Badlands Journal
Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice
Members of the San Joaquin Valley public would like to invite you to the first annual UC Pombozastan Pot Luck.
We’ve got the barrel; you bring the pork.
Public/private partnerships get preferential picnic tables behind gated, straw-bale walls, just like they did it at the old-time Condit Country extravaganzas.
Reading this morning’s Merced Sun-Star article, “Freeway work has chopped up roads,” we couldn’t help asking the obvious question: What were our leaders – local, state and federal elected officials, their staffs, the staffs of the city and county of Merced, business and financial leaders, large land owners and the newspaper – thinking?
So, we return to the elemental parental question, when the child returns injured or having damaged his family’s or someone else’s property: “What were you thinking?”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/741764.html
Last update - 23:50 23/07/2006
U.K. minister warns Israel of consequences of IDF assault
By The Associated Press
... Greek Orthodox Church warns Israel: 'Fear God's wrath'
The leader of Greece's Orthodox Church, Archbishop Christodoulos, accused Israel on Sunday of "sacrificing innocent civilians" in its bombardment of Lebanon.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/87455845-BD62-4D4B-9F16-559AF4BCF...
Lebanon oil spill crisis
Saturday 29 July 2006, 0:43 Makka Time, 21:43 GMT
The Lebanese coastline has been badly affected
The Lebanese government has appealed for help to clean up a huge oil spill along its coastline created after Israel bombed a power plant.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/07/31/the_coming_housing_crash.php
The Coming Housing Crash
Dean Baker July 31, 2006
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer.
The California Supreme Court yesterday decided the Marina, City of v. Board of Trustees (CSU) case in favor of Marina. The state high court found that the argument of California State University, Monterey Bay that state agencies have no obligation to pay for off-site mitigation, defined in environmental impact reports arising from their construction or expansion, was without merit.
In 1950, it has been repeated ad nausea; Los Angeles County produced more agricultural commodities than any county in the state. By the mid-1970s, it began to lead the nation as the most polluted air basin, despite its sea breezes. Today, in this grim "metric," it appears to have fallen behind both the San Joaquin Valley and Riverside/San Bernardino counties.
The San Joaquin Valley is the richest farmland in the western US. Today, Los Angeles is an asphalt jungle and its eastern neighboring counties are developing along the same dismal pattern.
Richard Byrd, who in 2004 sold a piece of property to the sheriff who was incarcerating him and the district attorney who was prosecuting him, recently filed a federal suit against the Atwater policeman who arrested and charged him, the sheriff, the DA, their real estate partners (which included Greg Hostetler, owner of Ranchwood Homes), his former attorney and Salvadori Realty for damages arising from violations of the federal civil rights and labor codes.
Only a fool or worse ignores moral values - in the end, they always take revenge. Uri Avnery, Is Beirut Burning? Counterpunch.com, July 26, 2006
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First, a word of appreciation for Wallace Mainplace Stadium Cinemas in Merced for showing Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" last week. Thanks, Mainplace, for showing the ecological awareness worthy of the city that boasts it is the "Gateway to Yosemite," where so much of the world conservation movement began.
Last week the Merced County Association of Governments decided to put Measure A, the transportation sales tax defeated in June, back on the ballot in November, despite a poll that indicated it might not do any better then than it did either in June or in 2002. The MCAG, composed of all five supervisors and one elected official for each of the six incorporated cities in the county, in their judgment overrode the poll results, declaring that the November election will draw more voters than the primary did. The Merced Sun-Star opined without attribution that: