Reflecting on the Tax Day Tea Parties and the gross government intrusion that most were protesting, made me think about one area of government intrusion that affects all of us, everyday.

The insanity that local government has imposed on drivers is making people nuts and causing more road problems than they solve. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the drastic changes on our roads are designed to solve anything: they are specifically designed to frustrate drivers to the point of finally acquiescing to leave the car at home and take public transit. It is a conspiracy – the city and county planners admit it.

Round-abouts, unnecessary traffic signals,, metered onramp signals, jutting curbs, carpool lanes: Traffic Calming projects are a farce. We are, in fact, experiencing more traffic congestion, worse air quality and are left with dangerous road conditions because of these changes. So what’s the real motive behind the innocuous sounding but fallacious “traffic calming” in Sacramento?

Traffic congestion increases fuel consumption and the release of harmful emissions. If motorists avoided idling their vehicle for just five minutes per day, millions of CO2 would be not enter the atmosphere. Yet city traffic planners keep drawing up and executing plans that create more traffic problems than they solve. Numerous traffic engineering studies in cities across the United States show that arbitrarily interrupting traffic with "nuisance" or "speed-breaker" stop signs, speed bumps and round-abouts, increase intentional violation and can actually increase the overall speed on the road where they are used. The devious plan to force us out of our cars is not working.

We should instead be working on traffic signal synchronization, removal of unwarranted traffic signals, stop signs and traffic undulations. Increasing traffic flow is far more beneficial to neighborhoods as well as safer for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists.

When unreasonable restrictions are continually imposed, drivers become careless and/or contemptuous about the need to obey the law. Greater air pollution and neighborhood noise is created due to braking, deceleration and acceleration of vehicles. This is fact and the city doesn’t want to talk about it. They have their own agenda.

According to the National Motorists Association (NMA), another public misconception is that speed limits reduce vehicular speed and improve public safety. In fact, speed limits posted lower than dictated by California Vehicle Code leads to a greater risk of driver, pedestrian, and cyclist accidents. A driver's speed is more realistically dictated by the roadway appearance and traffic conditions than by posted speed limits. Traffic studies clearly show that reducing speed limits has no influence on vehicular speed. Unrealistically low limits cause some drivers to obey them and others to ignore them, which disrupts uniform traffic flow and increases accidents. Pedestrian and cyclists injuries increase because of their difficulty in judging the varying speed of traffic. Downtown Sacramento is a case in point.

Safety on the road should come first and foremost, and not through the indiscriminate use of traffic control devices. Instead, city officials and neighborhood activists bombard us with messages of “traffic calming,” which is nothing more than a euphemism for traffic obstruction and diversion.

A significant portion of vehicular fuel consumption is wasted due to unwarranted traffic control. Traffic engineering studies have demonstrated that in cities with excessive numbers of traffic signals and stop signs, the fuel consumed by vehicles stopping and idling accounts for approximately 40% of all vehicular fuel consumption.

However, it is obvious that the decisions for traffic control devices are made in response to undue public pressure by special interests. People who purchase a home on a major thoroughfare in a neighborhood want reduced traffic. Neighbors fear for their safety when there is no traffic enforcement. Instead, they should be advocating for realistic traffic safety enforcement and efficient traffic flow on thoroughfares.

Then there are the extreme groups of bicycle advocates, which is what’s driving Sacramento’s “traffic calming” scheme. They absurdly and unrealistically advocate for no cars on the road, and use burdensome traffic control devices as their instrument. Traffic engineers know that what the extremists are asking is actually jeopardizing public safety, but on the surface, it looks as if they are fighting for bicyclists and pedestrians, and doing their part in the politically correct fight against global warming.

Traffic signals are only an asset to traffic control if installed at intersections that really warrant a signal; stop signs are intended to help drivers and pedestrians decide who has the right-of-way and not for speed control; crosswalks are only for the guidance and control of pedestrians and not to ensure safety; lower speed limits do not slow down traffic; speed bumps are more hazardous than helpful on public streets, especially on streets designated as emergency vehicle routes; and unnecessary traffic control devices cause pollution.

The rise in road rage and the increasing dilemma of red lights runners, is linked to the proliferation of needless traffic control devices and the nonsensical “traffic calming” techniques being used across the country. Practical, levelheaded traffic control and enforcement would solve many of these problems, rather than using punishment techniques against people who drive automobiles.

“Traffic calming” devices, such as speed bumps and traffic circles (round-abouts) are being installed in communities across the United States, without regard to their risks. Deflection devices built to slow passenger vehicles, create even greater delays to large emergency response vehicles. The longer wheel-base, stiff suspension, and high vehicle weight, requires drivers to slow almost to a stop to negotiate the devices safely. On our downtown streets, large delivery trucks cannot navigate a right turn around the newly installed jutting street corners, or the many round-abouts that sit in the middle of small intersections.

Stop-and-go traffic creates an environmental impact that takes a toll on health and quality-of-life. “Traffic calming” is the tool used by city officials to regulate and deliberately inconvenience, as well as hinder, the legitimate travel of motorists. As a community, we must put an end this obstruction and abuse.

Ricks fails to acknowledge that the military academies don't just prepare young men and women to become officers, they are trained to become future senior officers - leadership.  

If anyone thinks that a ROTC grad is comparable to a West Point or Annapolis graduate is a fool. According to several military who followed this column, they think he's full of hooey, as do I.

One fellow from Blackfive writes this: Now, I'll admit it's been a while but I'm sure the dynamic is pretty much the same now as it was when I was in. I was an ROTC grad. Anyone who believes I was as well prepared as a West Point grad to function at the same level as them doesn't know what they're talking about.

Now this is news!

Standing in front of the Capitol, I witnessed Capitol staffers leaning out office windows to snap photos of the event. One legislator and staffer hung a banner from a balcony, which only elicited yells from a few in the crowd for them to come down and be with the voters. Instead they went back inside. The banner was difficult to read and had a number on it... it turns out that the banner claimed that the legislature claims to have saved us more than $26 million in budget cuts. Who do they think they are kidding? Not one state employee has been cut.

As I handed out flags, one man told me that he had been holding one just like it but was forced to give it up when he went inside the capitol. He said the police even forced him to put it on the ground. He asked why but no one would tell him. What's wrong with a state capitol that requires citizens to throw away their flags?

Honk if you’re a radicalized rightwing extremist!

Guilty of rightwing extremist chatter

With the Day of Silence coming up on april 17th, Sacramento high schools seem to celebrate the day, and force all students to participate.

Instead of keeping my son home every year while he was in high school, we fought it.

Here is a Sacramento Union column I wrote about my experiences with the liberals at his high school. And read the information and research done by The Capitol Resource Institute http://www.capitolresource.org

Why Is The Majority Silenced?

By Katy Grimes

Every April for the past few years I have written to the Principal at C.K. McClatchy High School where my son attends, and registered my complaint about the school allowing and encouraging teacher and student participation in the pro-homosexual Day Of Silence.

From the Day of Silence website: The Day of Silence, a project of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in collaboration with the United States Student Association (USSA), is a student-led day of action where those who support making anti-LGBT bias unacceptable in schools take a day-long vow of silence to recognize and protest the discrimination and harassment -- in effect, the silencing -- experienced by LGBT students and their allies.

”Outside of class time”, the students present the following message:
I am speaking the Truth to break the silence. Silence isn't freedom. It's a constraint. Truth tolerates open discussion, because the Truth emerges when healthy discourse is allowed. By proclaiming the Truth in love, hurts will be halted, hearts will be healed, and lives will be saved.
 
Students who do not participate in the Day Of Silence are routinely called Homophobes, for talking and participating as they normally would during a school day. When “straight” students speak out about their frustration and displeasure at the disruption in the classrooms, they are called everything from Fascists to homophobes, and of course, Christian right-wing freaks. For most kids, their primary objection to the homosexual and transgender agenda at school, is the very concept of homosexuality. They are “grossed out” at the public displays of homosexuals embracing and the idea of homosexual sex. It’s that basic.

In April 2006, the Sacramento City Unified School District Board of Directors voted to adopt a Resolution on the Day Of Silence. The following is an inner-office memo from Arturo Flores, Susan Miller, Evan Lum and Joan Polster (Assistant Superintendents) to Sacramento City Unified School District Principals and school officials:
On April 2, 2006 the Board of Education is expected to approve a Resolution proclaiming Wednesday, April 26, 2006 as the Day of Silence, "to recognize the silencing of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning people due to discrimination everyday in our society."
In anticipation of the Day of Silence observance by students please notify staff of the anticipated support for Day of Silence and the need to develop lesson plans that will allow students observance.
Students who participate chose to be silent for an entire day to call attention to the event. They wear a rainbow ribbon on their shirts and carry a small paper that explains about the day to anyone who asks why they are not speaking.

What unspeakable nonsense (pun intended). These are educators?

The law already protects many groups of people from harassment, but it is only by dealing with individual cases and holding people accountable, that any form of harassment can actually be changed - one person at a time.

You cannot legislate ethics or morality or common sense or sensitivity. Forcing students to respect classmates is impractical and irrelevant. We send our students to school to become educated in academics (since parents are not educators), and for college preparedness. We also have a reasonable expectation that they will be exposed to career options, they will tempt fate, experience curiosity, feel out their intellectuality, learn about other people and the world around them, and learn about self-esteem and self-worth through earning it themselves. Legislating self-worth with a Board Resolution is naïve at best, but mostly impertinent, inappropriate and subversive.

Last April 2006, in addition to the SCUSD Board’s idiotic resolution, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 vote, decided schools can forbid students from wearing a shirt that demeans gay and lesbian students. The originating case was a Poway High School student in San Diego who wore a T-shirt to school calling homosexuality "shameful." The most recent example is the group of fifteen San Juan High School students suspended for wearing t-shirts that read: Sodomy is a sin.  They were suspended as reported by the director of high schools for the San Juan Unified School District for  “wearing shirts that are inappropriate for school because their message targets a group of students." Hmmm.

Gay and lesbian students "have the right to 'be secure and be let alone,'" wrote Judge Stephen Reinhardt, referencing a 1969 case, Tinker v. Des Moines. In that case, students in an Iowa school district were suspended after they wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War.

Vietnam War versus gay rights protests; I don’t see the connection. Nowhere in the Bill of Rights is there a guarantee of the “right to be secure” and “ be let alone” any more than the  “right to not be offended,” which seems to be so popular among do-gooders.

The Supreme Court however, ruled in favor of the students, stating that schools could restrict student expression only when it "materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others."

However, Reinhardt wrote that the Poway High student's T-shirt "was injurious to gay and lesbian students and interfered with their right to learn." So much for the Supreme Court being the highest court in the land.

Tobias Barrington Wolff, a law professor at UC Davis, commented on Reinhardt’s ruling saying that the stipulation is “problematic.” "I'm troubled by the notion that a student could perhaps come into school wearing a T-shirt that says Christian fundamentalism is shameful, and that might be OK, whereas a student wearing a 'Homosexuality is shameful' shirt is subject to discipline or suspension," he said.

During the 2004 Presidential election, students at C.K. McClatchy High School who wore “BUCK FUSH” t-shirts were not sent home. That qualifies as offensive, and vulgar and according to the Supreme Court, “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder.”

The Left-leaning bumbles on the Sacramento City Unified School District Board approved the Resolution acknowledging the Day of Silence in spite of the more than 500 angry parents who attended the board meeting in protest in April 2006. The Board ignored the pleas of parents and students, and approved the resolution because they wanted to.

The Day of Silence Resolution instructs school districts to notify staff so they can support the Day of Silence and develop lesson plans that will allow students observance. In other words, teachers are required to set aside their regularly-scheduled lesson plans and permit an entire school day to be hijacked by political activists with a controversial agenda.

There is no justification for school districts to be forced to give up an entire school day to cater to extreme activists. Day of Silence undermines education and forces children to focus on doubtful assertions that a group of people have been denied First Amendment protections because of their controversial sexual lifestyle. What about the San Juan High  students and their First Amendment protections?

The GLSEN (Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network) website offers a research tool to find out if your campus is a GLSEN-friendly campus.

For pro-gay groups such as (PFLAG) Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and GLSEN to claim they only promote acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality and cross-dressing, is nonsense. Both of the PFLAG and GLSEN websites promote gay-teen books, have gay-teen and man-boy pamphlets available and GLSEN even has the books for sale on their website. View their webstites; you decide what their agenda is.

Why is the pro-gay agenda even allowed in schools? When high schools in the Sacramento City Unified School District have a 48% - 50% graduation rate, shouldn’t we expect the educators and administrators to focus more closely on academics and less on social agendas? 50% of the senior class at C.K. McClatchy could not pass the California High School Exit Exam.

How does a tiny minority of the population have such a stranglehold on something as important as academic education? And why do the school districts allow such inflamatory diversions in education? Look no further than the Board Members of the Sacramento City Unified School District and their wanton agendas… The Day of Silence Resolution, their Anti-War Resolution, neither of which has anything to do with education.

Is it any wonder parents choose Charter Schools and homeschool? My son is about to graduate high school; and while I am relieved that we are closing a chapter on this constant battle for respectability and commonm sense, I am compelled to continue the fight for the other common sense parents out there who just want their kids to learn math, science and reading. Most parents don’t want homosexuality discussed in the classroom, muchless an entire school day or a week of awareness devoted to silence honoring the homosexual lifestyle.