WHAT: Originally sold as a hurricane shelter, the center got nearly $7 million in local, state and federal funding.

WHY IT'S AN OUTRAGE: The center, which critics call a "Taj Mahal," is not listed by local authorities as a hurricane shelter. The facility is losing an estimated $72,000 per month, according to Tampa Bay's News 10.

WHERE TO VENT: Lori Hudson, information director for Hillsborough County at 813-307-8388.

WHAT: Used $104,000 from the National Institutes for Health to study "energy healing"

WHY IT'S AN OUTRAGE: The study was based in part on the work of a woman who described herself, according to the Chicago Tribune, as a "healer, clairvoyant and medicine woman."

WHERE TO VENT: Call the NIH Office of Communications at 301-496-5787

The Army kid who seemingly was responsible for one of the worst national security breaches in U.S. history is, to quote the poet Kris Kristofferson, “a walking contradiction,” who isn’t quite sure who or what he is.

Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused of delivering thousands of classified documents to an Internet creation called WikiLeaks, a self-styled crusader for truth and justice whose founder is up to his own neck in legal difficulties and may be of more interest to the American government than Manning.

In fact, there is indication that if the Justice Department could work out a deal with the kid to spare his life or a forever term in the brig to help bring down WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, it would do so.

Some of this reportedly became clear in a preliminary hearing to determine whether there is enough evidence to court-martial the 24-year-old soldier who is having trouble figuring out whether he is a man or a woman, at times apparently preferring the latest Paris creation to his uniform. And while he has been described as an accomplished intelligence analyst, one thing seems clear at least: He should never have been in a position to handle the nation’s secrets.

During the course of his enlistment, Manning revealed enough unsettling information about himself to his Army handlers to have been a chapter in a budding psychologist’s doctoral thesis. In fact, before he went off to Baghdad with his unit, he had told his immediate superior, a master sergeant, that he was having sexual identity problems and included a picture of himself in a dress.

Whatever damage was done, a major contributor has to be we of the press who leapt at the chance of receiving the documents from WikiLeaks. There were several major outlets chosen by Assange and his cohorts. As a defender of openness in public affairs most of my life and who deplores the continued classification of historic documents well beyond what should be accepted, that is not easy to say. But this case is not the Pentagon Papers, but about sending out current state-classified documents during war time, no matter how Manning tries to cloak his actions in nobility.

It would not be easy to sympathize with Manning should he be tried and found guilty. But one has to believe he was crying out for some help and was ignored.

Dan K. Thomasson is a former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.

On April 11, 2000, the Giants opened their new ballpark. Even before it opened, it was heralded as “the miracle on Third Street.” But there’s another miracle on Third Street, just a few blocks north of AT&T Park, that’s celebrating its 30th anniversary this month. It’s called the Moscone Center.

On Dec. 2, 1981, the Moscone Center opened to great fanfare. A few days later on Dec. 6, it welcomed its first convention group — the American Academy of Dermatologists.

That day in December had been a long time coming. Twenty years, in fact.

California Supreme Court rulings, numerous lawsuits and delays had all taken their toll before May 9, 1979, when the first of more than an eventual 1,800 construction workers descended into the excavated 11-acre site bounded by Third, Howard, Fourth and Folsom streets.

To secure approval to build the center, the Redevelopment Commission had agreed to build it underground to placate The City’s powerful “no growth” advocates. The architectural firm HOK created an innovative structure that could support a rooftop expansion (up to 100,000 tons) if voters approved additional funds.

And indeed they did, because they saw the important economic value that the center was bringing to The City.

The Esplanade Ballroom, which expanded the footprint of Moscone South, was added in 1991. The rooftop became the pedestal for an ice rink and bowling center, playground, carousel and the Children’s Creativity Museum. Moscone North opened in 1992, Moscone West was added in 2003 and we are now reviewing plans to expand east along Third Street.

Moscone opened with one of the largest pre-opening bookings of any convention center in the world. More than 250 trade shows and conventions — some 3 million delegates in all — had already reserved the center before it was even halfway completed.

Just think of the positive impact the Moscone Center and the subsequent expansions have made to our local economy in the past three decades.

Thirty years ago, the world’s computer industry was just in its infancy. In its first full year of operation, the Moscone Center served as an incubator for ideas that would help change our world: Graph Expo, American Federation of Information Processing Societies, Office Automation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Control Data Corporation, among others, according to SMG. SMG has operated the Moscone Center since it first opened, garnering a number of awards recently for its waste-reduction programs and advocacy of solar power.

And the American Academy of Dermatologists, the first group to meet in Moscone? They came back again and again and again: 1989, 1992, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006 and 2009, breaking attendance records in 2000, 2006 and 2009. We will welcome them back again in 2015. This year we are on pace to book 2 million room nights, representing a direct spend of $1,270,490,700 by the delegates occupying those rooms over the next few years.

I’d say that’s no small miracle.

Joe D’Alessandro is president and CEO of the San Francisco Travel Association. He also serves on the California Travel and Tourism Commission and U.S. Travel Association board.

Gov. Jerry Brown has formally proposed a $7-billion-a-year increase in sales and income taxes to close the state’s chronic budget deficit.

Whether it will be the only tax increase on the November ballot is uncertain. Several others are in the works, and if they reach the ballot as well, voter confusion could doom all. But assuming that Brown’s stands alone, how would the campaign shape up?

By next year, he presumably will have pulled the spending cut “triggers” built into the fiscal year 2011-12 budget because revenues are not meeting their extremely optimistic levels, which would mean schools, colleges and some social programs would be hit again.

Also, he and legislators would presumably have put together a 2012-13 budget that continues or even expands those cuts. Therefore, he and his union allies will argue that raising taxes — income taxes on the rich and sales taxes on everyone — is absolutely necessary to preserve vital programs, especially education.

As Brown said in his open letter announcing the tax campaign, “Schools have been hurt and state funding for our universities has been reduced by 25 percent. Support for the elderly and the disabled has fallen to where it was in 1983. Our courts suffered debilitating reductions.

“The stark truth is that without new tax revenues, we will have no other choice but to make deeper and more damaging cuts to schools, universities, public safety and our courts.”

The governor’s proposal takes the path of the least political resistance. Polls indicate that education is the most popular type of spending and that sales taxes and income taxes on the wealthy — the much-debated 1 percent — are the most popular ways of increasing major revenues.

The California Teachers Association and other unions are presumably ready to spend millions of dollars to trumpet Brown’s argument, but whether opponents can mount an effective campaign is very uncertain.

The state Republican Party is virtually broke, and major business groups and the very wealthy are unlikely to publicly oppose it, based on past tax-the-rich campaigns. But were the opposition to have the money, its pitch would go something like this:

Why should we pay more when we already have one of the nation’s highest tax burdens, when the Legislature is handing out raises to its staff, when politicians haven’t curbed rapidly increasing pension costs, when they’re wasting billions on prisons, when they’ve shunned a spending limit, when they’ve squandered money on a hapless bullet train project and unworkable computer systems, when they’re spending tens of millions on illegal immigrants’ college educations, and — most importantly — when the state is mired in recession and 2 million-plus are jobless?

A well-financed campaign along those lines could be devastating to Brown, et al.

Dan Walters’ Sacramento Bee columns on state politics are syndicated by the Scripps Howard News Service.

California’s population increased by 10 percent between 2000 and 2010 but the number of Californians living in poverty grew more than three times as fast, a new U.S. Census Bureau report reveals.

The data are found in a massive compilation of poverty statistics broken down by state, county and school district. And if the Census Bureau adopts a proposed new method gauging poverty, which takes into account regional and local costs of living and other factors, the state’s poverty rate may climb even higher.

In 2000, 4.3 million Californians were living in poverty but by 2010, the number had increased to 5.8 million, a 34.3 percent jump that reflected the serious recession that has gripped the state in recent years. The state’s overall rate climbed from 12.7 percent in 2000 to 15.8 percent in 2010.

Virtually every region of the state was affected, from the most affluent counties in the Bay Area to the poorest in interior agricultural areas.

San Mateo County had the state’s lowest poverty rate in 2000 at 5.1 percent and was still lowest in 2010, but had seen a rise to 7 percent. Imperial County, in the state’s southeastern corner, had the highest poverty rate in 2000 at 24.7 percent, nearly twice the state rate, but by 2010 had ceded that dubious title to Fresno’s 26.8 percent.

Even more dramatic contrasts in poverty rates are evident in the state’s school districts, a separate Census Bureau compilation reveals.

The bureau reported numbers of school children in poverty-stricken families for each school district, but did not calculate poverty rates. They can be extrapolated, however, from the data.

In Los Angeles Unified, by far the state’s largest school district, for instance, 211,407 of the district’s 773,749 school-age children are in poverty-stricken families for a 27.3 percent rate. At the other end of the size scale, Maple Creek Elementary in Humboldt County has just six kids and lists one in poverty.

The very lowest rates of school district poverty are found in the state’s most affluent communities, such as San Mateo County’s Hillsborough Unified at just 3.9 percent. Beverly Hills Unified, however, has a 14.1 percent poverty rate, nearly as high as the state as a whole. Not surprisingly, given the county rankings, one of the state’s highest rates of school district poverty is found in Fresno Unified at 44 percent. But in Clovis Unified, on Fresno’s affluent northeastern flank, it’s scarcely a third as much, 15.5 percent.

One of the more interesting contrasts is found in two small school districts which are next door to one another in the Census Bureau’s alphabetical listing, but about 160 miles apart on the map, Marin County’s Reed Union and Tehama County’s Reed’s Creek. The former has a poverty rate of 6.4 percent while the latter’s is 43.3 percent.

Dan Walters’ Sacramento Bee columns on state politics are syndicated by the Scripps Howard News Service.