The last two major terrorist bomb attacks on the Western World targeted the subway systems of London and Madrid. So it’s maddening that our Bay Area Rapid Transit railway will only be given about $300,000 of the $28.3 million in Homeland Security funds. That’s what the federal government deigns to allocate for the Bay Area this year.
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Hillsborough has traits that make it very different from the San Francisco housing market, according to Pacific Union real estate agent, Susan Ring. And as she markets a home on Knightwood Lane, she’s running into several of them. First difference: in San Francisco, where the view is king, higher position on a hillside means higher property values. But in Hillsborough, where the high points of the hills are located near Interstate 280 with its noise, and far away from the shops and schools further east, the lower stretches of the hillsides command the bigger price tags.
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In these stressful times, when international rancor and local partisanship seem to make honestly negotiated compromise an endangered species, it is both rare and refreshing to be able to point to the successful resolution of a small-scale but heated conflict here in the Bay Area. The encouraging outcome of a long-running feud between residents of the McDougal Park neighborhood of Belmont and the private Charles Armstrong School for dyslexic students provides a hopeful example for other Bay Area disputes.
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Though the polls say he’s back on top in the governor’s race, Arnold Schwarzenegger last year made a near-fatal mistake. He called a special election so that voters, not the Legislature, would approve his multi-initiative reform package. After a seemingly interminable campaign, the merits of his reforms no longer mattered to voters.They wanted legislators to do their jobs, resenting the clear implication the politicians were handing off the hard work to them. Time for San Francisco to give up on golf courses
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As a candidate for U.S. Senate from Virginia, former secretary of the Navy, best-selling novelist and Hollywood filmmaker James Webb initially garnered national attention because of who he is. Now his views and temperament are grabbing the spotlight. In an unusual move, Democratic senators John Kerry, Harry Reid, and and Charles Schumer, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, endorsed Webb over Harris Miller in the state’s primary election.
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So who’s formulating inter-national policy these days? Is it Gov. Schwarzenegger? Mayor Newsom? How about London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who, as part of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s California entourage this week, signed a pact with several other municipal potentates to do something about global warming?
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Fantasizing about their imminent takeover of Congress, the Democrats these last months have taken to throwing out all manner of ideas to see which ones stick. If you go to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Web site you’ll find that the House minority leader has posted, like pasta on the fridge door, much of the party strategists’ starchy guesswork.
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Dick Lamm, a former governor of Colorado, recently said that blacks and Hispanics are more victims of their own culture than of a discrimination that undeniably exists. You would have thought he called for a second Holocaust, considering the reaction his remarks elicited. The head of a Latino group called him "a hard core racist." Gary Hart, a former senator and presidential candidate, is quoted as going nearly as far, saying the fellow Democrat’s statements appeared to "condone sophisticated kinds of ... racial characterization." A state legislator accused Lamm of "demonizing."
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If the five-month-old lawsuit to block the California high school exit exam achieves the indirect result of forcing the state’s educational establishment to improve English and mathematics teaching for foreign-born and/or low-income students, then something productive would have come from it.
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On the whole, most of the people who live or work in the areas where this newspaper is circulated came out reasonably well during the triple-digit heat wave that sweltered California during the past two weeks. Unlike some 823,000 of our neighbors in the East Bay and South Bay, we did not suffer extended large-scale blackouts.
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URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/archive/19/19?page=459
