By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

I’ve been reading about the new dinosaur found in China that may have had orange and yellow feathers. The scientists who say this was the dinosaur’s color actually haven’t seen any feathers on the Sinosauropteryx, which was found in China. Rather, they have stared at it through an electron microscope, and say they see signs of the colors.

This dinosaur was about three feet long, and if it did, indeed, have feathers, it would have looked like a big long-tailed duck with sharp teeth.

I’m glad those dinosaurs don’t exist any more. Our cat likes to stalk the blue jay that lives in our back yard, and I would imagine she would get a kick out of stalking an even bigger bird.

Momentarily, that is, until the bird had the cat for lunch.

When our cat stalks the blue jay, she hunkers down and tries to sneak around behind the bird, moving among bushes in the flower beds so the bird can’t see her. Or at least that is what she thinks. The bird has its eye on the cat at all times, but appears to be looking somewhere else. Birds have eyes in the sides of their heads, and only have to turn their heads a little bit to see big, overfed black-and-white cats lumbering up behind them like cement trucks.

Just as the cat springs, the bird flits away — laughing, I would imagine. The dinosaur would not laugh, though. It would be burping, having just had a nice cat hors d’ouerve.

Not all scientists agree that the 125 million-year-old Sinosauropteryx had feathers. The feather idea has taken hold over the past few years, but a lot of scientists still think the dinos wore leather, sort of like gangsters, and don’t resemble birds in any way.

I wonder if scientists of the future will think cats had feathers. If cats did have feathers, it would make it easier for them to sneak up on birds, don’t you think?

The Madera County Historical Museum was beautifully decorated in a cowboy theme during the holiday season. The hours of preparation and staging made for a memorable open house to all who visited.

Every small, intricate detail was amazing, showcasing not only the Western cowboy but the talent of the dedicated members. The participation of Madera students and teachers was especially fun since we knew many of them — what a terrific, outstanding job they did.

For an added treat we not only enjoyed the delicious cookies and cider, but we ran into several friends and talked of old times.

Thank you to everyone who worked faithfully to once again make us proud of the community in which we live.

Ken and Kay McCullough,
Madera

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

President Obama’s first State of the Union address Wednesday night saw him moving to the center, going after money from Wall Street Bankers, vowing to help small businesses create jobs and vowing to foster education reform through ideas such as charter schools and rewarding teaching excellence.

These suggestions won’t earn him many friends on the right — or the left.

On the whole, he was apologetic. “Change (his campaign theme) has not come fast enough,” Obama acknowledged. But then he scolded the politician-packed House chamber for a lack of progress, saying, “As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as the debates may be, it’s time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth.”

Later he said to the Republicans present, “Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.”

The president admitted that his “health insurance reform” plan likely would not pass in its present form, but he didn’t exactly throw it under a bus, either. He detailed the problems America continues to have with health care financing, and implored Congress not to forget the people experiencing those problems.

By focusing on the unemployment rate — one in 10 Americans can’t find a job — Obama hoped to regain the attention of those who voted for him, and to give the Republicans a chance to say yes to something they claim to back.

Obama’s plan to help small businesses get loans seemed heartening, but a little confusing. He said the $30 billion he hoped to make available to community banks — whatever those are — would come from unused money that had been voted to aid big banks. Then, he said, a tax on big banks (the ones too big to fail) would repay the government for that money. Huh?

Thank you to all who helped the Norman Gould Education Center families during this past Christmas season …

Madera County is blessed with many generous individuals. As in the past years, we have had an overwhelming response in helping make Christmas a little brighter for families from the center. We gave to 56 families this year, providing them with gifts of clothing, household items, blankets, toys, food and food certificates amounting to $1,050. These families all had children with special needs who attended the Norman Gould Center. The families convey their heartfelt thanks to all who gave so generously.

In addition to helping these families, the Madera County Employees’ Giving Tree gave $500 to the Madera Christmas Baskets. This money was raised through bake sales during the year, and we thank our retiree volunteers — Hermine Reiring, Velma and David Wammack, Jessie Hench, and Jackie Emo for their time and help, and all county employees who gave and purchased baked goods.

Thank you to the following individuals, churches, organizations, and Madera County departments:

Administration, Agriculture Commissioner, Agricultural Extension, Assessor, Board of Supervisors and Board Clerk, Child Support Services, Corrections, County Clerk-Recorder, Human Resources, Information Technology, Library, Probation, Juvenile Hall, Boot Camp,

RMA departments: Administration, Engineering, Environmental Health, Planning, Road Department, Social Services.

Individuals: Ryan Ely, lla Schoettler Family, Tim Schoettler, Terri Skinner, Charlotte Wayne, Marsha Williams.

Churches and organizations: Harvest Community Church Group, United Methodist Church, Bowling Team (Jutta Webb), Madera Community Hospital, Madera South High School Fashion Club, Midland Tractor, PEO, Rebekah Lodge #159, TOPS, Volunteer Police.

4-H Clubs: Berenda, Chowchilla, Dixieland, Howard, Sierra Shadow.
Madera Courts: Civil, Court Administration, Court Services, Criminal, Family, Juvenile, Traffic.

Madera County Office of Education.

Thank you once again for your kindness and generosity. Best wishes for a blessed and happy 2010.

Madera County Employees’ Giving Tree, Rita Wilson and Douglas Nelson

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

Republicans are still patting themselves on the back over the election of Sen. Scott Brown, and you can’t blame them. Good news, for them, is hard to come by these days.

Many theories have been advanced as to why Brown won. They are couched in terms like “the voters are just afraid of the health-care bill,” and “Obama’s magic has worn off.” Both those theories might seem rational, but the actual reason is probably less esoteric. What if the normally Democrat Bean-Staters just didn’t care for state Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democrat?

Not that Brown didn’t run a good campaign. He ran a great campaign, with the help of Karl Rove, the GOP political genius who helped elect George W. Bush, and now seems to be a principal Republican thought leader.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal before the election, Rove said, “If Massachusetts puts Brown in, it’s a message of ‘that’s enough. Let’s stop the giveaways and let’s get jobs going.’”

That is what he’d like the message to be, at any rate.

Aside from the Brown win, though, the GOP in Congress still is viewed by many as the party of obstruction rather than construction.

To get Congress back, the Republicans are going to have to come up with another Contract With America, such as that being proposed by former Rep. Newt Gingrich, who was largely responsible for the first Contract With America, which was credited with putting the GOP back in power in 1994.

In this new “contract,” Gingrich says the Republicans need to be for something in the 2010 election, and not just against the Democrats and their policies. “Part of the power of a contract strategy is that it forces Republicans to quit being an opposition party and enables them to become an alternative party,” he said.

And he is right. Republicans need to learn to say more than just “no.”

I suppose I am writing this letter on behalf of my fellow Americans. I honestly mean no harm to anyone, I am a Mexican myself, and I also speak Spanish. My goal is to speak to the people for the people and for the way I see things.

Illegal, first of all, means not sanctioned by official rules, so why do we continue to give these illegal people welfare? The more kids, the more welfare we give. This is welfare fraud, plain and simple. They don’t need I.D., but we do. They don’t even have to speak our language. It’s all our own fault.

The Constitution says that anyone born on United States soil is a citizen, but it also states don’t break the law. The law should come first. They have disrespected our system, and we continue to let it happen. Our schools are overcrowded because of all these illegal kids.

These people break the law and come here, and if they have a kid they are rewarded with money, food stamps, and an apartment.

WIC (Women, Infants and Children) is a joke. All you see with WIC are illegal aliens.

If Obama can’t cut the mustard, we need somebody else who will, and that’s the bottom line.

Farm workers I respect because they are trying to do something for us. You have people that went to school, learned English, paid and became legal, then you have most that want legalization to be handed to them for nothing.

Jan Soto,
Madera

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

A lot of liberals are upset by the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United Vs. Federal Election Commission. That was the decision which said, in effect, that corporations (of any type) have the same rights as individuals when it comes to waging political campaigns. The liberals, including Rep. Barney Frank, are talking about using draconian regulations to quell corporate free speech since they now don’t have any other legal way.

Liberals — certainly not all, but some — believe that “corporation” is a dirty word. But let’s see. Would you believe that the American Civil Liberties Union is a corporation? Now, if the ACLU wishes to declare its points of view in a political campaign instead of merely suing people, it can. How about the AFL-CIO? That is a corporation, as well as a union. Churches are made up of all kinds of corporations.

Of course, most corporations are of the commercial variety, but they consist largely of stockholders who don’t hold shares for political purposes. Woe be to the corporate bosses who spend too much on electioneering.

Since the decision is considered a conservative win, liberals are afraid conservative money will suddenly take over the election process, but one wonders where that idea came from. Conservatives don’t necessarily believe in blowing money, and if they do blow it, the results aren’t always what they wanted. A lot of conservatives, for example, who spent a lot of money trying to get elected in California haven’t been successful.

A lot of people, liberals and conservatives alike, believe America has become an idiocracy where voters are swayed mainly by the amount of money spent on ads for candidates, that they choose their elected officials the way they choose their toilet paper.

That sometimes may be the case, but this decision won’t make it any more prevalent.

On behalf of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Local Host Committee, I thank the Madera Tribune for its fantastic coverage of the MLK celebration held Sunday at MLK Middle School. Special recognition and thanks to Wendy Alexander, who once again came to our auditions of the student speeches on Jan. 11 and then attended the entire program on Sunday. As Monte Pistoresi, our emcee, stated at the event, Wendy is the best.

The MLK Local Host committee has been sponsoring this event for over 20 years. When the MLK Middle School was built in 1995, the program moved to the school’s multi-use room. I would agree with our president, Rose Walker, that this year’s event was one of the very best. We had a full house: More than 200 people attended, even in the rain.

Paul Van Loon, new principal of MLK, gave a wonderful welcome to the event. Most appropriately, he even wove part of the MUSD mission statement “students should be bound only by their aspirations, not by their circumstances” into his short speech on Dr. King and all he stood for. The rest of the program was well covered by Else Mejia of the Tribune in her article.

Again, it is a pleasure to do PR for this event when I have the opportunity to work with Chuck Doud and the rest of the Madera Tribune staff. Fantastic group of people.
We do so appreciate our local paper.

Sharon Stockdale, teacher-librarian for TJ and MLK,
MLK Local Host Committee

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

If you, as I, are a regular reader of National Geographic, you will notice in the latest issue beautiful photos taken from the Hubble Telescope’s new camera. The images are stunning, showing objects hundreds, thousands and even millions of light years away from our valley.

Astronomers are still trying to find the Holy Grail of their scientific discipline: A planet like ours, which could play host to people like we are. They have not found one yet. And if they did, one wonders what good it would do, except to drive the astronomers wild with joy and curiosity.

But that joy would be short-lived, and the curiosity unable to be satisfied. Here are some of the distances that work against their discovery of another planet like earth. Proxima Centauri, the star (besides our own sun) closest to us, is 4.22 light years away. No planets have been discovered orbiting that star.

If there were, however, reaching them would be daunting. If you could get your space ship to roar along at 100,000 miles an hour, it would take you 247.5 million hours, or 8,760 years to reach Proxima Centauri’s neighborhood. The fastest spaceship on record, so far, reached about 40,000 miles an hour once it broke free of the gravitational pull of our solar system. Plodding along like that, it would take some 18,000 years to reach Proxima.

Let’s say we found a planet around Proxima Centauri, thought it might be earth-like, and launched a ship toward it. Even if it were going 1 million miles an hour, in the 876 years it would take the ship to reach the planet, it would be an out-of-date piece of junk.

All of this is to say that even though the photos of space are breathtaking, you won’t be buying real estate there any time soon.

In response to the Discovery Center story:

Wonderful article, great picture, all this and nothing out of our pockets — wrong!

“The beauty of this project is that it’s not coming out of our pockets.” One grant mentioned is Caltrans, dig a bit deeper and discover the money came from Measure A road funds. Not exactly what I intended when I voted for a bond measure to rebuild our crumbling roads. Another grant was mentioned from California Parks and Recreation Department. State parks are being shut down for lack of funding, fees are being increased to make up the difference but, I read the money is not coming from our pockets.

The Madera Board of Supervisors just accepted a delayed repayment of the million-dollar loan the county made to the Discovery Center. Problem is, there was no agreement, no terms of or timetable for repayment.

Build it if you want, but don’t tell me fairy tales about not doing it with money out of my pocket. The idea that grant money is, free money, falling from heaven, is one of the main reasons we are in the dire condition we find ourselves in financially.

First we pass a bond measure, or fund a department (like Parks and Recreation) to operate state parks, then grants distribute the money for unrelated pet projects and private foundations, next we are told what was originally funded doesn’t have enough money as fees are increased, facilities and services are decreased.

Don’t tell us the money doesn’t come from our pockets. First we spend the kids college fund to pay the rent and buy food. Sounds justified to me until I dig a bit deeper to discover the money originally earned to pay the rent and buy food was “granted” — used to pay for an exotic vacation.

Dale Drozen,
Clovis