A Los Angeles Times article
about the sad and tragic story of the Barajas family living in South L.A., who
have been victims of gang violence in the area on multiple occasions, resonated
with me because it is a story I have heard far too many times.  I taught in Gardena, a school at the
very edge of South L.A., equally plagued with this kind of gang violence.  I have had several students who lost
parents and siblings because of gang violence. 

Every year, the school had to offer grief counseling because
either one of our own students had been shot and killed, or the victim was
someone who was known by a majority of our students.  Sometimes victims were gang members; often they were in the
way of a stray bullet.  One of my
own students, who in this case was a gang member, was also shot and
killed.  Ironically, this happened
the weekend after I kept him after class to talk to him about life choices; how
his choices pointed to death or jail. 
The people in this area live with a deep fear and yet an inability to
escape it.

Last week in Los Angeles, I testified before a joint hearing of the California Senate Select Committee on Obesity and Diabetes and the Senate Health Committee. The hearing was convened to explore the alleged link between consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and obesity and diabetes. There were several main points in my testimony:

First, energy balance is of paramount importance. All calories consumed must be balanced by all calories burned through all forms of physical activity in order to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.

Second, data from the USDA show that all calories in the food supply have increased over the last three decades and calories from added fats and oils increased 73 percent compared with a much smaller increase (14 percent) in calories from all added sugars. Furthermore, the data also show that added sugars availability has declined 10 percent in the last decade, yet obesity continued to rise.

Curious items appear in the two initiatives filed by the California Teachers Association to split the property tax roll taxing commercial property more than residential property. Both measures contain a pair of tax cuts as part of the packages that, overall, would result in massive tax increases.

One item would double the homeowner’s exemption and increase the renter’s credit. The second would create an exemption for business personal property tax.

When the $7,000 homeowner exemption was created, the exemption was equivalent to about one-quarter of the average California home’s value. However, after years of housing inflation the $7,000 exemption has little impact. It saves $70 off the homeowners’ property tax bill. Increasing the homeowner exemption to offset inflation driven value is a good idea.

However, the CTA measures merely increases the savings to $140. Such a small amount does little to offset inflation built into home costs.

If you like good news, it doesn’t look like California is going to have to call a special session on the budget before Jan. 10.

Come Jan. 11, though …

While the state’s current budget was balanced earlier this year with little more than boundless optimism and finger-crossed dreams of a better financial future, fiscal reality is about to strike, big time.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his money team have been putting out the word that this year’s budget already looks to be $5 billion to $7 billion short of estimates. And that doesn’t include the $7.4 billion shortfall already predicted for the 2010-11 budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

And how accurate are these new estimates?

Incredibly, the legislature was able to come together to pass a water package. Democrats and Republicans together. Farmers and environmentalists alike. North and South in agreement. Historic and implausible, yes. What it’s not… is done.

To accurately describe the package in its current state, we might include the following: nada, zero, zip. That is, unless we can get the voters to agree. Unfortunately,
California voters are frustrated and fed-up. Yet, these are the people who will be asked to trust the government with an $11.4 billion.

Is it good timing? No. Could there be worse timing? Probably not. But anyone plugged into California politics, policy, and history will tell you that it just might be the only time. When California has recovered from this recession (and we will) and has reformed the way we function, govern and balance our budget (and we will), California will still need water. Our children will need water. And their children will need water. This issue will not go away. It cannot be put off.

At the end of the 2008 fiscal year, the Treasury Department’s “Financial Report of the United States Government” issued a report that showed the present value of America’s unfunded liabilities had reached a staggering $56 trillion, or nearly four times our nation’s GDP.

In about a month, the 2009 Financial Report will be released and those in the know expect it to show our unfunded liabilities growing to over $60 trillion, effectively tripling in a decade.

Every day we delay rehabilitating our nation’s spending addiction, America sinks $11 billion deeper into an ocean of red ink.

What is the response from Congress to this out-of-control spending habit? Pass a massive new health care entitlement of course…what else?

My grandmother answered a knock on the front door and was asked by the stranger at the door if she was the mother of Harry Fox. She fainted.

It was early 1945. The Second World War raged and my grandmother thought the man at the door was the one she had dreamed about too many times. In her dreams, a man came to the door to inform her that her son, who has served in the United States Army since 1941, had been killed in action. The dream was so real that when the stranger said her son’s name she believed her premonition had come to pass.

Had she known her son’s whereabouts she would have been right to be afraid. Tech/4 Harry Fox was serving with General George Patton’s Third Army at the Battle of the Bulge.

In December 1944, Adolph Hitler attempted his last, desperate offensive thrust, sweeping tanks and infantry into the frozen, hilly, dense Ardennes woods. Hitler’s armies and Panzers massed in total secrecy and surprised the Americans in an attempt to disrupt the allied front, capture Antwerp, and break apart the Anglo-American alliance.

The transcripts of media interviews recorded by Attorney General Jerry Brown’s former spokesman Scott Gerber (and related emails) run to 93 pages. The PDF is here.

If you can only read one thing, check out the transcript of the interview of Brown by Beth Fouhy of the AP. This is the real Brown: cagey, canny, and candid. His media method, as I learned in reporting a story on Brown recently for the American Prospect, is to seize control of the interview by asking reporters as many questions as they ask him. The best adjective for this method is Socratic.

A bit of news: Brown makes plain in this AP interview, conducted in April, that he’s a candidate for governor. He hadn’t spoken that plainly at that point about his intentions (he’s still playing a “will I or won’t I?” game), though his candidacy has been widely considered a certainty.

He also talks more straightforwardly than he has in other interviews about his intentions for the state. Brown’s overarching view is, as a character famously said in the film The Candidate, “politics is bullshit.”

On this Veterans Day it is a time for all of us to reflect in gratitude upon the contributions our fellow citizens have made for us all when they donned the uniform of the United States military.

It is a time to visit, either in person or in our thoughts, the graves of the thousands of men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice so that the commitment to individual freedom—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and the country that has championed it from the start, would flourish in spite of every danger and opposition.

California is the home not only of a number of important military bases, but also of hundreds of thousands of veterans. While many of these of our fellow citizens have gone on to great personal success, many still also struggle with homelessness, with lingering physical and psychological trauma, with financial challenges.

Our state works hard to keep the promise we have collectively made, in the immortal words of President Abraham Lincoln, “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.”