In what may become a landmark legal decision involving the privacy of workers’ personnel files, a Los Angeles County judge ruled the state’s interest in protecting minors from pedophile priests trumped the laws safeguarding the confidentiality of employee records.
Former Santa Barbara News-Press editor Jerry Roberts is still stunned. A benefit party held in his honor last Saturday night at the Hope Ranch home of former county supervisor Susan Rose raised $135,000 to help him wage his legal battle against News-Press owner Wendy McCaw, his former boss and current nemesis.
OILS WELL THAT ENDS WELL: I’m flat-out jealous. Not only does Mike Brown, the CEO and reigning ¼ber boss of the sprawling county bureaucracy, manage to walk on water, he doesn’t even get his feet wet. It just ain’t fair.
MAKING LEMONADE: I was seriously minding my own business last Sunday afternoon when a perfect stranger invaded my space and took me to task for my perceived lack of compassion. I was at the public library waiting for my daughter, when a fellow patron-unbidden by me-sought to engage me in a tte- -tte on the subject of Paris Hilton.
Los Angeles has long had a Bike Kitchen. San Francisco has one too, not to mention San Diego and Davis. And if Ed France-a 25-year-old cycling enthusiast two years out of UCSB-has his way, Santa Barbara will soon join the California club of culinary velocipedes.
One of the chronic problems confronting downtown bike commuters is bicycle parking. There just aren’t enough bollards, streets signs, and bike racks to get the job done. And not many people want to leave their high-end bikes-or even their modestly priced machines-affixed to paint-scraping surfaces or exposed to the vagaries of the elements, not to mention would-be thieves.
What came billed as the biggest, most innovative, and certainly the most “sustainable” development ever proposed in the history of Santa Barbara County failed to make it out of the starting blocks on June 12, as the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission voted 4-1 against it in a decision that managed to be procedurally minor and momentous simultaneously.
The Angry Poodle takes on Judy Taege, the state government employee who authorized giving foster children to Sylvia Vasquez, who then put those children in cages. Taege won’t talk, but the Poodle wonders why she couldn’t listen either.
It’s getting easier being green.
Just days before flying back to the district to observe Memorial Day, Santa Barbara Congressmember Lois Capps (D) voted against a $120-billion war spending bill, $95 billion of which will actually be used to sustain U.S. military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan through September 30. Despite Capps’s opposition, the bill passed the House-as well as the Senate-by overwhelming margins late last Thursday and Friday.
