All Americans can choose to be peacekeepers. Peacekeeping has no boundaries. It is every race, every family member, (and) every individual making good choices over and over again — a way of life.
I, as a mediator and arbitrator, am a “certified” peacekeeper, but anyone can choose to be a peacekeeper.
I am working to bring a peacekeeping program to the schools. I am elated that President Obama can accept the Nobel Peace Prize for all past, current and future, foreign and domestic peacekeepers, including our military and veterans. He ran an inclusive presidential campaign and championed the message of peace for the future. Ending a war responsibly is not as easy as starting a war.
Congratulations, President Obama … we peacekeepers, and all Americans, take pride in your work and efforts.
All comments are edited for length and content. Due to content or space limitations some comments may not be published. More than one comment from the same person during the same week will normally not be published. Please limit calls to two minutes or less.
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“The (Old Timers Week) King and Queen reception has been celebrated each year,” a woman said. “Unfortunately it just keeps deteriorating. This year it was over before it got started. Why don’t they cut out an area for a nice program?”
Another call was received this week concerning the (Madera South High) Stallion discount card. This week’s caller voiced a similar complaint about a certain Mexican Restaurant “not honoring the one that says they will take 15 percent off your total check. It does not say excluding anything, so they are not honoring the card. It is misleading.”
A woman called about the Madera High vs. Madera South High football game. “Madera High was not the home team. While I was at the game I received numerous complaints. Handicapped parking and handicapped transport problems. I think Madera South, which was hosting the game (as the home team) underestimated the crowd, requiring a long wait to get into the game. The snack bar was inadequate. They ran out of food, they didn’t have enough help, and the line was long. I just want people to know it wasn’t Madera High that put this event on. It was Madera South.”
A man said, “I wonder when the police are going to start enforcing the speed limit on Yosemite Avenue? Last Thursday, three kids almost got hit. A lot of screeching tires; traffic stopped suddenly.”
“I find it disturbing that a person can actually call and talk about billboards that are written in Spanish,” said a woman. “Does she not have anything better to do with her life? Does she not have a family she should be looking after? Maybe she should pick up a hobby. I myself am American, but I do come from Hispanic descent. Maybe she should take some sort of communication class or ethics class.”
Another woman said on the same subject, “If the business paid for having advertising that way it should be their right. This is America, as that person said.”
Several calls were received concerning the woman last week who said she “saw (columnist) Leon Emo passionately kissing his wife in public.”
A lady this week summed up the feeling of the calls. “This goes out to Leon’s stalker, because that is what you are. I didn’t like the way you called his wife his ‘so called gal,’ his wife for over 40 years. I’ve come to the conclusion you are jealous of him; a kiss to his wife in public shows that he loves her. You must be a lonely woman. Like I said before, if you go up to him, he might give you one of those famous hugs you’re always complaining about. He’s a nice man.”
“I have the best deal for the whole Valley,” said a woman. “It’s called a converter box. I know everyone was supposed to get one and I got one. Guess what? I get 23 stations and it doesn’t cost me a penny. Now I’d like to know if there is a TV guide for all the new stations they are adding.”
A man called about “downtown Madera” and a store “painted brown with windows painted black. It looks very nice. Things are changing in downtown Madera. And the intersection at Yosemite (Avenue) and Gateway (Drive) has had repaving and it is very nice.”
A man commented on “the former county supervisor (Harry Baker) being arrested for (alleged) child molestation. In the four years I have lived here, numerous government employees, law enforcement, and school officials have been arrested for having kiddy porn on their computers or other charges. It appears to me the Central Valley must breed sex offenders and perverts.”
A woman “just wanted to talk about the water situation. You hear a lot about the farmers and the people out on the west side, but I haven’t heard a lot about the homeowners throughout the county. I know tons and tons of people who have lost their wells and have had to move out of their homes because they can’t afford to have wells drilled. The well drillers are having a field day charging outrageous prices. I wish the supervisors or someone would address this issue.”
A concerned citizen called “about the layoffs by Madera County. After 20 years of service, my wife was laid off. They didn’t go by seniority. She had been loyal to the county. It is not fair with keeping people with less years of seniority. I’ve never heard of that situation. Lets put the people back to work.”
A man “had to take his hat off to Arnold Schwarzenegger. What a shrewd maneuver. You’ve got to remember he’s a real estate guy. He starts by putting a river right though the center of California. Can you imagine the real estate value increase, marinas, water sports, skiing? It would rejuvenate the Valley. It would make Central California the vacation capitol of the world.” The caller raised his voice and concluded, “Arnold you’re my hero. It’s a real estate revolution.”
A man called about a specific business in Madera and said the owner was of a certain Christian denomination. He went on to say “he’s ripping off his employees with bounced checks and ripping off people here in Madera by overcharging for installation and services. He is very unfair, especially if you’re trying to be a Christian to top it off.”
“I read a letter to the editor from one of your writers in today’s (Monday’s) paper,” said a man. “He should reserve his comments to his column. You don’t see your other columnists like Nix and Emo using the letters to the editor to voice their opinions. The letters page should be left for the readers, not your own writers.”
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Thank you for your comments. Remember, the Red Line is open for your messages 24 hours a day by calling 674-4478, or by visiting maderatribuneredline.com.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to give his wife, Maria Shriver, a good talking-to for having been photographed using her hand-held cellphone while driving.
The photographs were posted on the celebrity Web site TMZ.com.
“Thanks for bringing her violations to my attention. There’s going to be swift action,” the governor wrote TMZ founder Harvey Levin.
The reason I say Shriver will get a good talking to from the governor is that there isn’t much else he can do. He certainly can’t take the cell phone away from her. If he did that, it might get him sent back to Austria — by Shriver.
If he stepped on the cell phone purely by accident, he would have to buy her a new one and pay the bill himself.
And if she keeps talking on her hand-held cell phone and driving, what else can he do?
That cell phone law is just a tough one to enforce.
If you had a camera, you could stand on any street corner in Madera, take photos of violators, and soon you would have to go out and buy another camera because the one you started with would be worn out.
But even with all those violations, you don’t hear about many people getting pulled over. And you shouldn’t blame the police for that. They have more serious things to do, especially since the Legislature made the law so wimpy.
If the Legislature had really wanted to make the law work, it would have mandated a $10,000 fine, confiscation of the vehicle and permanent loss of the offender’s driver’s license as a fine for the first offense. But that didn’t happen.
Driving while holding a cell phone, like similar habits, such as eating while driving, is distracted driving, and it is dangerous.
Especially if you are the governor’s wife who does it, gets photographed, and the photos are put on TMZ.com.
Schools, banks and government offices were closed yesterday for Columbus Day, which honors the Italian explorer who, sailing for Spain, landed in the Bahamas and began the European westward migration.
Some folks believe we shouldn’t memorialize Columbus or his voyage because of the negative effects it had on the indigenous populations, and if one is a native American that must seem especially true.
But if the “voyage that started it all” hadn’t been made by Columbus, it would have been made by somebody else. The civilizations of Europe had advanced their seamanship to the point that a voyage west not only was possible, but also probable.
The driving force behind the European urge to sail west was the idea that profitable maritime trade could be established with Asia.
Columbus had used information available at the time to calculate how far west he would have to sail. He surmised that a ship well provisioned could make the voyage before it ran out of food and fresh water for its crew.
He was wrong on two counts. First, he had to sail farther than anticipated before reaching land. Second, the land would not be Asia, but an entirely new place — for Europeans. He had no idea he would wade ashore on the beach of a hemisphere peopled by tribes whose populations, taken together from the Arctic to Cape Horn, probably outnumbered the populations of all of Europe.
Columbus was vastly outnumbered. But the one tribe that met him, the Taino, made no effort to kill the sailors or burn their ships. The Taino, often victimized by other Caribbean tribes, were awed by the Europeans, their wea-ponry and their tools. They were soon in the thrall of the Europeans, much to their eventual dismay.
Columbus was brash, brave and lucky. But he made the first recorded voyage to the Western Hemisphere in 500 years — a great achievement.
When I was a youngster, my parents always had something called hospital insurance. It was relatively cheap, and it covered all of us — mom, dad, sister and myself. And dad, who was self employed, paid for the whole premium himself.
Hospital insurance did just what it was supposed to do. It paid for care if you had to go to the hospital for an operation, or if you were ill enough to be hospitalized.
It did not pay for your doctor’s fees, or for visits you might make to the doctor’s office. You paid for those yourself.
When I went off to college, I discovered that I could buy hospital insurance from the college, and my parents said I should so that they could save money by cancelling me from their policy. So, I did.
There I was, a college kid, with hardly any money, and I had hospital insurance. I could afford it, and it was what I needed. If I had to go to the doctor, I had my choice. I could go to the college’s student clinic, which was included in my tuition, and was exceptionally cheap, or I could go to a doctor in town and pay for it myself.
This was an excellent system, but it began to change when something called “health insurance” came along. Not only would health insurance pay for hospital stays, it also would pay for visits to the doctor’s office, and for drugs that went with it.
People who had health insurance suddenly discovered they needed to go to the doctor a lot more often than before because the health insurance would pay for it — and as often as not, their employers would be paying the health insurance premiums.
In other words, they got spoiled. Which may be part of why we have a health-care debate today.
Maybe if we went back to the hospital insurance system, we’d be lots smarter as health-care consumers today.
All right, I admit I could afford to lose a few pounds, and I fully intend to once the holidays are over. All those big church dinners, all that candy, all those cookies, and all those fund-raising feeds together between now and Christmas are too much to resist. Maybe I’ll just try to hold the line on my weight until January, when I’ll start eating less and exercising more.
At any rate, I’m glad I don’t work for the State of North Carolina, where employees with Body Mass Indexes of more than 40 are going to be assessed “fat fines.”
I looked up my BMI, and without my shoes, or any clothes, and completely dried off from the shower, I have a body mass index of 24.7. If my BMI were just two tenths higher, I would be overweight.
If your body mass index is over 30 — well, you’re obese. And if it’s over 40, you’re no longer fine free if you work for the State of North Carolina.
The people who thought this up are buying into the idea that obesity is a health risk by itself, and also one that contributes to other problems, such as heart disease and diabetes. So, what they’re thinking is that they might as well fine people who are dumb enough to put on too much weight.
But let’s take a look at that logic. First, most people who are obese don’t want to be as heavy as they are. As a group, they willingly spend billions on schemes to help them lose weight, schemes that are far less effective on weight problems than aspirins are at treating headaches. Second, would we fine people who get colds, or who have allergies, or who suffer from depression?
If you did that, you’d have to fine just about everybody in the country.
How about fining people for being goofy, and starting with the North Carolina bureaucrats.
One year ago on Oct. 11, my husband of 35 years, Brent Harlow, was killed in a motorcycle accident. The week before, he was with me at Stanford Hospital to see if I was a candidate for a heart transplant.
Four years earlier, I had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and had been battling it with medications, frequent infusions and treatments at the Fresno Heart Hospital.
I was never hospitalized for it until around June of last year. From then on there were many 911 calls and emergency visits to the hospital. It seemed nothing was working for me and I was getting worse day by day.
After seven days of testing at Stanford, the results were very devastating. We were told I was too unhealthy to have a heart transplant and they couldn’t even put me on the list for one.
At that time I was retaining at least 35 pounds of fluid from my waist to my feet, and I was not able to bend my knees or my ankles. It was very difficult to breath. I was in need of 24/7 care.
We drove home feeling hopeless and discouraged, the same feelings we went through 16 years earlier when we were at Stanford for my bone marrow transplant from my battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer. Death was again staring us in the face. Praise the Lord, I’m a survivor.
The next weekend Brent was killed in a motorcycle accident up in Oakhurst. The doctors, family and friends did not think I would survive this tragic news because of my health.
We were companions going on 40 years.
In July, Brent had just published his first book and he named it “Companions, God’s Inspired Victory Over Cancer.”
He shared about how all of us will at some time have a crisis, or what the Bible calls an evil day. This could be a sudden illness, auto accident or complete loss of direction for our lives. When this happens, how do we get back on course, how do we protect our family, home and finances? It is by day-to-day direction of the Lord.
This book will help you see the failures, then the successes of one man’s battle to save his wife’s life. You will hear God’s voice speaking to you as you read, and then acquire the capability to hear His voice for yourself.
Many people in the community have already purchased his book and have been inspired by it. For those who haven’t, I’d like to give you an opportunity to get a copy for yourself or for someone going through a struggle in their life.
You can go to www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore or locally at Valley West Christian Center.
Little did I know that Brent’s inspired writing in his book would be the words I needed to hear to make it through the crisis of his death.
Soon after his death I started doing better and my blood work started to improve with each doctor visit. The fluid was coming off me without infusions. In two months, I lost 35 pounds of fluid. I was able to bend my legs and walk without help. I no longer needed 24/7 care. Before Christmas, I started driving again. Then, in January, a trip back to Stanford for another echogram revealed my heart had improved so much that I no longer needed a heart transplant.
Our prayers for complete healing were answered. The doctors were speechless, and knew it was not medically possible to improve that much in only two months … so there’s my miracle!
In “Revelations,” the Bible tells us that we are overcomers by the blood of the lamb (Jesus) and the word of our testimony.
In April of this year, I was able to go back to work.
Each day I am thankful to be healthy and alive so I can enjoy my children and eight grandchildren.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my testimony with you.
For some reason the last couple of days, I’ve been wanting to say “That’s stupid.”
Mrs. Doud is sometimes inclined to say that if she sees me doing something that is going to get me into trouble.
For example, the other morning, I turned the sprinkler system off because it looked to me like the plants were getting too much water. That night, Mrs. Doud accused me of trying to murder our yard.
She, of course, is right. She’s the gardener in the house. Things grow for her. They just keel over for me.
But getting back to the last couple of days — not the sprinklers — I have been wanting to say “that’s stupid” to those NASA employees who spent $79 million sending a satellite to the moon and then crashing it.
They called it “good science,” but I think it amounts to a bunch of pranksters with access to expensive toys they didn’t have to pay for just wanting to see what would happen if they flew something into the moon.
The “science” was to see whether there were any grains of ice up there, hidden among the grains of dirt, in an area where it is more than 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
One of the scientists said if such grains of ice could be found it would make it easier to set up a base on the moon. Come on. Think of how much dirt you’d have to heat up just to make a little mud.
All the water we need is right here on earth. Spending that $79 million on oceanographic research, for example, may have led to new discoveries about our oceans, lakes or rivers. The bottoms of the seas remain as mysterious as the dirt on the moon. But the potential benefits of solving some of the seas’ mysteries far outweigh anything we might have learned crashing another rocket into lunar dirt, where you’d never install sprinklers, anyway.
Music Video: “All the Right Moves” by One Republic
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Most people probably couldn’t care less that Madera has a newly updated General Plan (it was approved by the Madera City Council on Wednesday), and that is understandable. Written largely in bureaucratese and about an inch thick, the plan isn’t exactly Dan Brown’s next novel. You will not see it on any best-seller lists.
But it is important to the life of every person who lives in Madera now and who will live here in the foreseeable future. It tries to paint a picture, in text, photos and maps, of how Maderans are likely to live over the next decade and even into 2025.
The updated General Plan is the latest in a series of steps that will lead us from the present day to the year 2025 — as in Vision 2025, the community-wide planning effort that began four years ago to help the city set its sights on becoming a better place in which to live, work and do business.
The plan is a land-use document, showing what is supposed to go where, and what is not supposed to go in certain places. It is a guide for the zoning decisions of the future.
It also is a philosophical statement, which says the city should stop grabbing valuable agricultural land for growth until it has filled in the lands already available for growth of housing and businesses.
It says that people should feel safe, and that their city should be clean and green — clean not only of trash, but also of blight such as graffiti.
Madera City Council members and planning commissioners began working on this concept for the future in 2002. At the same time, City Administrator David Tooley and his staff were envisioning a better Madera of the future, a Madera where people would take joy in living and find economic opportunity, while all the time feeling safe in their persons and secure in their financial investments. Vision 2025 was the outgrowth of that thinking.
Now, this General Plan, delivered after more than a year of hard work, will help achieve all that.
The driving assumption behind the move to change the way health care is financed in the United States is that everyone is entitled to as much health care as he or she needs without having to pay for it.
For example, you could go get your flu shot for free, or you could get your appendix taken out if you were having an attack of appendicitis. If you had a heart attack or cancer, you could get treated for it. And it would all be free.
Of course, a lot of us know that “free” simply means somebody else is paying for it.
That is pretty much the way health care is largely financed now. If you have health insurance, you are part of an insurance pool which shares the risk among participants. That way, if you have to be treated for a serious disease, such as cancer, you will receive treatment and it will be paid from the insurance pool to which you belong. The cost of the treatment is likely to be far more than you or your employer have paid into the pool, but since not every member of the pool gets seriously ill, enough money is in reserve to treat those who do.
You have to be in the pool or it won’t work for you.
That’s why President Obama favors a rule which would require all Americans to buy health insurance, and fine them heavily if they don’t.
The question I have is: if you are going to have that requirement, why not just put it in place now and be done with the rest of the debate? We do it with vehicle insurance. Why not health insurance?
It would expand the pools, make sure more people are covered and might even save a little money. That’s how the requirement for vehicle insurance works.
But that would fly in the face of the driving assumption, which, again, is that people “deserve” “free” health care. Perhaps that assumption should be re-examined, or at least clarified.
