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Why are Merced taxpayers footing the bill for a study "to analyze the economic impact of a recent ruling by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that listed thousands of acres of both city and county land as 'critical habitat'"?

Isn't that basically an economic issue for developers and landowners?

How would somebody living in central or south Merced expect to benefit by the City of Merced spending $23,000 on the study and the Board of Supervisors presumably putting in $20,000?

Better regional planning will help make the state's metro areas more attractive and livable, and that will allow them to grow and attract jobs in a cleaner, healthier setting.-- Sacremento Bee editorial, June 4, 2007

Endorsing a bill authored by state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee editorialized today that the Sacramento Area Council of Government's (SACOG) "blueprint" should be made statewide policy for urban areas.

On June 1, the Lathrop Sun-Post reported that Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced paid the Lathrop City Council a visit on May 29 to warn Lathropians that the Federal Emergency Management Agency "is in the process of redrawing flood-plain maps and casting more stringent levee requirements in a post-Hurricane Katrina, climate-changing world ..."

The San Jose Mercury News, under its former Knight-Ridder ownership, distinguished itself above all the mainstream press by its healthy skepticism about the trumped up reasons for invading Iraq during the preliminary Bush-Blair propaganda campaign. Later, it was sold to the McClatchy Company, which peddled it to MediaNews Group. The rapid descent of the once-great paper through the media-corporation shuffle apparently extinguished healthy skepticism.