If I was going to write an editorial in the opinion section, I would make sure I knew the topic that I was talking about. If I was an editor, I wouldn’t print an editorial from someone who knows nothing about the topic. Ron Fink just wrote an article about the electric vehicle mandate (“Who […]
Letters To The Editor
We need reliable voting
To save our United States, we must vote in the 2024 elections at all levels, from city council to president. There was the primary election on March 5 and the general election on Nov. 5. But how will we vote? The last election in 2020 was a crazy-quilt example of irregularities. Because of the COVID-19 […]
Mother Nature will have her revenge on Dana Reserve development
[Regarding the SLO County Board of Supervisors April 24 approval of the Dana Reserve development in Nipomo.] Really? This is an outrage on all levels, an insult and attack on our sense and sensibilities. We have surpassed our oak tree removal quota after letting Resnick clear-cut 15,000 oaks in Paso Robles. What is going on […]
What Oppenheimer didn’t tell us
Oscar-winning Oppenheimer fails to depict the experience of the Tewa people with the Trinity test. Using First Peoples and the land and water they protected as sacrifice for atomic testing, just weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government poisoned the air, water, and sacred land of the Tewa—communities that for more […]
Listen to the voice of the village
The name Nipomo is said to have come from a Native American word that means village. The Community Alternative Plan for the Dana Reserve Project offers a single-family and affordable housing development choice that represents the voice of a village that has come together with experts to design a proposal with lasting beneficial impacts to […]
Homelessness solutions require broad agreement
Most people can broadly agree on a few things about the homeless. It is distressing to see them. They make an awful mess. Some of them are dangerous. They devalue our cities and neighborhoods. They reduce our collective quality of life. Beyond these areas of broad agreement opinions diverge. Consensus is lost. Possibilities are limited. […]
‘Do the right thing’ should extend beyond liberals
Having read John Donegan’s recent epic “Do the right thing” (March 28), I do have to admit that I agree with a lot of what he has to say, which, as a recovering progressive, is a bit painful for me. It does seem that it takes American liberals, especially progressives, an inordinate amount of time […]
Biden will see our country through its current challenges
I wrote President Joe Biden a letter early last year with regard to our current threat to democracy and the attempted coup of Jan. 6, 2021. I sent him copies of excerpts from The FBI Story as published in 1957, which indicates that our country’s balance of power would never allow a tyrant to take […]
We need to end the killing of Palestinian children and families
I am profoundly moved by United States soldier Aaron Bushnell who recently burned himself to death in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. I feel deeply grieved but also all the more determined to preserve life. Aaron Bushnell self-immolated, saying he could no longer be complicit in the U.S.-backed genocide against the Palestinian […]
A reasonable commute, affordable home, dignified life
In making the argument that exclusive neighborhoods ought to remain socioeconomically segregated to preserve elite class bragging rights, John Donegan somehow manages to be both breathlessly condescending toward the less fortunate and also woefully ignorant of the types of housing policies that produce thriving communities (“Beverly hillbillies,” Feb. 29). Donegan ignores a mountain of sociological […]
Nuclear power, weapons, and war need to go
March has a way of coming in like a lion. On March 1, 1954, the U.S. military conducted a test explosion, called Castle Bravo, of a hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Aoll. This robbed the Bikini people and other Marshallese of their homeland and way of life and left them with extremely high rates of […]
Left turn signals are neither safe nor sane
About every four minutes of every day, at nearly all controlled traffic signals in Santa Maria, two and sometimes four vehicles traveling toward each other nervously swerve to avoid a collision. This game of automobile chicken plays out in all controlled traffic signal left turn lanes. This is neither safe nor sane. You and your […]

