TALK RADIO MOVES DEBUNK 'LIBERAL MEDIA' MYTH

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 2014 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “TALK RADIO MOVES DEBUNK  'LIBERAL MEDIA' MYTH”

          Listening to radio host Rush Limbaugh and former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, you’d think all newspapers, radio and television stations are owned by the pinkest of leftists.

          But a series of moves by the nation’s largest owner of radio stations, Clear Channel (controlled by the Bain Capital firm once headed by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney), means the most-heard medium in California will now carry almost exclusively conservative material.

          That medium is talk radio, where until this month at least a couple of high-wattage liberal or “progressive” oriented stations in this state’s biggest metropolitan areas offered a semblance of competition to the far-right voices whose ratings are tops here even as California voters mostly register and vote Democratic.

          Here’s what Clear Channel, which owns all stations involved, is doing: It has taken liberal talkers including Stephanie Miller (daughter of Barry Goldwater running mate Bill Miller), Randi Rhodes and Bill Press off its KTLK 1150 AM station in Los Angeles and removed the liberal hosts who worked at KNEW 960 AM Oakland-San Francisco.

          Into their places go Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and other ultra-conservative hosts. All are syndicated by Clear Channel-owned Premiere Networks. KTLK has even been renamed The Patriot, KEIB AM 1150, taking its letters from the satiric, fake “Excellence in Broadcasting” network that originates in Limbaugh’s fertile imagination.

          Clear Channel made these moves for reasons of profit. The three conservatives bring far higher ratings than any liberals. All were already on the air in the same markets, while their most left-leaning colleagues will probably disappear from California’s publicly-owned airwaves.

          The sheer number of cars stuck in traffic in the two big metro areas at times when Clear Channel’s favored hosts appear guarantees higher advertising rates for the stations they’re now on.

          Liberal talk won’t quite completely disappear from California’s airwaves. The Pacifica Foundation’s stations KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angles and KPFA 94.1 FM Berkeley will continue operating as before, as will the 39 National Public Radio stations, which carry a decent share of liberal-leaning programs mostly underwritten by large corporations.

          But virtually all those stations broadcast on the FM band, where signals are much less powerful and far-reaching than many AM stations. Where FM radio signals often don’t make it even over low hills, the nighttime signal of Clear Channel’s KFI-AM Los Angeles can be heard throughout most of the West.

          Limbaugh says he happy with the shift. He should be; he’ll have many thousands more listeners than before to his constant commentary. “(Limbaugh) has built the ratings and revenue of hundreds of America’s most successful radio stations and is looking forward to doing the same at these new Clear Channel homes,” said his spokesman, Brian Glicklich.

          The other view is that the move leaves a major medium in extremely one-sided condition. “This leaves radio listeners completely unserved by anything but corporatist, right-wing radio over our publicly-owned airwaves,” griped liberal blogger Brad Friedman.

          Because Clear Channel controls so many stations, both in California and across the country, there’s not much listeners can do. A liberal boycott of stations like KEIB and KNEW would likely have low numbers and little impact, because Clear Channel already expected those listeners to leave those stations the moment it moved in the conservative hosts.

          The bottom line is that the old shibboleth of liberal media has just been debunked again: Two of the nation’s largest and most liberal metropolitan areas will have nothing but rightist rhetoric on their AM airwaves, which far outdraw whatever liberal talk might be available via FM. That’s conservative domination, not the other way around.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, the Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

RECORD DROUGHT SURE TO BRING CHANGES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2014 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “RECORD DROUGHT SURE TO BRING CHANGES”

          There is no longer any doubt about it: Even if California gets a bit of rain and snow over the next few weeks – and there is very little in forecasts for most of the state through Feb. 1 – we are in the midst of the worst drought since the mid-1970s.

          One good measure of this may be the levels of water in California reservoirs – a total of just under 7.7 million acre feet as of Jan. 5, compared with the typical average storage of about 12 million acre feet at this time of year. One acre foot represents about what a typical suburban family uses in a year. So California has only about 64 percent of its normal water supply on hand, one reason why Central Valley farms have been told to expect little flow from either the state Water Project or the federal Central Valley Project this year.

          Even worse, snow levels in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, source of most California water, are only about 20 percent of normal, providing little hope for refilling reservoirs as they are drawn down further, short of a spring deluge a la what the state experienced in 1978.

          It shapes up as an unmitigated disaster, one that some call as catastrophic as a major earthquake. This is a bigger problem than any wildfire, because it has the potential to cause multiple massive blazes. Some analyses indicate the ongoing drought was one major reason the Rim Fire near Yosemite National Park burned so widely last summer. The state had gotten a record-low 4.58 inches of precipitation from January to June of last year, and then a major July heat wave added to tinderbox conditions sustaining that wildfire, the 14^th most damaging in United States history.

          So far, this drought has produced no major changes in state policy and practices, although some cities are already telling restaurants to serve water only on request, a 1970s-era tactic. But if past is prologue, as historians often tell us, we can count on bigger changes.

          Here’s a little bit of disaster history: The Field Act, passed on the heels of the Long Beach Earthquake of 1933, changed forever the way schools all over California are constructed. After the 1971 San Fernando quake severely damaged the Olive View Medical Center, building standards changed radically for hospitals and nursing homes. The drought of 1975-77 produced major water conservation changes, among them wide government distribution of low-flow toilets. These now are standard in new homes.

          What might result from today’s drought, which saw California get less rain- and snowfall in 2013 than in any year since record-keeping began? Some politicians hope it will further the cause of Gov. Jerry Brown’s $25 billion “peripheral tunnels” project, which probably wouldn’t raise the amounts of water flowing south from the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, but could keep the flow steadier, thus smoothing out supplies for farms and homes in years like the last two.

          The problem with this is that not even drought can change the high cost of that project. But strict water conservation measures that may come later this year could produce some votes for a $10 billion-plus water bond in November’s election, no sure thing to pass even under these conditions.

          Most likely right now appears to be a much tougher set of rules regulating how much water farmers can draw from underground aquifers. Brown hinted strongly at this in his early-January preliminary budget. There are currently few such restrictions, and in dry years, farmers who have wells pump more water than normal.

          The preponderance of drier-than-usual years in the decade before conditions reached today’s point of actual drought caused more such pumping than usual, although no one can quantify it. One result has been land subsidence of as much as one foot per year in some areas. Driving some Central Valley highways today, motorists can see instruments and wellheads that once were on the surface perched 10 or more feet in the air.

          Subsidence, in turn, can lead to problems moving surface water in canals, something water agencies cannot long tolerate. Which makes it wise to expect regulation of ground water pumping, among other new drought-spurred actions.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, the Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

COMPELLING PRIORITIES FOR NEW LAWMAKING SESSION

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “COMPELLING PRIORITIES FOR NEW LAWMAKING SESSION”

          Like swallows returning to Capistrano, state legislators come back to Sacramento as each new year begins, ready to peck away at what they see as the state’s problems.

          Last year, that included giving drivers licenses of a sort to undocumented immigrants, imposing light regulations on hydraulic fracturing of oil shale, making it harder to convert guns into assault-style weapons, setting up an earthquake warning system and renewing California’s commitment to join Nevada in preserving Lake Tahoe.

          That left out issues like campaign finance openness and transparency, modernizing the early-1970s-era California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), making it easier to fire lousy or perverted schoolteachers and prison overcrowding. Among others.

          Because 2014 is an election year, with every member of the state Assembly and half the state Senate either termed out, moving on or up for reelection, the normal expectation would be for little or nothing of substance to be done. Legislators usually don’t like taking controversial votes near enough to an election for voters to remember them.

          But this election year may be different. For one thing, as the year begins there is not yet a substantial re-election challenger to Gov. Jerry Brown. No one who has expressed interest in running can come close to matching his stature, name recognition or bankroll. So he probably will have few electoral worries.

          Other statewide officials are pretty much in the same boat. Yes, Democratic Assembly Speaker John Perez will run for state controller, current Controller John Chiang will try to move to the state treasurer’s office and a trio of significant Democrats seeks to become secretary of state. But Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris appear safe from challenges from other Democrats and there are as yet no substantial-looking Republican challengers for any statewide office.

          Neither of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats is up for grabs. And only a few legislative and congressional districts are due to be strongly contested, which means the vast majority of incumbents in both major parties will have almost as relaxed a time as they did in 2013, a non-election year. The only real question is whether Democrats will keep the two-thirds legislative majorities they’ve had for parts of the last two years. There is no doubt they'll keep enjoying huge legislative majorities, even if those may not come up quite to the two-thirds level.

          So very few in Sacramento have much to worry about, which could lead to serious business this year.

          The single most important bill they could pass this time around is the so-called Disclose Act, which would force public disclosure of all major donors to candidates and initiative campaigns, many of whose donations have previously been hidden behind smokescreen campaign committees with misleading names.

          Prison overcrowding could also be solved legislatively. One thing lawmakers could do is make it easier to parole sick and elderly inmates who not only are twice as expensive to maintain as ordinary prisoners, but pose little or no threat to society if released. Murderers and rapists, of course, could be excluded.

          Mandatory sentencing rules could also be altered, giving judges more discretion to determine who is dangerous enough to merit confinement in prison and who could be paroled or somehow rehabilitated in a non-prison setting.

          Taken together, these moves would probably reduce the prison population enough to satisfy the demands of federal judges whose order to reduce prison occupancy by almost 10,000 more convicts was upheld for a second time last fall by the U.S. Supreme Court.

          Modernizing CEQA will be somewhat trickier, as reconciling a simplified and expedited building permit process with environmental protections is no simple thing.

          The same with teacher firings, where legislators in the last session passed a measure mandating that districts create a special panel each time administrators want to rid themselves of a teacher. Brown vetoed this one, mostly on grounds that it complicated matters without improving much. There’s room to fix the vetoed measure enough to win Brown’s approval.

          So there’s plenty for the lawmakers to do, as usual, and little for them to fear if they act.

         

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

UNDERSTANDING DRONE DECISION SIMPLE AS ABC

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
   “UNDERSTANDING DRONE DECISION SIMPLE AS ABC”

          It turns out that understanding the federal government’s late-December decision on where to site the testing of unmanned aircraft in U.S. skies is as simple as ABC: Anywhere but California.

    Other rationales will be offered for the fact that California, the state with more manufacturers of drone aircraft than any other and more experience testing new aircraft than the rest of America combined, will not get any of this new program.

          That’s a new manifestation of the “ABC.” attitude which previously resulted in the ludicrous choice of Buffalo, NY, for a major federal earthquake  study center, when Buffalo had not felt a quake in modern times. The government also tried to put the superconducting supercollider advanced physics facility in Austin, Texas, when both the Stanford Linear Accelerator Project and UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory would have provided far more Nobel Prize-winning talent to run it. No surprise, that program achieved nothing before it was cancelled.

    And the Defense Department has deactivated far more California military reserves in each round of base closings than in any other state.

          So it is that New York, New Jersey and Virginia, states with few wide-open air spaces, will get major pieces of this pie, along with Nevada, Alaska and North Dakota, which have plenty of open space, but little of the academic talent usually deployed in major pilot programs.

          States chosen as test sites lost no time bragging about their leg up toward winning many of the estimated 70,000 jobs the domestic unmanned aircraft industry is forecast to produce over the next 10 years.

          “Our state is now on the world map when it comes to this exciting technology,” said Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska, who will use his state’s win as he fights for political survival in that normally Republican state.

          And Nevada’s Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval called the selection of the University of Nevada at Reno as a test center a “historic moment” for his state. It surely didn’t hurt that the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, hails from Nevada.

          None of that explains why the Federal Aviation Administration passed on California, home of Edwards Air Force Base, where most new military aircraft – including drones – have long been tested. The state also hosts testing for military drone makers like AeroVironment of Monrovia, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of Poway, along with Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrup Grumman Corp., both in Palmdale.

          Weaknesses are obvious in the FAA’s selections. For one, given its size, California will see more drone aircraft deliveries of goods to homes and businesses than any other state if the technology becomes common, as – for example – Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos predicts.

          So skipping California makes no sense. Nor does the so-called explanation offered by FAA Administrator Michael Huerta, who said his agency considered factors like geographic diversity, availability of ground infrastructure and the volume of air traffic near test sites.

    “What we were really looking for was how do we select six that give us the broadest base of (these things) and different climates,” Huerta said.

    No state offers more of those items than California, with its varied landscape of deserts, cities, coastlines, mountains and forests. But it is out, even though by Huerta’s criteria it could easily quality to host the entire program.

    The good thing about the two California bids for parts of this program was that both got cooperation from Gov. Jerry Brown’s Office of Business and Economic Development and neither experienced the kinds of permitting hang-ups that have sometimes plagued businesses here.

          It is also comforting to know the military does not usually site its testing by political criteria, as was plainly the case with this civilian program. Which means military drone makers will almost certainly stay put, even as some of their affiliates experiment in the new test sites.

          The bottom line: Until California’s largest-in-the-nation congressional delegation of 55 men and women begins acting with unity to benefit the state and make sure it gets projects like this, other states will gang up to seize money and projects that rightfully belong here. But there are no signs of any such cooperation coming soon.

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    Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net