Canary

I‘ve said before that the truth hurts, but sometimes it’s downright chilling. Take the report released by the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) about the county’s response to the Thomas Fire and Montecito mudslides (see page 7). The county’s own report recommended improved evacuation plans, more public outreach via social media and […]

Is it too much to ask: People, why can’t you just do your damn jobs? That’s how folks living in the county’s rural canyons have felt about the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office over enforcement of unlicensed cannabis cultivation (see cover story on page 12) ever since Proposition 64 passed. The Sheriff’s Office received enforcement […]

“Why is everyone so sensitive?”  We hear it so often in the Opinion section, often from those mad at letters they disagree with or at reporting they’d have rather never learned about. Take a look at the critical response we received from a reader (page 14) for some news reporting done in the Oct. 4 […]

So many problems in our community and the greater society seem to languish, becoming monstrous, almost insurmountable issues before anything ever gets done to address them. Why? Well, most of the time we just don’t know about them, or we aren’t listening to those who’ve been speaking up. In our over-saturated society, everyone is clamouring […]

Spend enough years at a newspaper and you get really good at smelling canned PR statements. You don’t even need to be in the business that long to smell something real fishy, like Staff Writer Kasey Bubnash did at a recent hearing in Santa Maria to consider a merger between Dignity Health and Catholic Health […]

Journalists are in the business of asking questions. So when someone–especially those in a public office or agency–won’t bother to answer, it ruffles our feathers. It could be about something as simple as an elected official not bothering to return phone calls or emails, like Lompoc City Councilmembers Dirk Starbuck and Victor Vega did for […]

Let’s play a game.  Here are the rules: Pick whatever it is that bothers you about a community, and blame it on something you hate! It seems like a lot of Central Coasters are playing that game right now. You don’t have to look much farther than the pages of the Sun to see what […]

Everybody loves choices, right? But what happens when you only get a very superficial range to choose from? What if they’re all pretty much the same? That’s what Santa Maria‘s handy types and do-it-yourselfers are asking themselves now that Orchard Supply Hardware (OSH) is closing down (see page 7).  While OSH may be a multi-state […]

Have you ever ignored a problem for far too long, letting things pile up until you’re left with a festering, rotten mess? That’s why it’s handy for me to have all these newspapers around to line my cage, which I change out often. If I didn’t do that, this bird’s home might look and smell […]

Don’t you hate it when you want the same thing as your friend wants, but you can’t agree on exactly how to get it? It really burns my feathers, guys. I don’t want fair-feathered friends on my side of the cage, I want yes birds, dammit! As in, whatever I say goes!  I think the […]

Just about every time I bring up the president, I get the inevitable angry letter that tells me to “go get a job in a mine,” or something like that. Well, to really flesh out the metaphor I’m named after, in this week’s lesson, the “mine” is discourse in politics, and the dangerously noxious gas […]

I‘m getting really weary of hearing the same tired, and frankly lazy talking points being regurgitated again and again, especially regarding problems that have only gotten worse. Take poverty, a huge problem in Santa Barbara County, recently illustrated by the fact that we were placed at No. 3 of all the counties in the state […]