Judge Karlton and the Board of Supervisors need a confrontation with the forest service, not coffee cake.

How is a “hydrologic connectivity” study being used to justify closing that many roads for an indefinite period? Has anyone challenged the “science” behind the pettifogging? Why can’t the forest service use “site sampling” techniques for studying connectivity at a few representative locations? There is no reasonable need to close the majority of roads to complete a study. Hydrologic connectivity is not “disconnected” at road surfaces crossing a creek or meadow. Connectivity is gravity and soil porosity dependent, mostly connecting below the surface and visible only during water runoff events. And by definition, yellow-legged frogs actually have legs. They can traverse an occasional dry spot.

These closures are really more about newly proposed U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s rule making, soon to declare an additional two million acres of the Sierra Nevada range closed for the recovery of the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, the mountain yellow-legged frog and the Yosemite toad. And this is just the first of over 700 “imperiled” species soon to be addressed. Still think Agenda 21 is just a wacko conspiracy?

Once the forest service makes it through this season with locked gates, what’s to keep it from extending the tyranny via the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? It’s time to act El Dorado County BOS! Where are the maps? If we are going to remain locked out of our public lands, then they really aren’t public anymore are they? And if they’re no longer public what are they? Will it all become more unusable wilderness area soon? Why are we paying taxes to maintain them if it’s now just for the animals? We need to wake up America while we can still do something; we must if we value access to our public lands.

In response to the Center for Biological Diversity’s lawsuit to list over 700 species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service posted this proposed rule making in the Federal Register on April 24. The comment period is open until June 24. You know what to do. The contact person is Jan Knight, acting field supervisor, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office, 2800 Cottage Way Room W–2605, Sacramento, CA 95825; reached by telephone at 916–414–6600; or by facsimile at 916–414–6712.

Rod Kerr is retired with 30 years of service at the California Department of Food Agriculture and with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

Imagine my chagrin as I sat in my daughter’s ballet class last night watching her prance around in pink tights, wondering if I was ever going to experience with my kids what I grew up loving with my parents. As a guy who started his professional journalistic career as a sports writer — one who played basketball, football and baseball in high school — it’s been a struggle so far raising two girls. While trying not to force them to participate in what I want, I’m trying to let them discover and enjoy what they want. In doing so, though, I feel like I’m losing a big part of me with each addition of pink material that enters my home, and each piece of sports memorabilia that gets packed away in the garage.

Life is about discovery for children. You introduce them to as many things as they can handle, and let them carve a path down the things they truly enjoy. As a father to two daughters and no sons, though, this is more difficult than it seems. I’m now outnumbered three to one in my household — think about when they’re moody and teenagers! — and it’s been quite the adjustment for a guy raised in a household of eight, with five of them male. We used to wrestle WWF-style (before it was WWE) and create our own little Super Bowl in the living room with each doorway into it an end zone. We’d destroy the room on a daily basis discovering tackling techniques, while spiking the football in our opponents’ faces when we scored.

Now? I can’t watch a full game without some sort of whining to watch something else, and after preschool activities include fake tea parties, dress up, dolls and the previously mentioned ballet.

It’s been a lesson in patience for me, to say the least. I’m learning to have more realistic expectations, and that’s serving me well. My daughters are 4 years old and 20 months old, respectively. There’s plenty of time for them to learn to hate ballet on their own and discover a world of fun spiking a volleyball, knocking down a three-pointer or smashing a home run. Maybe they’ll even enjoy soccer. There’s a good chance with my blood running through their veins that they’ll need an activity where they can smash something or someone, and I’ll be waiting with a video camera — or a whistle if needed — when that day comes.

But maybe they won’t. Maybe my life will be full of floral designs, bright feminine colors and giggles about boys. I’d say shoot me now, but I want to see how this whole thing plays out.

Patrick Ibarra is the managing editor of the Mountain Democrat. 

In a society that continuously raises the price and taxes on a pack or carton of cigarettes, but sees stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joes continue to boom, another major shift is happening at a level that could help farmers survive in these tough times.

Growing demand for hummus has pushed up prices for chickpeas, spurring farmers to increase production. The average price that farmers received for chickpeas was 35 cents a pound last year, a 10-cent increase over the mid-2000s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

U.S. farmers will plant 214,300 acres of chickpeas this year, a number fivefold from a decade ago.

Farmers are changing with the times. They have to stay in business. That often means selling crops to the highest bidder, and the bids are pouring in for chickpeas.

But it goes even higher than that. The big boys are jumping on the bandwagon quickly. Where there’s a buck, there’s a way.

The Pacific Northwest is currently the hotbed of the country’s chickpea production. Sabra Dipping Co., a joint venture of PepsiCo. Inc, announced an $86 million expansion to its hummus plant in Virginia to keep up with the demand. “Virginia officials are eager to develop new crops in a state where tobacco farming has shrunk dramatically since the 1990s because of declining cigarette sales,” the WSJ article stated.

The popularity of hummus in the United States continues to grow. The chickpea dip is low in fat and high in protein. According to market-research firm Information Resources Inc., sales of “refrigerated flavored spreads” — a segment dominated by hummus — jumped 25 percent from 2010 at U.S. food retailers.

Chickpeas won’t be dominating the market by any means, and neither will hummus. Fast food will continue to be popular to American society, as are cigarettes, though less so in health conscious California. But the shift isn’t so subtle anymore. According to the USDA, last year’s U.S. chickpeas harvest totaled a record 332 million pounds, up 51 percent from the previous year, with the value of the chickpea crop also setting a record at $115.5 million.

The more who reach for a healthy snack with their wallets rather than a few smokes, the more hummus will hit shelves and the less butts will hit the ground. Quitting smoking suddenly sounds like it providing a healthier society in more ways than one.

I know. Bad.

I rationalized, of course. I told myself it was about homeowners’ business — to the extent that maximizing your country-living experience by enjoying the occasional evening out at an exceptional local eatery is homeowners’ business.

Anyway, here’s what the message said, on behalf of myself and my husband, Hank:

“Friends and neighbors, if you haven’t tried the CrepeTown Café & Grill restaurant, please do. Even if you think you don’t like crepes. It’s in the Burkes Junction mall in Cameron Park, and it’s our new favorite place to eat.”

I went on to explain that both the savory and sweet crepes are “out of this world.” I offered my own recommendations: for entrees, the Verona (vegetarian) or Beef & Burgundy crepes, and for dessert the Granny Apple or Nutella & Berry crepes.

“To die for,” I gushed. “And the dessert crepes can be split.”

That last bit, about splitting, is completely true, though it’s not how I like to eat mine. I’m normally a diet-conscious diner, but at this place, I want a main course crepe and a dessert crepe all to myself, and woe to anyone who asks for a bite. (I’m like a girl-dog with a bone, if you get my drift.)

Anyway, I added in the message that the food was reasonably priced, and that Hank and I were helping to spread the word about the place because we wanted to see it thrive so we could keep enjoying it ourselves.

You see, I have no vested interest whatsoever in the CrepeTown Café, nor do I participate in those social-media tell-your-friends promotional campaigns. It’s just that the restaurant business is rugged, today’s business climate is dicey, and if this place were to disappear…(I don’t even want to think about it).

I remember my first time there. My friend Phyllis insisted we go for lunch. The cafe is on the corner of one of the main Burkes Junction blocks. It’s small; the decor is quaint and European; the staff are warm and welcoming. The menu offers a variety of crepes as well as a few other interesting choices, such as Hungarian Goulash. Most entrees are around $10.

At that first lunch, I did something I almost never do. I ordered dessert — the Granny Apple crepe — as my entree. Eating it was almost transcendental. I couldn’t carry on a conversation, or even really hear what my friend was saying. All my brain cells were focused exclusively on tasting.

It was sublime.

After that, I brought my sister Sherry for lunch and tried an entree, the Verona crepe — equally scrumptious. Then I brought my husband for dinner; he loved it, too (he had the goulash), and we both approved of the beer and wine offerings.

Then I brought my sister Caroline and my daughter, for Caroline’s birthday. We ended our meal with three different dessert crepes. Better than cake!

Two weeks after I sent the message to the homeowners’ list, I heard from my neighbor Chris.

“Thanks for the tip off about the crepe restaurant in Cameron Park,” she wrote in an email. “Lewis and I went there last night and loved it.”

Then, a month after that, neighbor Steve weighed in with a message to the whole group titled “I’ll vouch.”

“Great place, small and cozy, and smells reeeally good as soon as you walk in the door. Go if you get the chance. You won’t regret it, and the nice couple who run it will be grateful for your business.”

That nice couple would be Edi and Alma Zildzo, who are originally from Croatia and are now intent on providing patrons with a dining experience like no other.

And that may be the key thing here. I love Mimi’s and BJ’s and Macaroni Grill as much as anyone. But for something really out of this world…I recommend the CrepeTown Café.

Do us both a favor, if you would, and give it a try.

(For hours: crepetowncafe.com.)

Jennifer Forsberg Meyer is a biweekly columnist with the Mountain Democrat.

They were the elite of world professional cyclists, the athletes competing in this week’s Amgen Tour of California (ATOC). In its eighth running, ATOC has become one of the world’s greatest bike races and a highlight of National Bike Month (May) throughout America. Some 2 million spectators will attend the races, and this year’s tour is not likely to disappoint them.

In eight days, this week, the tour’s cyclists will travel 750 miles of scenic California backroads and highways.  For the first time in ATOC history, they will ride south to north against prevailing winds, with stage starts and finishes in Escondido, Murrietta, Greater Palm Springs, Palmdale, Santa Clarita, Santa Barbara, Avila Beach, San Jose, Livermore, Mt Diablo, San Francisco and Santa Rosa. Along these routes, they’ll climb 13 summits, including a 3,455-foot ascent of Mt. Diablo.

To endure such an ordeal, professional cyclists are among the fittest of athletes. That example is encouraging everyday people to take up cycling for their fitness, health and a more positive attitude about self and life, according to Jeff Molinari of the Placerville Bike Shop.

A family-run business established in 1977, the Placerville Bike Shop is El Dorado County’s oldest cyclery. Bob Molinari, Jeff’s father, acquired the shop 33 years ago. He has seen the sport evolve from one done by a few adherents, to one of the most popular ways people exercise across California.

The senior Molinari grew up in Santa Rosa riding his “Schwinn Varsity all over Sonoma County. He says he “could ride all over town and not get run over by speeding cars or better yet, speeding cars driven by texting teenagers.”  Though admits, “Times have changed. These days most parent’s won’t let their kids of any age ride on the street. They are not free to roam and experience this kind of freedom that we did as kids.” So where do they ride? On bike trails.

Fortunately, El Dorado County has the start of a great trail. It’s called the El Dorado Trail. It’s a multimodal transportation corridor planned to extend the entire length of El Dorado County from the western county line to the Lake Tahoe Basin. Most of the 28 miles of trail, from west county near Latrobe east to Camino, are unpaved and travel along an old railroad route. Class I (paved) bike path runs along Forni Road through Placerville. The rest of the route is a natural trail, proposed for improvement.

Class I bike paths are a proven way to attract travel spending and provide a significant resource for local recreation, of benefit to a community’s health and well-being. As evidence of this, the 32-mile, paved Jedediah Smith Memorial Trail (also known as the American River Trail) in Sacramento County is used by some 5 million people annually. Bob Molinari said, “During summer, people from outside the area contact our shop about local rides, and many of my customers drive to Sacramento to ride the American River Trail, and they spend lots of money on restaurants and shopping in that area.”

Most people who ride on Class I bike paths aren’t elite athletes like those that compete in the Tour of California.  They’re ordinary folk out for exercise and experience, and they achieve it by varied means. Molinari says how cycling has diversified is reflected in the many types of bikes sold, today: e.g., fitness, hybrid, commute, camping, mountain, touring and road bikes.

“A lot of the bikes we sell are purchased by people who want to get fit.” Jeff Molinari explains, “These riders have been motivated by Subway Sandwich commercials, the TV program Biggest Loser and countless diet programs to eat less and do more. They see cycling as an enjoyable way to get exercise into their routine. They want to stick with it and not buy a bike that ends up gathering dust in a garage. They want one they’ll enjoy riding.”

“We work on about 1,000 bikes a year and sell three to 400,” he continues. “Among them, Trek’s FX is one of the new style of fitness bikes that have become popular. It’s designed for a more comfortable workout, than the light, but hard-riding equipment that a bike racer would use. One of our customers has ridden 25,000 miles on her bike. She loves riding.”

Lydia Molinari, Jeff’s wife, leads beginner rides several days each month. And, each Wednesday, the shop organizes longer rides for 30 to 35 intermediate to advanced riders. “The only requirement is that you wear a helmet,” Jeff said.

“The beginner rides are for people who haven’t been on a bike in a while. We start at the Forni Road trailhead and ride out to Missouri Flat and back. It’s an easy portion of the El Dorado Trail that helps riders get back their sense of confidence, balance and understanding of how to gauge speed, shift gears and brake. After crossing Weber Creek Bridge, there’s a short climb before reaching the top.”

While these beginner rides travel only a mile or two, Molinari said they, “feel real proud when they get to the top of that hill.” No, they haven’t traveled a hundred miles in a day like the Amgen Tour of California riders, but the true meaning of Bike Month isn’t who wins the race, but who wins a better life by riding a bike.

For more about cycling, visit www.placervillebike.com, www.eldoradotrail.com,  www.amgentourofcalifornia.com, and www.bikeleague.org/programs/bikemonth/.

This week is Bike to Work Week.

John Poimiroo of El Dorado Hills is a travel writer who specializes in California destinations.

The 94-year-old Peabody is not only a WWII veteran, but he is also a historian and genealogist and the author of historical books about El Dorado County and numerous books of poetry. He has lived in the Hank’s Exchange hexagon-shaped home he built with his wife Patricia since 1974, where he continues to write poetry.

The most impressive monument for Peabody was the memorial of the Iwo Jima flag raising at Mt. Suribachi, but the one that touched Peabody was the Korean War Memorial.

“The Iwo Jima memorial is big and so detailed; the artwork is marvelous, but it didn’t grab my heart the same way,” said Peabody.

Peabody described the Korean War Memorial as a park with statues of soldiers dressed in bad weather gear, out on patrol.

“The misery of fighting an enemy you can’t see when you’re wet and cold got to me,” said Peabody, who had been in that situation in WWII. “If you look closely at the granite slabs in the park, they’ve been sandblasted with the images of soldiers in combat. I understood what the artist meant and that was the most emotional of all.”

The group was put up at a “magnificent hotel,” according to Peabody, “where I had a room all to myself.” Guardians and vets were feted in the banquet rooms of the hotel which allowed them to talk together.

“No one was there to say, ‘you’re taking too long,’ so every vet was able to tell his story and some of the Guardians told theirs as well,” said Peabody. “Every minute of this well-organized trip was wonderful, with opportunities to see, hear and to be listened to.”

Some of the WWII vets had never talked about their war experiences with friends or family, but surrounded by other vets who were interested and encouraging, they finally did.

“If we sensed someone was holding back, we went after them to get them to talk. With other guys who had been through it,  they felt safe to tell their story,” said Peabody.

There were two other Honor Flight tours from other parts of the country while Peabody’s group was in Washington.

“The co-founder of Honor Flight of Northern California, Debby Johnson, was with us and took complete charge,” said Peabody. “She took roll call every time we got on and off the bus. I introduced myself by saying ‘my friends call me Peabody Bobbity Boo’ and that broke the ice.”

Peabody visited the Arlington National Cemetery, the National World War II Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the U.S. Navy Memorial, the Airforce Memorial and the Washington Monument. Being the historian he is, Peabody noted that California’s memorial stone at the foot of the Washington Memorial landing was cut from El Dorado County’s marble quarry at Ringgold on Oct. 29, 1852.

“It was fun; it was inspirational,” said Peabody. “The Japanese and Germans tried to dominate the world but they failed!”

“There remains considerable uncertainty as to how much the climate has varied regionally and globally on the decades-to-centuries time scale, or what caused those changes. Yet we need to know how natural climate fluctuations are caused in order to determine to what extent human activities have affected the climate system,” according to the George C. Marshall Institute’s Website.

“Furthermore, the temperature pattern of the last century is not consistent with the assertion that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are the only contribution to periods of global warming. In the early part of the 20^th century, temperatures increased. Then from about 1940 until the 1970s, there was a slight cooling. Temperatures again increased since the 1970s, but since about 2001 increases in the global surface temperature have stopped, even though greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continued to increase and have increased steadily in the latter half of the 20^th century,” according to the Marshall Institute.

“Climate scientists have been locked into a simple-minded identification of climate with greenhouse-gas level … That climate should be a function of a single parameter (like CO2) has always seemed implausible. Yet an obsessive focus on such an obvious oversimplification has likely set back progress by decades,” Richard Lindzen told Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. last summer. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The battle between those who are global warming believers and those who actually study the climate and not just computer models is, as mentioned in the introductory paragraph, abating somewhat — not that they are going to be singing “Kumbaya” yet.

Despite the growing realization that the world is not warming and neither are the oceans, California is charging full speed ahead on a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce “green house gases” that its political class is sure will help halt global warming that is not happening anyway.

Enter the Pacific Legal Foundation. The PLF doesn’t care about the scientific debate. It says California’s cap-and-trade scheme is an illegal tax. The carbon tax auction plan was set up by the Air Resources Board, which is trying to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Never mind that the recession has very nearly accomplished that anyway.

The PLF says the carbon credits auction is an unlawful tax program created entirely by “an unelected bureaucracy” when the state Constitution requires two-thirds of the Legislature to vote to raise new taxes.

Of course, the California Air Resources Board contends it is merely implementing Gov. Schwarzenegger’s signature bill, AB 32, which mandated reductions in greenhouse gases.

“But AB 32 doesn’t authorize an auction program for billions of dollars in new revenues for the state,” the PLF said in a statement released May 3. Even if it did authorize cap-and-trade auctions it is still an illegal tax because AB 32 did not pass with a two-thirds vote of the Legislature.

The newness of this revenue source is borne out by Gov. Jerry Brown wanting $500 million a year from the carbon tax fund to pay for the California High-Speed Rail. Last month CARB voted to “support the proposal from the state Finance Department to invest the first three years of revenue from the allowance auctions on carbon-reducing projects, including high-speed rail, zero-emissions vehicles, low-income housing retrofits and urban forestry,” according to Bloomberg News.

The first two auctions raised $138 million. The next auction is May 16. If that isn’t a tax on business, then the governor’s dog ate his copy of the state Constitution.

“Why do you think I make such a big deal out of Father’s Day for you?” she asked. She has a point.

I won’t use the excuse that men think differently than women. That never ends well. While I’ll still fight against commercialism dictating that we buy lavish gifts to show our appreciation, I can’t argue that my wife doesn’t deserve gratitude on Mother’s Day. But it took some thinking about it objectively to realize just how much.

During our debate, which I lost, by the way, I focused solely on societal pressure. I try really hard in life to live at my own pace, make my own rules when I can and find comfort and satisfaction where there’s usually pressure. It’s my path to contentedness — focus on my family, not on keeping up with the Joneses. It’s served us well, I must say.

Every once in a while, though, I have to step back and realize others are on this path, and their needs might not be the same as mine. And if it irks my wife that her same-aged co-worker received a gift on Mother’s Day while she is busy helping me buy my mom one instead, I need to pay attention to that, right?

So I took a step back and tried to walk in my wife’s shoes. In doing so, I remembered the days — nights actually — that she gave birth to my daughters. I was surprised with the specific detail I could recall from those experiences, when I often can’t remember things I’ve said and done only a few weeks prior. In vivid detail I remembered the shape of my eldest’s head right after birth and the way my youngest breathed when she slept that first night. I remembered the “bed” I slept on overnight in each room, more than once being a love seat or chair I hung over the side of like a clock in a Salvador Dali painting. I even remember what I wore — I still have the “Gonzaga Bulldogs Basketball” t-shirt I had on in the hospital during both births, which wasn’t intentional.

But most importantly, I remembered the way my wife looked at me as she held each child for the first time. The strain from pushing a kid out was still on her flexed forehead, but her tears of physical pain had shifted to tears of joy, and the mixture of them both made her beautiful face glisten under the hospital room lights. She looked at me like she was pleasantly surprised by what rested on her chest and thankful that we made it through it all together. I gave her a kiss each time and told her I was proud of her, and it was true.

If I can remember such things as a guy coaching from the sidelines, what can my wife remember as the quarterback in the game? Mother’s Day probably brings back memories of contractions for half a day, labor for an entire night and no sleep for several months (or years, really). She can probably distinctly remember each child’s first cry, their birth weight and dimensions. And she definitely remembers what it was like carrying them both for nine months — the heartburn and endless Tums, the cravings for popcorn and coffee-flavored ice cream at all hours of the night and the magical feeling of something coming to life inside of her.

I realized it’s no wonder she feels the need to be a part of Mother’s Day. Her children are too young to show the appreciation my siblings and I will show my mother, and on top of that, her experiences of motherhood are not only still fresh in her mind (the youngest only being 19 months old), but her job as a mother is still ongoing. Her kids haven’t moved out of the home and started families of their own, they’re still waking up in the middle of the night crying, learning how to put words together (my youngest) and discovering ballet for the first time (my eldest). The joys and sorrows of motherhood are essentially in full effect right now.

I wish I could retract my side of the debate the other night. My points, while valid, really don’t matter in the scheme of things. There I was trying to make a point about how I care about my family first and not what society tells me to do, and I’m neglecting the most important member of it because of it. Shameful.

So I accept my defeat graciously because my wife is right. Every mother deserves to feel special on Mother’s Day, and it’s our job as children and spouses to ensure that happens.

Patrick Ibarra is the managing editor of the Mountain Democrat. 

That’s a lot of people in a very strong generation possibly given bad advice that could affect the golden years of their lives. But it’s not just one generation that’s being led in the wrong direction.

According to a recent study conducted at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, when assessed for major depressive episodes using a structured interview, only 38.4 percent of adults with clinician-identified depression met the 12-month criteria for depression, despite the majority of participants being prescribed and using psychiatric medications.

“Depression over-diagnosis and over-treatment is common in the U.S. and frankly the numbers are staggering,” Mojtabai said. “While participants who did not meet the criteria used significantly fewer services and treatment contacts, the majority of both groups used prescription psychiatric medication.”

Sad about something that happened recently? Pop a Zoloft. Can’t get over the hump of day-to-day life? Take a Lexapro. All will be right with the world, at least until your next dosage is needed.

That’s the philosophy some have become accustomed to, a coping mechanism that’s a vital one for those who actually need it. But what if you really don’t? The study suggests we in the United States might be overdoing it.

It indicates that of participants without a lifetime history of major or minor depression, a majority reported having taken prescription psychiatric medications. Essentially, many folks are popping pills when they don’t need to, but they’re convinced they have to.

The sample of participants — 5,639 of them — were from the 2009-2010 United States National Survey of Drug Use and Health, and subjects were assessed clinician-identified depression based on questions about conditions that the participants were told they had by a doctor or other medical professional in the past 12 months. With only just over a third of them actually meeting the 12-month criteria for depression, the rest could possibly be treated another way for their “depression.”

There are obviously many severe cases that do need psychiatric medications; we’re not denying that. But you might not be one of them.

We prescribe a weekend discovering El Dorado County as good medicine. When the weather is great, the county is bountiful, with plenty to see and do. It’s got enough to make anyone smile, from the casual walker wanting to see historical sites to the adventurer wanting to four-wheel up a mountain or raft through rapids on a river.

Initially I was worried about the bees, but they haven’t bothered me when I am trimming shrubs in the area. They have done a fantastic job of pollinating my fruit trees, so I have grown to kind of appreciate them. Last summer I had so many plums growing on my Santa Rosa plum tree that I thought about selling them at the farmers market. I had fresh plums for weeks in my lunch. As it was about a dozen went unharvested.

My wife, who listens to NPR, told me the most fascinating story she heard about bees. Each flower has a very slight electrical charge that is detectable by bees. Once a bee enters a flower for its nectar it neutralizes the electrical charge. This informs other bees that the flower has already been used and they buzz along looking for the next opposite charge to neutralize. Who figures this stuff out? How do they measure positive and negative charges on bees and flowers? Information like that is just the bee’s knees.

• • •

My last column generated two items of interest. One has to do with the artist featured at the newly located Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco. The principal artist was sculptor Michael Cooper. The person truly surprised and impressed was Ken Deibert, who gathers and organizes the material for our “As We Were” column. Ken, who taught drafting at American River College, went through the master’s program at San Jose Sate University with Michael Cooper. Sometimes it’s just a serendipitous world.

The other item was one I ran across while filing our historical documents after moving into our new building. Last column I wrote about the LED light display on the Oakland Bay Bridge and added in some distance facts about the bridge. One of those factoids was that the tunnel through Yerba Buena Island is 540 feet long.

What I found was a letter from Earl Lee Kelly, director of the state Department of Public Works, to then Mountain Democrat Editor and Publisher Clarence E. Barker, dated Dec. 14, 1935: “I am enclosing herewith two pictures taken on our recent Bay Bridge inspection trip. I trust they will serve as a reminder of a very pleasant journey.”

The photograph is of a large group standing in front of the tunnel works for Yerba Buena Island. The bridge was completed in 1936 and opened for traffic on Nov. 12. Construction had begun in 1933. Three years! The new eastern span replacement began construction in 2002 and is due to open by Labor Day this year. Problems with huge bolts on seismic anchor shear keys have the potential to put off opening the bridge until sometime in 2014.

According to the official Website for the $6.4 billion Bay Bridge construction project, 32 out of 96 bolts cracked while being stressed. There are two fixes to hold the shear keys in place  — a steel collar or a steel saddle. The selection will be made May 8.

The bolts can’t be replaced. The 288 bolts range in length from 9 to 24 feet. When they started tightening 96 to connect the shear keys to the caps, 32 broke.

How this system works in case of an earthquake is best described by the official Website: “The eastern foundation of the self-anchored suspension span contains seismic devices called bearings and shear keys. The bearings allow the road-decks to move slightly during a seismic event, while the shear keys prevent the decks from moving too much. The four bearings (two beneath each deck) and four shear keys (one beneath each deck and two beneath the cross beam connecting the decks) are bolted between the roadways and a concrete cap beam with steel anchor rods.”

It’s the 96 manufactured in 2008 that are problematic.

Some newspapers have pegged the engineering fix at about $1 million.

The self-anchored tower holding up the suspension cables is 525 high. The new east span is 2,047 feet long. The new skyway approach is 1.2 miles long.

The new eastern span is supposed to replace the truss structure where the roadway buckled in several spots and dumped some cars into the bay during the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. So we’ll put our faith in the engineers to make the new span safe and earthquake resistant.

Michael Raffety is edior of the Mountain Democrat.

I initially and somewhat cynically joked with my wife that the Nature Bowl was some sort of ploy to unduly influence our budding youth to buy a Toyota Prius when the time came from them to a purchase a car.

We quickly learned that the Nature Bowl is a unique program that promotes science and conservation literacy among third to sixth grade students. The students compete in teams representing their respective schools. This year marks the 29^th annual competition that is sponsored by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Each team competes in activities, relays, nature investigations and question-and-answer sessions that focus on local and regional environments. Each team also prepares an “Enviro-Mercial,” a short skit, jingle or commercial about a hot environmental topic or issue. Many of the students practice with their coaches for months.

In March, 14 schools in El Dorado County competed in the Nature Bowl semifinals in Coloma, with more than 150 student and teacher participants involved at the competition hosted by the American River Conservancy. James, a fourth grader, is a member of the Lake Forest Elementary School team from El Dorado Hills, and the Lake Forest team won the event at their third and fourth grade age level to advance to the finals at Sacramento State University on May 18.

Lake Forest has traditionally enjoyed strong Nature Bowl teams due to the efforts of educators such as Lynn Howard, James’ teacher this year who first introduced Lake Forest to the competition about a decade ago, and this year’s Lake Forest coach, Marlaine Reilly.

“It doesn’t matter where (students) are on the academic scale, each student takes away from the experience more than a colossal amount of knowledge on nature and the environment,” said Reilly, who has coached the Lake Forest team on three occasions.

“They take with them understanding of how to be a team player, and their speaking skills begin to bud here as well. Some even realize leadership roles… It’s not the competition that is important here, but the knowledge and lifetime skills they take with them from the experience,” she said.

For students such as James’ classmate, 10-year-old Joshua Medina, the Nature Bowl experience has provided extensive knowledge.

“I can name native, exclusive and introduced species. I have learned about succession, conservation, honeybees, landfills and habitats,” said Medina. “I have built on my reputation for learning and sharing information. I love that I have expanded my knowledge and ability through a more sophisticated education.”

James agrees that being part of the Nature Bowl has stretched him academically, as his team meets several days a week outside of school hours to practice and test their knowledge.

“I have learned about everything from landfills to water and air pollution,” said James. “But what I like the most about Nature Bowl is that it is super fun. You get to make new friends while learning more about nature and conservation.”

And who wouldn’t like that?

Dan Francisco is an El Dorado Hills-based public relations consultant to the high-tech industry. 

So, who is running the district? The board majority is. It writes its own agenda and minutes, but can’t keep up the details of giving full and proper advance notice about its meetings.

What does the public utility district do? It provides water service and oversees community septic systems in Auburn Lake Trails.

But you wouldn’t know it from its actions over the last several months. The board has held endless meetings about process and policy, but nothing about water service, endlessly reinventing the Public Records Act, yet it can’t even get the Open Meeting Law right. The district board has done nothing about a water plant improvement the state is requiring the district to do and which has already been prepared for bidding.

It should be renamed the Georgetown Divide Publicly Useless District. It’s like the Edwin Starr song, “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” And yet they keep fighting a policy war that’s good for absolutely nothing.

Placerville has some great history to relate, having hosted Mark Twain, newspaper editor and presidential candidate Horace Greely, stage-coach driver Hank Monk. John M. Studebaker made a fortune making wheelbarrows to sell to the miners. He went back home to South Bend, Ind., and founded the Studebaker Co. with his brothers. The wagon and buggy company eventually became an automotive manufacturer, closing its Indiana plant in 1963 and Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 1966. The Budweiser Wagon pulled by its famous Clydesdales is a Studebaker Wagon.

Next to the Placerville News Co. is the original site of the business owned by Albert and Frederick Bee, who built the Placerville-Humbolt Telegraph Co. in 1858. The line ran through Genoa to the Great Salt Lake, both of which at that time were in Utah Territory. Col. Albert Bee built a grand residence on Bee Street that is now a restaurant serving wedding parties.

The two buildings that were originally Florence’s dress shop and are now a beauty parlor and a wedding dress shop, were originally express offices, with one of them being Wells Fargo & Co. Express office.

The east half of the old City Hall was built by Mary Jane Shroyers, who made her money by driving a band of horses across the Great Plains. “In later years she was renowned as a horsewoman and was seen about the countryside, a romantic figure in a black velvet riding habit,” according to a Walking Tour of Placerville by Jane Schlappi and Marilyn Ferguson.

And everybody knows about Placerville Hardware, which has been a hardware store since 1856. The hardware store has since expanded into space that was the Mountain Democrat newspaper office for 102 years. We, of course, are now located at 2889 Ray Lawyer Drive. Come by and see our new building, especially if you have trouble getting through on our phones, which are temporarily idiosyncratic.

The folks downtown aren’t paying $1,000 for the right to dig up a vacant lot and panning the diggin’s in Hangtown Creek to sort out the gold. Now the downtown hosts visitors from throughout the county and state, from as far away as Florida, Germany, Spain and China. That’s the new gold. And thanks to the El Dorado County Historical Society for making the trip a memorable one for these visitors.

For those of us who never joined the military and have not had to experience war firsthand, we can’t truly understand what it means. I was only able to get a small glimpse into that experience, one that didn’t involve flying over a war-torn country or bullets flying in our direction, but still one that made me appreciate that I may not ever have to be in their shoes.

Unlike today, where it is a common thing to create a lifestyle without military service, the majority of the guys who rode the Memphis Belle weren’t so lucky. When we leveled out in the sky, I took a look out the window at the spinning propellers and imagined being a scared teenager sent to war. I thought about my wife and kids, and how this plane better land safely so I could see them again later that evening. I thought about how being away from them for a weekend can be hard sometimes, and soldiers of the past and even today have to do it for months or even years.

That same smell of exhaust fumes could have been the last these soldiers ever experienced. Pretending to fire the “waist” and “chin” guns was a game for me, but it could have been a nightmare for them. They had to take lives or lose theirs, possibly the most intense emotion human beings can experience. I may never comprehend what that is like.

The seats we strapped ourselves in were small. We were packed tight, my photographer and I trying to avoid touching knees as we faced one another in what felt like unfolded and battered lawn chairs made for children. I got grease on my jeans and was annoyed, then laughed at myself for the ridiculousness of such an emotion. It wasn’t blood, after all.

Listening to former pilot Dick Austin literally tell old war stories was inspiring. It felt like we were listening to the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster movie, of which he lived. And he lived it through 35 missions, once coming home with what he said was 350 bullet holes in his plane. He spoke with such confidence and pride, both jovial and serious at times, like he felt lucky not only to still be alive, but to have lived a full life in every way imaginable. I wondered if I’d be able to look back on my adventures the same way one day, and if a life without the experience of war could be as appreciated. I hope it can.

I thanked him for his service after my interview and drove to the office thinking, “Wow, the things these guys had to go through…”

Times are different today. We aren’t involved in a world war. Military personnel already enlisted are taking care of business for us civilians, allowing us to go about our day-to-day lives without worry, fear or the same responsibilities. We can function in a normal society here in the United States without the obligation of front line duty. We’re basically allowed to choose our paths in life, and I’ve chosen to be a writer and not a soldier.

My choice has an impact on society, too, and I firmly believe my job is an important one to the functioning of our American lifestyles. My weapon is a pen and not a rifle, and my enemy is injustice — or whatever other ideal we journalists are trying to embrace these days — and not a suicide bomber or opposing soldier firing an RPG.

This wasn’t always the case for wannabe writers, though. Many writers a generation or two ahead of me first served in some military capacity before settling on a career as a journalist, or author, actor or whatever else. Our own Editor in Chief Mike Raffety served in the U.S. Navy from 1965-69 before embarking upon a career as a journalist and photographer.

When the draft — or conscription in the United States — was discontinued in 1973, things changed. Our military became volunteer based and not mandatory. The Selective Service System is still in place as a backup plan, and I (at the time), like most men between 18 and 25, made up that list ready to be called if necessary. Luckily, it never was necessary.

So I’ve created a different course for my life, and boy am I appreciative for the opportunity to do so. It is because of guys like those originally seated in that B-17 bomber that I have the freedom to make the decisions I have today. I’m so thankful for their sacrifices to our country, and for being able to not have to do the same.

Patrick Ibarra is the managing editor of the Mountain Democrat. 

Where else but Sacramento would someone think the answer to a bad tax is to replace it with one even worse?

Assemblyman Wes Chesbro, who represents many rural taxpayers on California’s North Coast, is leading the charge to reinvent and expand the fire fee. His proposal (AB 468) would replace the fire fee with a 4.8 percent “surcharge” on all insured homeowners and businesses in the State of California, regardless of location.

A similar concept was proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2009 but was rejected by the Legislature.

These payments, averaging $48 per policy and totaling an estimated $480 million per year, would find their way to a “Disaster Management, Preparedness, and Assistance Fund.” The fund would benefit bureaucracies, like Cal Fire, that are involved in the state’s disaster preparedness efforts.

If you want to discourage an activity, you tax it. Mr. Chesbro’s proposal would make it more costly for Californians to maintain insurance coverage on their property, punishing them for being responsible. Our laws should encourage good behavior, not discourage it.

Call it what you will, this new “surcharge” is really just the fire fee all over again — this time on steroids. It aims to repackage, rebrand and expand a tax that to date has been a colossal failure. Although the new tax will lessen annual payments for current fire fee payers, it will dramatically expand the number of overtaxed Californians who are forced to pay even higher taxes.

The original fire tax was supposed to bring in $84 million in revenue from more than 825,000 rural California taxpayers. Due in part to billing errors and bad addresses, the state has spent millions and only collected about $75 million.

This new tax would cost California property owners six times more money than the original. About 10 million people would be impacted — 12 times as many as right now.

The Legislature passed the original fire fee by a simple majority vote rather than the required two-thirds vote for new taxes. That’s why the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, with my full support, has filed a class action lawsuit against the State of California.

As currently drafted, Chesbro’s legislation would also only require a simple majority vote, rather than the two-thirds vote clearly required by Proposition 26. It’s hard to imagine the Legislature would replace an illegal tax with an illegal tax, but stranger things have happened in Sacramento.

It remains to be seen what Governor Jerry Brown will do if it passes the Legislature. Some also speculate the Governor will propose sweeping changes to the fire fee when he unveils his May budget.

Despite significant media coverage, to date the Governor has mostly tried to brush off growing concerns about the fire fee and Cal Fire. In January, the agency was forced to admit the existence of a secret $3.66 million slush fund. In February, the agency was faulted by the Legislature’s attorneys for illegally diverting fire fee funds to pay for wildfire investigations. The Governor dismissed these revelations as “boring.”

Since the original fire fee passed, Californians have voted twice to send billions of additional tax dollars to Sacramento. Some now believe the state’s budget is balanced and could even see surpluses in the next few years.

Public safety is the first priority of government. The heroic men and women who fight wildfires and respond to emergencies and natural disasters deserve our full support.

But that doesn’t mean they need new taxes. Public safety should be first, not last, in line for existing public dollars. If the state’s emergency readiness lacks adequate funding, we need to do a better job prioritizing the billions of dollars the state is currently spending.

With this in mind, the Legislature would do best to repeal California’s illegal fire tax and stop thinking about replacing it with a tax that’s six times worse.

George Runner represents more than nine million Californians as a taxpayer advocate and elected member of the State Board of Equalization. To help inform California taxpayers, Runner has established a Website, calfirefee.com, providing the latest fire tax news and information.

When you clean out your garage this spring, or finally replace that old TV or computer with a new one, consider donating your no-longer-needed electronics to Snowline instead. You’ll be avoiding adding more to the landfill, and in turn, doing it for more than just an environmental good cause.

Snowline Hospice Reuse and Processing Center will take your e-waste and turn it into products it can sell, then help people with the money. The center is an authorized Microsoft Refurbisher that restores and resells affordable quality computers at each of the non-profit thrift stores. Appliances that work and are in good condition are taken to one of the Snowline Hospice thrift stores to be sold. The appliances that are broken are recycled. All proceeds from Snowline Hospice Thrift Store sales go to help support the mission of Snowline Hospice serving the community by supporting patients near end-of-life and their families.

“We provide our community with an alternative to taking stuff to the dump and putting it in the landfill,” said processing center manager Todd Pieplow in staff writer Mike Bush’s article on April 17.

Oh, but they’re doing so much more than that. That bulky tower and monitor in storage that you’ll never use again could be essentially helping a family in the final days of a loved one’s life.

And it’s not just e-waste. Snowline is set up to even make use of that single shoe you have lying around. You know, the one you keep thinking about throwing in the garbage, but don’t because you vow to find its partner someday? Yeah, that shoe can also make a difference.

Laurine Burns-Estreito, who oversees retail operations for Snowline Hospice, said the center takes clothing and shoes not suitable to sell in thrift stores, including single shoes.

“These materials are sold to a broker who ships them to Africa where single shoes are paired up with like shoes for impoverished communities,” Burns-Estreito said. “Clothing is put to good use; a ripped pair of jeans might become a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with a hole in the sleeve might become a pillowcase.”

They’ll even take that broken-down car in the yard you haven’t had towed away yet. “We will take care of all the paperwork, get the donor’s signature and arrange to have the vehicle picked up,” Burns-Estreito said.

It’s impressive what they’ve done so far. The processing center diverted more than 6 million pounds of materials from the landfill in 2012 and over 18 million pounds to date.

Let your waste do something good for once. Take it to people who will turn it into something that will benefit families all over the county, including possibly one day yours.

As a kid, you flank the calves; you grab them, throw them and hold them down. This is conducive to abrasions, muscle strain, and involuntarily changing the color of your shirt.

As you get older, you get to handle the branding iron, then move up to giving shots. After that comes earmarking. When you reach the pinnacle of branding, that is, when you own the calves, then you get to rope the calves and drag them up to the fire.

It is a swirling cauldron of heat and hooves, excited cowdogs and bawling cows. There is the smell of manure and singed hair and sweat and corral dust.

At the Rafter E, I wielded a syringe as the youngsters got their teeth rattled by the heavy stuff.

Wasn’t the first time I’d given the shots, though. Once during a branding at the Triangle Cross, I was about to immunize a calf when the calf jumped and I stuck the needle into my thumb.

Hurt like the dickens, of course, but at least it was effective. I haven’t had black leg since.

Slim Randles, based in Albuquerque, N.M., was sports editor of the Mountain Democrat in 1964.

Following the grueling two-day regatta, Koch reminisced about his achievement, saying he didn’t imagine he would win against so many other great sailors, and admitted that the effort was exhausting. Though, the name of his boat, Poco A Poco, said a lot about how he approached winning.  “The name comes from the expression “’Poco a poco se va mucho’” he said, “which means, ‘Little by little, one goes far.’”

Koch has been sailing this way most of his life. He recalls 30 years ago when the Camellia Cup would attract 300 boats. “They were mostly small boats, back then. There weren’t many keel boats.”  Baby boomers were just entering the workforce and couldn’t afford a J22, the keelboat Koch sailed to win Camellia Cup.

So, they bought small, light boats that they could carry atop or inside the back of a station wagon. New materials began being used. Hand-crafted expensive wooden boats were being replaced with less-expensive fiberglass, foam and aluminum. The brand names of these new boats evoked carefree fun… Lido, Sunfish, Banshee. These dinghies were the aquatic equivalent of the popular vehicle of the day, the Volkswagen Beetle. They democratized sailing, allowing anyone to own a yacht, even if it sat covered in the side yard.

As Baby Boomers aged, they starting young families, and many stopped sailing. A few moved up to family cruising boats like the Catalina 22, though many stored their dinghies. They left them hanging from rafters inside garages or covered with a tarp in a side yard. The dinghies soon became coated with dust, bright colors faded and once-crisply white sails became molded and decayed from neglect.

However, the thrill and freedom of sailing bred reaching dinghies up onto an exhilarating plane or sailing a Hobie Cat up onto a beach wasn’t entirely forgotten by those who could then afford a yacht.  Their purchases encouraged the evolution and multiplication of marinas along the California Coast from decaying wooden piers and boardwalks to sleek, concrete and steel refuges where bay and ocean racers and cruisers reside. Few of the 25-foot to over 100-foot yachts in these new marinas spend much time away from their docks. The harbors of San Francisco Bay, Marina del Rey, Balboa, Long Beach and San Diego are forested with the silver masts of boats waiting to be sailed.

Though when these boats do sail, their bays and seas come alive with white triangles. Packs of racers move deliberately across aquamarine froth toward a blaze orange mark. Individual cruises advance purposefully over the blue surface, their passengers enthralled by the spectacle surrounding them.

Although all of the sailors competing in Camellia Cup have sailed in coastal waters, they sail most often on inland waters. Inland sailing occurs most actively at Huntington and Millerton lakes near Fresno, at Lake Yosemite in Merced, at Clear Lake, Whiskeytown west of Redding, the Port of Stockton, Lake Almanor and throughout the Delta. El Dorado County’s prime sailing venues are Lake Tahoe and Folsom Lake. Sailing also occurs at Sly Park Recreation Area in Pollock Pines.

A used boat can cost from a few hundred to $20,000 and more.  The biggest ongoing costs are storage (a marina slip or storage yard unless it fits on your property), replacing sails (every few years unless damaged), licensing the boat and maintenance. The bigger the boat, the more the maintenance; the same for any boat stored in the water. An old joke among power boaters is that a boat is a hole in the water in which you throw money, though inland sailors rarely say that. More commonly, they’ll say as a loud power boat passes, “Do you hear the money being spent?” As sailing is relatively affordable.

Of course, most sailboats rarely move much faster than 10 mph. Yet, in a breeze, the experience can be knuckle whitening. A sailboat heels to the side, tilting the deck so that it feels as if the boat might capsize. You hold onto a rail or sit over the side to steady yourself and balance the boat. The hull shudders as it hits waves, sending chill sprays of water over the boat’s passengers. Rigging groans and whines. Sails ripple and snap. As racing boats approach one another, their skippers shout for the right to pass, “Starboard!” or acknowledge they will turn away, “Hold your course!” A tense moment passes as one boat crosses ahead of the other.

To an experienced skipper and crew, this is all normal. They know that a sailboat must fight its way ahead against forces that seek to push it away. It is that conflict that allows the boat to sail upwind.  Wind moves along the curvature of the sail and its keel or centerboard like that across an airplane’s wing, providing lift that advances the boat.

Sailing is both visceral and intellectual. With years of experience, it becomes instinctive. What’s needed most to become a great sailor is time on a boat. George Koch has invested a life sailing. So, as Camellia Cup – the county’s largest sailboat race – began, the other competing sailors knew George Koch was the most experienced sailor on the water, and one to beat.

Today, people expect to get their thrills instantly and socially. Turn a key and the motor starts. Gather socially to spray one another with chalk on a color run or get muddy on a challenge course. It takes practice and time to get as good as George Koch.

There was hope on the water at Camellia Cup, however. The youngest skipper that day was 7-year-old Katie Deutsch of El Dorado Hills. She trimmed the mainsheet of Four Sirens, a Santana 20 during racing and later presented trophies to the winners: another unlikely athlete, soon to be a champion.

John Poimiroo of El Dorado Hills is a travel writer who specializes in California destinations.

I was watching our neighbor’s dog today, and Daisy was lying next to me. She started growling, and as the neighbor’s dog came closer, Daisy’s growl escalated. I told her to relax, but she started to attack the other dog. I grabbed her — making sure she knew it was me — and she turned on me and bit me. 

I responded in anger and approached her with that mindset, which made her even more aggressive toward me. I grabbed Daisy and my pistol and headed toward the woods, but I was just venting. I could never hurt an animal. But I am concerned that Daisy’s aggression will get worse as she gets older. I don’t know whether it’s hereditary or abuse, but I need to help her if possible.

For a minute there, I thought we were heading for an “Old Yeller” ending — minus the fateful rabies outbreak as justification.

I called this guy to make sure he had talked himself down from the ledge.

I asked him, “Have you killed her?”

He told me no, she’s fine. “I was just so angry.”

Some people reading this will be ready to meet at the town square, tar and feathers in hand. But the truth is, a lot of people get irrationally angry with their dogs when things don’t go their way.

Why are we getting so angry? Why is it the dog’s fault that we don’t understand its behavior?

Were it not for this man and his family, Daisy would not be alive. She was seriously injured, unable to walk and in grave danger of starving to death alone in a ditch. He rescued her, got her vital medical attention and nursed her back to health. And don’t think that’s not part of the problem.

He did so much for her. Why won’t she just behave for him?

As with children, so it is with dogs. It just doesn’t work that way.

Daisy didn’t bite him because she’s ungrateful. She bit him because he inserted himself into an ongoing act of aggression, prompting her redirection onto him. She didn’t willfully ignore his earlier request that she “relax.” She has no idea what “relax” means because he hasn’t trained her.

In his 1969 book “The Godfather,” Mario Puzo wrote of the now legendary Don Corleone: “If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his, the old man would take it personal.”

For the Don, that philosophy fueled a strategy, one that allowed for no accidents, no misunderstandings, no unintentional slights — which took all the stress out of deciding whether retaliation was appropriate. It was. Always.

For those of us not in the mafia, living this way makes no sense. And it’s wildly out of place in dealing with our dogs.

On that day, before the other dog and the pistol and after the other dog and the pistol, the story of Daisy and her knight was ongoing. He rescued her, he nursed her, he invited her to stay. Still to come: He deepened his insight into her behavior, he got her trained, and they lived happily ever after.

Woof!

Dog trainer Matthew “Uncle Matty” Margolis is co-author of 18 books about dogs, a behaviorist, a popular radio and television guest, and host of the PBS series “WOOF! It’s a Dog’s Life!” Read all of Uncle Matty’s columns at www.creators.com, and visit him at www.unclematty.com. Send your questions to dearuncle.gazette@unclematty.com or by mail to Uncle Matty at P.O. Box 3300, Diamond Springs 95619.

Copyright 2013 Creators Syndicate Inc. 

A nice blend of the whimsical and the practical, Eco Logical has handwoven handbags from Guatemala, toys made of wire, beads and cans from Africa, jewelry from the Starfish Project, pop-top purses and bangles, bags made from recycled plastic and rubber tires, wall art from Haiti made from recycled steel drums, backpacks from recycled rice bags, handmade journals and sketchbooks with eco-friendly paper, pillows, woven scarves, handmade and wrapped soaps, knitted and woven hats, headbands, pottery, handwoven cloth napkins, all kinds of small toys, keychains and even chocolate.

Why Fair Trade?

“I’ve always been environmentally concious,” said Danielle, 26. She has lived in El Dorado County since 2000 and both she and her husband are El Dorado High School graduates. “Fair Trade gives artisans a safe place to work, a fair wage and even health care. My husband and I liked to buy Fair Trade items, but we always had to go down the hill and there was a limited selection. With this store, we can bring a bigger selection to Placerville and educate people about Fair Trade.”

Fair Trade works with farmer and artisan communities in developing countries to empower them while offering unique and well-crafted products for the public. Communities are improved, nutritional needs met and the poor, especially women, are empowered. There are stories associated with many of the artisan groups, like the Starfish Project which was established to empower exploited women in Asia. Through the jewelry-making business, they are provided with an alternative employment, counseling, vocational training, health care, shelter, family education grants and language acquistion classes.

Divine Chocolate is produced by the Kuapa Kokoo Cooperative in Ghana, where Juliet Brago is a cocoa farmer. She and the other women in the cooperative used their profits to purchase a corn mill for their village.

The store was a big challenge for the couple who had no retail experience.

“The Fair Trade Federation was an invaluable resource  to find wholesalers and shops,” said Danielle, “and the rewards are unsurpassed — people love the store and they love what Fair Trade stands for and that they are helping someone else when they purchase something.”

Objects made of leather and bone such as journals, wallets, napkin rings, jewelry and chopsticks are “cruelty free.”

“That means that the animal has died naturally and wasn’t killed to make the product,” said Thorne. While the jewelry, much of which is produced by the Starfish Project, is the main event, according to Thorne, “people say they come in to buy cool gifts.”

“When you purchase a product here, you make a difference,” said Danielle. “They aren’t made in a factory or by a child. You can feel the difference in a handmade product — you can tell they’re made with love.”

Contact Wendy Schultz at 530 344-5069 or wschultz@mtdemocrat.net. Follow @wschultzMtDemo on Twitter.

At 2 p.m Thursday the computers and phones will be shut down and will be moved to our new office at 2889 Ray Lawyer Dr.

The plan is to have the phones back on Friday, some time in the afternoon. Our photographers will likely be out and about long before the phones are back on — once they get their studio and photo desk moved and set up in the new building.

Without landline phones and e-mail, everyone will be taking advantage of the news blackout to move and set up their desks, set up the library, collection of old bound copies and microfilm, rain gauge, film and photo CD files, clip files and myriad other valuable and historical files.

There’s a lot to a newspaper operation, from ad sales reps to graphics, to accounting and circulation, plus the publisher, who has to know about every department and has planned the new building.

You can reach us Thursday until 2 p.m. After that, as they used to say on the long-running TV series MASH, “It’s time to bug out.”

The vote was 54-46, six votes short of the 60 required to pass the bill. Even Senate Majority Harry Reid voted against it, though that supposedly was a procedural gimmick to allow him to bring the bill back up for another vote. Sounds like more sleazy action by Mr. Squeaky.

The compromise by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., sounded reasonable, but you can’t blame America’s gun owners for being suspicious of any federal action, especially after the United States led the vote in the U.N. General Assembly to pass the Arms Control Treaty.

“The U.N. Arms Trade Treaty that passed in the General Assembly … would require the United States to implement gun-control legislation as required by the treaty, which could supersede the laws our elected officials have already put into place,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said in a statement. “It’s time the Obama administration recognizes it is already a non-starter, and Americans will not stand for internationalists limiting and infringing upon their constitutional rights.”

Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana said he opposed the treaty because it doesn’t “uphold the rights of Americans.”

The three countries who voted against it were Iran, Syria and North Korea. China and Russia abstained. And where do bad countries get their weapons? From these five.

While regulating the sales of heavy military weapons, such as tanks, it also includes small arms and light weapons. At the very least this could make it difficult for Americans to buy Italian shotguns or German pistols. But the real fear is the treaty’s requirement for countries to pass gun control regulations.

The trouble with Congress and the president is they are attacking responsible gun owners while ignoring the problems of the mentally ill and the criminals with illegal guns.

Kelsey Thom, a wise old Karok Indian, spoke in soft clipped sentences. On occasion he would share with me the many wonders of nature and its link to our spiritual sense as we cut firewood or panned little nuggets from (a secret) creek. Whether hunting morel mushrooms, icknish or deer, one of his pearls of wisdom, “Takesome leavesome,” was simple enough for the boy that I was, and has always stayed with me. Kelsey was a remarkably sage and generous man as well as a decorated WWI veteran.

In Quartz Valley, spring and fall were marked not so much by a calendar, but by the melodious chatter of migrating Sandhill cranes. They flew so high one often couldn’t see them, but their distinct, unique sound was like a thousand distant flutes, a symphony to them and a message of time for those who listened. Winter was marked in the early morning light by a vast white carpet of sparkling diamonds stretched out for two miles along the gravel road where my brothers and I rode bicycles to the bus stop.

Like spokes on a wheel radiating outward, I believe I hiked and explored every hill and forest of firs, every creek and pond with its blue, green and red dragonflies, every deer trail, mountain and ridgeline of rock that could be crossed in a day’s venture. Later I took three- to four-day hikes to many of the high mountain lakes like Campbell and Big Blue where silver flashing Eastern brook and rainbow trout were caught on bare hooks as fast as they could be reeled in — where one was reminded to feed the campfire when signaled by the hair-raising scream of a midnight mountain lion. Today there are many more black bear at those lakes than in the 60s … and a lot fewer people in the valley.

Etna High School, a place where I used to play basketball and on occasion, hooky, has become smaller. Why? A once prosperous thriving valley of ranchers, loggers and cattlemen, a place where I learned to fly a little Cessna 140 on our homemade airstrip and reconned places I had only dreamed of hiking. On my daily trek to and from the bus stop I crossed a flat stretch of gravel lined with cottonwoods called Emigrant Creek. At one time it was covered by hovels where 3,000 Chinese laborers lived and worked the shallow gold-laced waters.

Today there’s not a trace of them left save an occasional opium bottle the size of a golf ball. When the gold ran out, so too did the immigrants, a natural decline in human population. But today, the unnatural decline of a modern population is still hard to fathom. Grocery stores, barbershops and Edgecomb’s hardware store … gone. Most of it is gone or barely surviving on some government subsidy. Driving familiar roads off the main highway I‘m struck by the virtual time capsule of change, but it’s upside down. There are overgrown pastures and broken fences, empty houses with fallen barns. The specter of man-made catastrophe by overregulation has arrived … clearly a black mark in the history of the west, and for mankind.

If one were to make a list of all the layered federal, state and county regulations, policies and twisted environmental pressures imposed on this land and its people, the consequences of such would fall into perfect alignment with UN Agenda 21. So we are now living under global regulation as well. Where is that written in our Constitution? More importantly, are we just going to accept losing America to politicians who lied to us when they swore to uphold and defend it? They are either incompetent, or liars … or both. How could this happen any other way? To refute this is to ignore the truth.

Even the British Magna Carta of 1215 AD, the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the King, granted private property rights. What sleight of hand are we being dealt today by the EPA, in full view of our legislature?

If Kelsey Thom and his blood-stained band of doughboys dying in French trenches of 1917 could have seen the future of their sacrifice, our “land of the not-so- free and the home of the homeless,” I wonder if their attention would have turned towards a more fundamental evil, the thieves of our promised destiny?

Rod Kerr is retired with 30 years of service at the California Department of Food Agriculture and with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

Hurricanes didn’t have names in 1938, but because this storm is considered the worst and fastest moving storm in the history of Providence, R.I., it was sometimes called the Long Island Express (at some points during its travels from off the coast of Africa on Sept. 9, 1938, when it was first observed by a ship until it dissipated about two weeks later, forward speeds were clocked at 70 mph). In Westhampton, Long Island, it swept an entire movie theater, projectionist and all 20 patrons two miles out to sea where they  drowned.

From the dates, obviously this was not Hurricane Sandy, which pales by comparison with respect to severity, yet how many people in the news tried to intimate that Sandy was from global warming, climate change, or whatever the name d’jour may be, to create crisis and hysteria? The last great hurricane to hit New England before the Long Island Express was in 1869. It was known as the Saxby Gale (the word hurricane was not developed back then). It is not surprising that the Saxby Gale occurred 69 years before the Long Island Express and was almost entirely forgotten by 1938 as the Long Island Express was not even noted in the news reports some 74 years later when Sandy hit the East Coast.

Recently the “Warmists” have been pounding the drum with constant stories about weather, like the warm winter where Chicago didn’t have any snow into January. Must be global warming. Of course those same global warming advocates run for cover when two or three late winter blizzards hit most of the entire eastern half of the United States. Other advocates say all this “extreme” weather is caused by global warming. Oh, excuse me, the new term is “climate change.”

We almost never hear in the media about the extremely cold and long European winters of recent. London, whose high temperatures in April are not much above freezing, is having double problems. Because of the green agenda energy prices have skyrocketed to the point where much of the populace has to decide whether to “heat or eat.”

Estimates of deaths from the cold in England for this year may be upwards of 30,000 people as compared to the heat wave of 2003 when an estimated 2,000 people died as a result. But it’s not just England. Much of Europe has for the past several years been cloaked in extreme cold during winter. In 2009 there were record snowstorms and in January and February of 2012 there were blizzards and an extreme cold snap. Could it be the global warming advocates have it backwards?

Two Russian biogeochemists, Vladimir Bashkin and Rauf Galiulin, certainly think so and their published findings that the climate is cooling are gaining ground among independent scientists. The underlying basis for this cooling is a weaker sun; weaker in the sense of less sunspot activity and a reduced solar wind. The science of sunspots has been the topic of the Balancing Act in the past when discussing the work of Danish scientist Henrik Swensmark wherein Swensmark developed a relationship between clouds and sunspots. With fewer sunspots there are more clouds and hence cooler temperatures. During the 20^th century there were more sunspots, less clouds and hence warmer temperatures because the solar wind retards cloud development.

During the Little Ice Age, the Maunder minimum of almost no sunspot activity occurred from about 1645 and 1715 during which the Earth reached its coldest point of that approximately 400-year period known as the LIA.

But there is more to this story. A recent paper by New Zealand scientist, Vincent Gray, questions the whole Greenhouse theory with respect to CO2. The CO2 aspect of the current theory was proposed by a Swedish physicist, Svante Arrhenius. He published extensively near the turn of the last century on the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere. Gray however found that Arrhenius based his calculations on the measurements of Samuel P. Langley, the scientist who was supposed to invent powered flight. But it turns out Arrhenius got it backwards and used water vapor instead of CO2 in making his claims. Big mistake.

The theory was revived by Guy Callendar, an English steam engineer and inventor. His flaw was that he believed that the only form of energy transfer in the atmospheric system was radiation. He ignored or didn’t know about convection, conduction and evaporation. The bottom line is that the IPCC was set up to prove this flawed theory. Most of the global warming models can’t even reproduce the past climates, never mind the future. Perhaps that is why there has been no significant warming during the past 18 years while CO2 has continued to climb about 10 percent during the same period.

But why are the warmists pounding the drum harder than ever? For warmists any weather event is related to global warming. Every disaster is caused by global warming. It is unrelenting in the news, the latest example being the late spring blizzards that hammered the eastern half of the United States. What could be their reason? Money. The global warming industry receives at least $20 billion a year from the government. Grants and research money the past decade have been estimated at over $150 billion. We are talking a cash cow here that would not exist without the fear and hysteria created by the warmists.  The “war” on global warming isn’t that far behind the war in Iraq. But most amazing is how we could allow the spending of so much taxpayer money fighting a fictitious battle that has ramifications of costing the taxpayer so much more in dollars and freedom.

News Bulletin:  Bosch said it is getting out of the solar photovoltaic business it started in 2008 as it has taken a $2.4 billion euro haircut. Three thousand employees are in jeopardy of losing their jobs if the business or parts of it cannot be sold. Bosch is just another casualty of the green energy debacle, which is so aptly named, because green energy costs a lot of green. Bosch is a German manufacturer of electronic components for automobiles and industry. If you have sticker shock from the price of a German car, you can blame global warming.

Larry Weitzman is a resident of the Rescue area.

Recently I was introduced to another museum in San Francisco, one that by design, has no permanent collection. The Museum of Craft and Design has been around since 2004, originally housed in the “Union Square District,” though I confess I never saw it in the Union Square area, which we have explored somewhat thoroughly on Thanksgiving Days, admiring the shop windows, fashions and jewelry displays decorated for Christmas.

A fire at the downtown location in 2010 sent the museum on an itinerant journey of “pop-up” museums.

But now they have a permanent home in something of a warehouse district, surprisingly  flanked by Victorians on an adjoining street near Interstate 280. It’s called the Dogpatch neighborhood and it’s way out on Third Street past the China Basin drawbridge and AT&T Baseball Park. Finding parking is hell. Take a cab or catch the No. 22 Muni bus, which stops two blocks short of the museum or the Metro T Train Sunnydale to 20th or 23rd Street. The T Train can be caught underground downtown.

Located at 2569 Third St. between 22nd and 23rd streets, it is a spacious building with three artists featured, all sculptural. And there is workshop space reserved. It is 8,500 square feet with 4,000 square feet of flexible exhibition and workshop space. Originally the American Can Co. since 1915, it was redesigned for a street entry with rollup door in the rear.

The two big shows now through June are a survey of sculptural conceptions by Bay Area artist Michael Cooper covering 17 works from 1968 to 2011 and jewelry artist Arline Fisch, who used crocheted and knitted copper wire to form a display of colorful jelly fish and anemones.

Cooper’s work is very imaginative, constructing trikes and twisted pistols out of wood, a go-cart-like creation made from a plastic deck chair. He works with both metal and wood, making complex sculptures and statements on contemporary life.

A third artist is Rebecca Hutchinson who created a “natural forest” that looks somewhat like a kelp forest, but it is white and made from porcelain paperclay, paper and other materials.

Cooper’s work will be on display through June 30; Fish’s jelly fish will be there through June 23 as will Hutchinson’s.

The museum opened April 6. Admission is $8 for seniors and for students it is $6. The museum is open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

• • •

For the best free artwork on display for the next two years, the Bay Bridge is a sight to see. Computerized light artists Leo Villarreal began in September 2012 installing 25,000 white, energy-efficient light-emitting diodes along 1.8 miles miles of the suspension portion of the Oakland Bay Bridge. The algorythm-driven display opened last month.

It clicks on at dusk and runs until 2 a.m.

I’ve been switching out compact fluorescent bulbs in my house for LED bulbs. Replacing 60-watt bulbs in the can lights of our kitchen and kitchen nook with compact fluorescents reduced our wattage from 540 to 117.  Then changing to LEDs reduced the total wattage consumed to 81. Three 75-watt floodlights in our living room were replaced with three LED floods. Total wattage for the three floods went from 225 watts to 33 watts and the lights were brighter. Replacing compact fluorescents with brighter but lower wattage LEDs in my wife’s bathroom made her very happy with the increased brightness of the light. I’ve done the switches in stages. Each time I go to Home Depot the prices of LEDs have gone down. The bulbs are guaranteed to last 10 years.

Villareal’s LEDs are obviously smaller, otherwise the bridge would look more like a huge searchlight. The privately funded project cost $8 million. Operational expenses are $11,000 a year.

The suspension cables total five miles. The display is only on the outer, north face and is not visible to drivers on the bridge.

It’s fascinating to linger along the Embarcadero not far from the Ferry Building and watch the changing displays of lights on the Bay Bridge. It brings the gray-painted span to life. The Bay Bridge was completed in 1936, six months before the more colorful Golden Gate Bridge. The Bay Bridge carries 280,000 cars a day on two decks. The 540-foot tunnel through Yerba Buena Island will connect with a self-anchored suspension bridge that is still under construction. That new bridge was supposed to open on Labor Day this year, but it is looking more like sometime in 2014 because some 3-inch wide bolts snapped off that help anchor seismic shear keys and bearings to a concrete beam. Engineers are working on a repair plan.

Meantime the fabulous light show continues through rain, fog and clear weather, enhanced by the lights along the horizon from the Port of Oakland.

Michael Raffety is editor of the Mountain Democrat. His column appears biweekly.

It took only one day to have the newest city park planted, weeded and landscaped, but it was a plan over a decade in the making.

The park, at the corner of Pleasant and Arizona streets, has been in the city’s plans since 1998. It was part of the Cottonwood Project, a conditioned subdivision project. The phased development was lost to foreclosure before the park and two other sections of the project were completed, but the lender agreed to give $98,000 toward the park’s development.

In 2013, everything came together. But it took a lot to make it happen:

• On March 5, Wally Sealok, his foreman and a three-man crew from the Placerville Public Works Department used a Bobcat to drill footing holes in the park soil, preparing to install equipment.

• The City of Placerville agreed to pick up the installation costs and to keep the costs low.

• $30,000 of playground equipment was donated by the Placerville Kiwanis Club.

• On April 6, the community collaboration, including members of the Placerville Kiwanis Club, Kiwanis Key Club, Kiwanis Aktion Club, Kiwanis Builders Club, members of Placerville City Council, city staff and neighbors of the park, banded together to ready the park for opening. “We had about 50-60 folks who planted 15 trees and 60 plants,” Community Services Director Steve Youel said in Wendy Schultz’s story. “Dennis Look Landscaping was there, Western Sign installed the signs and Charlie Wigglesworth made the best hot dogs in the world.”

• Kiwanis children’s clubs — Key Club and the Builders’s Club — will be helping with park maintenance.

It was a joint effort with a lot of moving parts involving a lot of key players throughout the community. Volunteering time, money and services for the greater good of the community was the only reason the park stands today, in its shining glory.

That’s why we found it so important to be there for every part of the process. We wanted to showcase the effort every step of the way, from the fundraising (see our article on the Art & Wine Festival, and how Kiwanis was using some of the funds it raised from that event to help fund the effort for Duffey Park), to the digging and installation, all the way to the planting and celebration. It is efforts like this that deserve all the press we can give.

And now something stands that generations of Placerville residents and visitors can enjoy. We’d say it’s helping make Placerville a better place, but the people who put it together have been here long enough to already have. And as a former downtown neighbor of the late George Duffey when he ran the Placerville News Co. we know the man with a collection of wildflower photos would really appreciate this park. It is an aptly named park and we congratulate the Kiwanis and City Hall.

One of my favorite topics to harp on, because it continually amazes me that seemingly nothing is done about it, is criticizing government officials for excessive salaries and pensions. Notice the rash of local senior government official retirement stories in the Mountain Democrat nearly every issue? All of those overly paid officials are escaping at relatively young retirement ages with their platinum pensions intact. With inflated pension liabilities continuing to pile up, it makes you wonder how close the rest of California cities and counties are to Stockton’s bankruptcy fate.

However, instead of choosing to frequently rant like so many other news sources out there, I generally try to write on topics that offer something uniquely interesting or socially redeeming to a degree. It can be challenging to dig up those types of stories on a regular basis, but I aim to go that route more often than not. That is until a rant-worthy topic comes up that I can’t resist venting a little steam over and hopefully mildly entertaining readers in the process.

This particular rant begins with a police report I was recently forced to file. An unknown party decided to vandalize our car as it sat harmlessly minding its own business on a residential street in a Folsom neighborhood. The car wasn’t parked unsupervised for more than an hour, but that’s all it took for someone to inflict about $3,000 worth of damage to the vehicle.

The tale is relatively commonplace and understandably frustrating for any car owner, but the fact that the car is a restored 1967 Camaro makes it sting that much worse. The vandal, for whatever reason, decided to pry the spoiler off the trunk of the car, and after being successful, then left the spoiler on the trunk with all the associated damage from the act. The damage not only requires a new spoiler, but also a new trunk lid, some related adjustments and a paint job for the whole back end of the car.

A number of questions arose when I discussed the incident with Folsom police. Was someone trying to steal the spoiler and got scared away? Did they think the spoiler might fit on their car, and when they realized it didn’t, just left it behind? Were they interested in stealing the whole car, and for some odd reason, started with the spoiler first?

Did someone have a beef with me personally and wanted to lash out? Or did a highly competitive and proud Mustang owner happen to walk by at the wrong time?

Of course, I don’t have any answers to the questions, the Folsom police don’t have any time to look into it, and the vandalism isn’t the end of the world in the grand scheme of things. Far more senseless and egregious crimes are committed every day.

Still, I can’t help but be disappointed. I thought people had respect for the classics. Many of us were taught by our parents to not even touch a classic car, just to admire from a distance. I guess I was wrong.

Dan Francisco is an El Dorado Hills-based public relations consultant to the high-tech industry. 

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. If you are over 35 and the doctor doesn’t know what condition is causing your combination of symptoms, you will likely hear the dread words, “Well, at your age…”

The assumption that completes the rest of that sentence is that at your age, decrepitude of some form is to be expected. Go home, get some rest and suck it up.

One thing I’ve learned from watching CSI and multiple detective programs on television is not to make assumptions. Follow the evidence. Open your mind and explore the possibilities. Follow all the leads, not just the one that seems most likely. It’s probably not the butler who killed Professor Plum in the library with the lead pipe, but you should check it out anyway.

I first heard “at your age” when I was 40. I have friends who are hearing it at 94, but it’s not any more valid at 94 than it was at 40 as a reason for all medical problems. To be sure, things are going to wear out and some things work differently than they used to. They look different too. But, you live in your body 24/7 and when something is not right, you know it.

It’s like that funny noise you hear in your car. Other people don’t notice the noise or they attribute it to something inconsequential. But you know your car and that is not a noise your car makes. You take it to the mechanic and it stops making the noise. The mechanic can’t find anything wrong and implies that it’s probably just a loose screw or something. You drive home, thinking that maybe you’re wrong and then, a mile from your house, the noise returns. If you immediately return to the mechanic, sometimes they find the problem. Sometimes, several hundred dollars later, there’s still a noise in your car and the mechanic looks at you as if you’re crazy. You decide to try to live with the noise and hope that your motor won’t fall out on the freeway.

A friend’s active and independent 90-year-old mother went into the hospital for minor surgery. The surgery went well, but her daughters were dismayed that their mother seemed to be rambling and incoherent upon waking up. The hospital kept her another night and the following morning; the mother did not recognize her children and was hallucinating. The daughters talked to the doctor who said that unfortunately, this sometimes happened to elderly patients — a slide into dementia that would necessitate a placement in assisted living or a memory care facility. The daughters questioned whether the intravenous pain medication or some of the other medications being given to their mother in the hospital might be the cause. No, it was her age — it just happens, said the doctor. Finally, the oldest daughter demanded that all medication be stopped temporarily. Reluctantly it was and 12 hours later, the mother was back to her usual alert and responsive self. She had been allergic to the pain medication.

Thank goodness for the Internet. You can research your own symptoms — follow a few leads and narrow down the field of possibilities. You might have a bit more time and definitely more motivation than your doctor does to do this. Doctors didn’t use to appreciate patients who researched their own symptoms, particularly when they also made their own diagnosis, but if you trot out your research and leave it open-ended, many are more willing to listen. There are countless examples of non-medical people doing research that lead their doctor to an accurate diagnosis.

It’s up to you to refuse the one-hit wonder approach. How about looking at all the symptoms instead of just one? Advocate for yourself even if you don’t know anything about medicine — few of us do. If your doctor pulls the age card, pull one of your own — the informed patient card.

Wendy Schultz is a staff writer and columnist for the Mountain Democrat. Her column appears bi-weekly. 

The authors are both local and regional. It’s an exciting event fashioned after the popular Book TV that C-span hosts on weekends and holidays. All the authors will be speaking. They also will have tables set up to sell and sign books both before and after the talks. Anyone with questions can get them answered at the authors’ tables.

The oldest author is 91-year-old Auburn resident Clarence “Bud” Anderson, who flew 116 missions in a p-51 Mustang in WWII, shooting down 17 enemy aircraft. Anderson saw it all, commanding jet fighter squadrons in the Korean War, being a test pilot and then leading combat strikes in the Vietnam War. Wow, what a career! He collaborated on the book with writer Joseph P. Hemelin.

Placerville resident Keli Gwyn writes historical novels. Her latest one is set in the town of El Dorado and titled “A Bride Opens a Shop.” It was a finalist for the Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence. The award is sponsored by the Romance Writers of America chapter Southern Magic. Though the chapter is based in Birmingham, Ala., it is a national contest and entries cannot be vanity press books nor can their distribution be subsidized by the author.

Gwyn’s novel, as described by staff writer Wendy Schultz, is about the heroine battling fire, disease, desperadoes and society’s views of what women can and cannot do in the 1870s in El Dorado. There were women who made their fortune baking pies during the Gold Rush and Bine Ingham began working for the Mountain Democrat about the time period of this novel. Ingham became publisher in 1889. She worked 42 years for the Mountain Democrat, a record unequaled, though Joanna Wright in the bookkeeping department has been here 37 years and is young enough to surpass Ingham’s record.

The author of the business/autobiography is Shari Fitzpatrick, a resident of the South County and famous for chocolate covered strawberries. Fitzpatrick started a successful business, sold it and then started another one. She is also an accomplished and inspiring speaker.

Roseville resident Sherie Lebedis wrote a memoir about her time as a teenager from Shingle Springs going to the South in the 1960s to register voters. Her book is titled, “You Came Here to Die, Didn’t You.”

Of course we can’t resist the concept of a novel by a former newspaper editor. Sacramento resident Michele Drier’s latest novel is about the new managing editor of a multi-national celebrity magazine that is part of a media empire owned by — oh, stop the presses — vampires! Her novel is titled “SNAP: The World Unfolds.”

Thanks to the ladies of the Shakespeare Club for organizing and growing such a great event. The event starts at 1 p.m. Sunday at the Shakespeare Club 2940 Bedford Ave. in Placerville. The Shakespeare Club, by the way, is the oldest continuing women’s club, established in 1897. The spacious and beautiful clubhouse was moved from Union Street in 1955 to make way for the freeway.

The word with the stars of course represents a family-friendly version of the word many of us say routinely to express anger, disgust, frustration and to describe any number of unpleasant things or circumstances. I’ve also read that it’s the most common utterance recorded on airplane black boxes (Oh, s***!) when a plane is “going down.”

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hollered (Oh, s***!) when they jumped off the cliff into a raging river to escape “those guys,” the Pinkertons, who were in hot pursuit. When that movie came out, mainstream films didn’t usually have too much potty language, so the word was muffled, but grown-up audiences knew exactly what they were hollering.

Kudos to Craig Ferguson for saying what millions if not billions of us would like to express. “We’re sick to death of this s***!” Bombings and shootings or threats of bombings and shootings, maybe not every day, but way too d*** often.

It takes a concerted effort not to feel existentially victimized by such events. Do we really want to go to the big Labor Day parade? Do we really want to cram into Candlestick Park to watch the 49ers knowing that some nut or whole can of nuts might get into the stadium with a duffle bag full of TNT and 50 pounds of ball bearings? Do we tighten our pucker strings even more than usual when we ride BART under San Francisco Bay or drive over the Golden Gate Bridge or stand on a corner enjoying the circus that is the Bay to Breakers run?

“If you see something, say something” has become the security officials’ mantra urging us all to be alert, watch for suspicious people or suspicious activities or suspicious objects. I would think that most of us have always been reasonably alert to “suspiciousness” when out and about. When walking along a crowded street or milling around at a big flea market, you move your wallet from your back pocket to your front pocket. If you carry a purse, you strap it over one shoulder and kind of hold one arm close to your body to keep it from being snatched away. That kind of common sense has always been part of life in a crowded world.

These days being suspicious has a much more universal element. It’s not just your wallet you need to worry about; it’s your building or your kid’s school, your whole neighborhood or your whole town. 9/11 brought us an increased fear of flying and a whopping increase in airport and airline security.

That’s good. I always feel better knowing that everyone getting on my plane has been screened and double-checked before being allowed into the boarding area. It’s kind of a pain to take off your shoes and belt and unload your pocket change and give up your dinky little corkscrew, but overall, it’s not that inconvenient. You can always wear easy-off shoes, keep spare change in your backpack and pick up a cheap corkscrew when you get to your destination.

By today, Friday, the information might be all different, but as of Wednesday morning, CNN was tentatively reporting that the Boston bomber was probably a “lone wolf,” and later announced a suspect had been arrested. Not long after that came another report noting that the Justice Department had later said that no one had been arrested after all.

If indeed it turns out to be a “lone wolf,” in many ways that’s a good thing. It localizes the threat to that particular street in Boston at a particular moment in time. On the other hand, it gives pause to wonder how many other “lone wolves” are out there waiting to set off a bomb at our city hall or the county court house or the Fourth of July picnic.

The September 11 attacks changed some things for us. They changed some things a lot and other things not so much. We aren’t bunkerized or scared to leave our homes, but we’re certainly more aware when we travel — not because we’ve individually had bad experiences but because of the visible increase in security measures.

About 15 years ago, while visiting relatives in Virginia, we took the subway into Washington, D.C. I wanted to go to the Holocaust Museum. Everyone else wanted to go just about anywhere but the Holocaust Museum. Taking my place at the back of a long line that stretched around the corner and down the block, I was surprised when armed guards slowly came along the line with bomb-sniffing dogs. We hadn’t seen that at any of the other landmark sights around the city. I understood it at the time, and at that location, but it was unusual. And it didn’t surprise me that they weren’t conducting the same kind of security at other historic and popular places. We wouldn’t lose our so-called innocence for another couple of years.

Back then I couldn’t have legitimately said, “I’m sick to death of this s***!” because other than the Oklahoma City bombing, we hadn’t seen much of it up till then. But I can sure say it now: “Enough of this “s***!” Now people in West, Texas can say it and mean it literally.

Chris Daley is a staff writer and columnist for the Mountain Democrat. His column appears each Friday. 

The implications that Chief Bruce Lacher and the Board of Directors ignored the property tax decline is without merit. The last Firefighters Union contract called for a 5 percent cost-of-living raise in January 2010. Chief Lacher and the board had extensive deliberations as to whether it was prudent to award the raise or delay it. At the time it appeared that the district had in excess of $1 million in reserves and contingency funds. This decision was to honor the contractual obligation and utilize contingency funds to award the pay raise. This was during the same year that social security recipients and military retirees received “zero” cost-of-living raises. In addition, the 5 percent brought the total cost-of-living increases given to the union members during the previous eight years to 34 percent.

The next financial bullet to hit the district was fired by the JPA, which is the organization that manages the ambulances within the county. There is a system in place called “loan labor” that requires compensation from the district to the JPA when an ambulance-assigned individual is utilized on a district fire engine. The JPA, in 2011, presented the district with a claim for over $700,000 in loan labor bills that were not paid by the district during the previous three to five-year period. This of course begs the question as to how the JPA staff, the county health department staff, the district staff and the County Auditor could miss this amount of unpaid bills. This issue was settled with the district paying the JPA in excess of a half-million dollars.

The monies paid to the JPA and the declining property tax revenues were part of the issues facing Chief Lacher in early 2012 as he tried to compile the current budget. The board directed Chief Lacher to evaluate what it would take to balance the budget without again reaching into the contingency fund. Chief Lacher estimated approximately $600,000 would be needed to balance the budget and not close or brownout stations. Until that time the district paid 100 percednt of all employee pay and benefits. This included the 9 percent contribution to the PERS retirement system that is usually borne by the individual employee as in other state and county organizations. Chief Lacher alerted the union officers to the fact that, to avoid closing stations and laying off personnel, individuals may have to start contributing to their retirement system and their medical benefits as done in other agencies and in most civilian organizations. The union’s response to this possibility was to present Chief Lacher with the infamous vote of no-confidence letter. At the same time Director Dennis Edwards and I, who were serving as board representatives on the negotiating committee, were informed by the president of the union, Lucas Shepard, that the union would be running two of “their” candidates against us in the forthcoming election.

The Board of Directors in response to the loan labor billing fiasco and other financial issues directed Chief Lacher to secure the services of a part-time CPA to review and make recommendations concerning the district’s financial activities. Michael Ocenosak, CPA, was retained and within a very short time, after being alerted by the County Auditor to a major fund discrepancy, identified and informed Chief Lacher and, subsequently the board, that approximately $1 million identified as reserve and contingency money and shown as a carryover in the budget did not exist! It seems that some years earlier funds were transferred from one account to another but continued to be reflected as available in both accounts.  Annually the district hires an auditing firm to conduct an audit of its books. In addition, with the exception of a small petty cash fund, all financial transactions of the district flow through the County Auditor’s office. Again, it begs the question as to how could multiple audits, the County Auditor’s office, and the district’s accounting and billing staff not identify, over a period of years, a million dollars that was reflected in the budget but did not exist!

It is unfortunate that the Grand Jury is not available. Absent a Grand Jury investigation, I would strongly advise that an independent third party be obtained to investigate the above irregularities and identify the staff members and/or procedures in the district’s reports, accounting and bill payment areas responsible for the problems. This effort would be used to ensure that the errors are not repeated in the future and to gather the facts required to, if necessary, terminate or reassign employees who did not know their job or did not do their job. If, in the future, a knowledgeable, professional staff cannot be assembled, then perhaps the district should recruit a chief with a Ph.D. in accounting and hope that he or she knows a little something about the fire service.

Currently the district is working very closely with Mr. Ocenosak to maintain a balanced budget, provide greater visibility and financial details to the current chief and members of the board, reinstate funds borrowed from other accounts that were used to balance the current budget and rebuild a viable contingency fund. That is not to say that the district is not facing future problems. Although the union has made concessions in terms of its members’ retirement and medical benefits, its current contract expires on the Dec. 31 and contains provisions for a potential 3 percent cost-of-living raise. There will be future savings as a function of Chief Lacher and two other chief officers retiring, however the three remaining battalion chiefs have been promoted to division chiefs with a 10 percent pay raise and have a contract that also expires at the end of this December. (It is important to note that the reduction in the number of chief officers and the 10 percent pay raise for the remaining chiefs was the union’s idea to save funds and avoid future union concessions and/or provide future rank and file pay raises.) In addition, the promoted chiefs informed the board during a recent board meeting that they, in the future, will also be represented by a union. We can only hope, for the district and the taxpayers’ sake, that the next contract negotiations will be conducted by union representatives who have matured and have learned to put “service before self” and “mission before money.”

The complaints by union members and others that Chief Lacher and the other chiefs should return the contractual raises they received in the last few years is interesting. I am not aware that the individuals complaining or any other employees have offered to return the 5 percent raises they were given in January of 2010 that was funded by the invisible contingency fund. I also wonder how far a sergeant or lieutenant in the military would get complaining about their pay as compared to that of the colonel or general?

Theodore Roosevelt once gave a speech that, in part, said, “It is not the critic who counts, but the one who is actually in the arena.” The chief and/or the commander who is actually “in the arena” often times has to walk that fine line between mission and morale. I have known a number of outstanding commanders during my military career that could pull it off. I would rank Chief Lacher as among the best of that group. It is unfortunate that the union leadership who pushed the letter of no-confidence and continue to take mean-spirited shots at Chief Lacher have such short memories. Chief Lacher consistently cared about the rank and file whether it was supporting pay raises to gain parity with other districts, making the current two-day-on-four-day-off work schedule function or obtaining  grants to outfit the troops with the latest and best safety equipment. There are many outstanding people who work for the district that are dedicated to their time-honored profession. These are the people who know the difference between a brotherhood of firefighters and a “union” brotherhood. I would hope that those of you among this number who will put on chief’s rank someday and others who think for themselves are mature enough to stop the pot shots and acknowledge Chief Lacher’s distinguished career with a heartfelt thanks for a job well done and a wish for a long and healthy retirement.

Tom Mahach is a retired Air Force colonel and previously served 12 years on the board for the El Dorado County Fire Protection District.

Sure, there’s anger, which I’m personally sharing, despite having a lot less vested than relatives of victims, or the victims themselves. But the confusion is overriding that for me, personally. What’s next? Why there? What does this mean? What should we do?

All these questions lead inevitably to me worrying more than anything, and fearful for any and all of my American brethren. The east coast can seem so far away most days, but Monday, it felt like it was next door. The explosions could have been anywhere in the United States and caused the same ripple. We are one nation, and when our fellow Americans are harmed, we all feel it.

Yesterday, like on Sept. 11, 2001, we were reminded that we are vulnerable. This is a foreign concept for Americans; as the “big brother” we rarely feel like we have the weakness to be hit. Constantly threatened and always a target, we stand strong in the face of “terror” and push through without fear day by day, witnessing horrible atrocities across the world on the news and shaking our heads with a “that would never happen here.”

Then it does, and everything changes. Terrorists hijack planes and we go to war with Iraq and Afghanistan. A local gunman fires inside a school full of children and we reevaluate our entire methodology on gun control. Now someone bombs innocent bystanders of a sporting event and more fallout is sure to occur.

But this isn’t a column about gun control. It’s not about immigration. This isn’t even about the argument for or against our wars on foreign soil. Whether those causing terror are foreign or domestic, of which they’ve been both lately, this column is about us common folk, and how we deal with what has happened.

This was just another reminder that we are not immune. We are not completely safe. As a father, husband and a human being, I now feel fear. Sure, my macho pride screams, “I’d like to catch the guy that did this and let my fists do some talking,” but my heart hurts for the victims, and I’m afraid of this world I’m raising my kids in today. An 8-year-old boy died on Monday. As a sports fan excited to start taking my children to events, this is a shocking revelation. For all intents and purposes, that could have been my kid.

As we scoff and chuckle about North Korea’s threats, there’s a good chance that we have people planted within our own country that want to do their neighbors harm. For whatever reason, they’ve made it their goal to hurt us, and that makes it a risk to walk out the front doors of our homes on any given day. Yes, there’s a better chance of being harmed in a car accident every single day (which I’ve obviously realized with last week’s column), but I at least feel like I have control over part of that situation. Here, I just feel helpless.

In times like this, faith is the only thing comforting. Whether it be faith in a god, a government or humanity to protect us, we must find a way to overcome our fears and keep this country going. It’s what has made us so great in the past and what will continue to make us great well into the future.

Actor Patton Oswalt yesterday summed it up best for me:

“I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, ‘Well, I’ve had it with humanity.’

“But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mess of broken sociopaths.

“But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out … This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in a while, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

“But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

“So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.’”

Patrick Ibarra is the managing editor of the Mountain Democrat. 

Consider the French drug maker Sanofi. It has a research lab in Toulouse that hasn’t made a major discovery in 20 years. It wants to close the plant as excess to its needs and offer the employees jobs at its labs in other French cities. It opened a lab in Boston, Mass., that is doing new drug research.

The reaction of the 600 lab scientists was to stage weekly “Thursdays of Anger” and confront management with the Maori war dance, the Haka. They also took the company to court. In March the court ruled that Sanofi acted contrary to French labor law by failing to clarify with unions how many jobs, and which type were at risk from its reorganization plans and it failed to have a plan to save the jobs.

The mayor of Toulouse wants a law that would prevent companies from laying off workers.

That’s France, but don’t laugh; this country could get there yet.

Recently the El Dorado Irrigation District reviewed the legislative restrictions under which it operates.

The presentation began by noting that in California private employees are all “at will.” They can be fired or let go at any time. Public employees, however, once they pass probation have civil service protection and the U.S. Supreme Court has said they have a “property right” to their jobs.

Furthermore, unionization, instituted by Gov. Jerry Brown in his first governorship in the 1970s, requires public agencies to negotiate with the union. In California 58.4 percent of the public sector is unionized while 8.9 percent of the private sector is unionized. The Meyers-Milias-Brown Act requires negotiating “all matters relating to employment conditions” and “wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment.” At EID about two-thirds of the employees are in the association, or union.

Despite these restrictions EID has managed to cut its employee roster by about 84.5 positions since 2008; another 6.5 positions are budgeted but unfilled. And as property tax revenue and hookup fees declined, EID employees have made substantial concessions, picking up a greater portion of their health care costs and their entire share of their pension payments five years before a legislative deadline.

EID employees have a pretty good pay scale, but 50 percent of the workforce are engineers, information technology professionals and water treatment and wastewater plant operators who are required to have specialized certificates. To attract and retain these key people, EID pays competitive wages and benefits. It also sponsors classes at the local community college that train new plant operators.

EID’s human resources officer, Jose Perez, said a recent recruitment for a distribution operator attracted 17 applications, but only five met the minimum qualifications. Of those five only three accepted interview offers. Two were asked back for a second interview and only one accepted the interview offer, ultimately declining the job offer because EID’s payscale meant a $9,000 cut for that applicant.

EID has 211 retirees as of June 2011, collecting an average pension of $22,500, with the average age being about 66.

General Manager Jim Abercrombie said that about 30 percent of the district’s employees will be eligible to retire in the next five years.

“Within this framework we have a very constructive relationship with our employees,” Perez said.

EID management and employees have been conservative with the ratepayers’ money. Unlike Sanofi, which is an international drug company, EID is stationary and limited to El Dorado County. It must innovate within its mandate to provide clean water and sophisticated sewer service. It has done that by eliminating its sewer plant lab and having a private contractor provide lab services. It replaced 24-hour staffing for the sewer plants with computerized remote control and used those extra people to operate more sewer line cleaning trucks to cut sewage spills down to nearly zero.

The public sector operates under different rules established by the state Legislature. So far the Legislature hasn’t Frenchified the public sector.

First he and the previous Democratic majority in Congress took $716 million from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Thank you, Nancy Pelosi, for finally letting us know what’s in the bill now that it was passed in 2010.

Now Obama wants to stop the sequester that reduces the increase in spending. He wants to pay for that by “reductions in benefit programs, such as Medicare,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s Janet Hook Thursday.

Thursday in a first look at the President’s proposed budget WSJ writers John D. McKinnon and Louise Radnofsky wrote, “The president also proposed significant changes to Medicare, including further moves towards means-testing of the program by charging well-to-do senior citizens higher premiums.”

Where does the president get these ideas from? Medicare is means tested. Medicare looks at a recipient’s tax return each year and adjusts the payment rate in accordance with a means-tested sliding scale. Check out socialsecurity.gov, Mr. President. Does this mean the president wants to confiscate even more money from the people who spent a lifetime paying Medicare out of their paychecks?

The New York Times summed up the figures this way: “The budget would require $57 billion in higher payments by Medicare beneficiaries, cut $306 billion in projected Medicare payments to health care providers …”

In other words he plans to screw seniors two ways: 1. Make them pay more for premiums, and 2. pay doctors and hospitals a whole lot less after already cutting payments by $716 billion. Make it an even trillion now and disincentivise doctors from treating Medicare patients.

And don’t think this is just more about having “millionaires and billionaires paying their fair share” and “giving everybody a fair shot.” It’s about taking more money from seniors to pay for his massive preschool plan that won’t accomplish anything. Low income people are going to contribute also. Obama’s budget proposes extracting money out of low-income people. It starts by cutting $19 billion from Medicaid and it proposes adding another 94 cents tax on a pack of cigarettes. Anyone who smokes now — mostly people in the East and Midwest  — practically has to take out a mortgage to pay for a carton of cigarettes.

And just in case you are a successful business person, entrepreneur or acquired a lot of stock working in Silicon Valley, or just saved a lot by driving old cars, and you happened to save more than $3 million in an Individual Retirement Account, Obama wants to tax your tax-free account. That looks like the Cyprus solution to us. All those millionaires are going to be singing, “Dont’ Cry for me Argentina,” if this notion ever gets through Congress.

And just to lure Republicans into his tax trap he proposes decreasing how the Consumer Price Index is calculated when raising Social Security checks. We hope they don’t fall for it. This is just another way to reach into seniors pockets and impoverish all of them through inflation.

Social Security is not a problem currently. Medicare trust fund “exhaustion” is projected for 2024, according to Summary of the 2012 Annual Reports of the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees. Social Security is good through 2033.

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan proposed for those 55 or younger to have the option when they reach age 65 of receiving a voucher to use to buy private insurance that is designed specifically for seniors. We think that option ought to be available for those on Medicare now. It would likely be cheaper than paying for Medicare and a Medicare supplemental insurance. It can be made more affordable by eliminating Obamacare and all its crazy rules being imposed on insurance companies.

That looks like a better deal than President Obama’s budget proposals, which all look like attacks on seniors.

I turned 60 earlier this year and have been pondering it ever since. I’ve tried to concentrate on the things that can help you feel better about turning 60. There’s the obvious one, of course, involving the alternative to aging. No one prefers that.

But there’s a sweeter one as well, and an example of it is looking up at me this very moment, as I type. It’s my little dog, Sadie, she of the caramel-colored coat and large, liquid eyes and floppy ears — all of which make her look like a pint-sized “Lady” from “Lady and the Tramp.”

How does a pet help as we ease into those Golden Years? By giving us a preview of the aging process, plus pointers on how best to deal with it.

We first acquired Sadie, a Pomeranian-Chihuahua cross, in 2007.  She was just a pup back then — an adorable baby. My real baby — daughter Sophie — was 12 at the time, and both of us (plus Sophie’s dad) loved doting on this impossibly cute little ball of fur. Sadie needed constant supervision, special food, and potty-training, not unlike a human infant.

Dogs lives zip by much faster than humans’ do, however. In an eyeblink, Sadie was a young adult dog, delighting us with her personality and her antics. She was enthusiasm incarnate, and up for anything the family wanted to do, including long walks.

Now she’s 6, which makes her roughly 40-something in human years. Middle-aged. She’s graying around her eyes and muzzle, and her joints sometimes ache.

She doesn’t waste a thought on that gray hair, however. Doesn’t bother her a bit! And whenever her joints suggest that she stay home instead of going on a walk, she just stays home.

She doesn’t regret it, or think, “Oh, I’m getting old!”

She just does what feels right in the moment and doesn’t worry about it.

Most of the time, she still feels like a pup, happy and playful. She maximizes the things she really likes to do, like hang out with her family, scarf her meals, chase her green ball, chew her chew-bones.

And, based on how she greets every single day, life is good for Sadie.

I suspect her admirable pattern will continue as she grows even older, and I’m taking notes, believe me. I’ve written before about how dogs can serve as role models for us, but this particular aspect of canine character hadn’t occurred to me before I started noticing the graying of that dear little face.

Though Sadie hasn’t yet reached my age in human-equivalent years, that will in fact happen very shortly. In 2016, we’ll both be 63 (or 9, in dog years).

A couple years after that, I’ll be retirement age — 65 — but she’ll have zoomed past me and landed at 77.

Then, two years later, in 2020, I’ll be 67, and she’ll be … 91.

The math is sobering. I console myself with the thought that small dogs often live longer than larger ones, and that the dog-human equivalency scale is just an approximation anyway. So maybe she won’t really be like a 90-year-old human just a few years from now.

I can’t say for sure. What I do know is that whatever her real biological age, she’ll be making the most of it. Aldous Huxley said — and I paraphrase — the secret of genius is to carry the spirit of a dog into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

Sadie “knows” that. She’ll be doing everything she’s capable of doing, and enjoying it. She’ll also be leaving behind everything she can’t do, and not giving it a second thought.

She will be living, with enthusiasm, her fullest life possible.

And, following her lead, I hope to be doing the same.

Jennifer Forsberg Meyer, a biweekly columnist with the Mountain Democrat, was 6 when she named her first dog “Lunky — because he lunks on your foot.”