Letters To The Editor

Due to the current market price of crude oil, Santa Barbara County has the capability and capacity to generate as much as $30 million per year in annual property taxes to Santa Barbara County, roughly 50 percent of which would go to our county’s K-14 public schools, roughly 25 percent of which would go to […]

I was reading through Erik Huber’s letter “The folly of nationalism” in the Nov. 15 edition of the Sun. I was wondering about the purpose of his historical review of the so-called issues of “nationalism” and wondering why he wrote the letter with all kinds of nasty comments on the past world history for 100 […]

What’s the smart money doing with nuclear power while California is abandoning it? China is looking more and more like the new world leader, taking over from America. Smart management has seen the Chinese economy growing nonstop, decade after decade. What about their take on carbon-free nuclear power to run their mighty economy? According to […]

The “settled science” of the ’70s predicted a coming Ice Age. Of course the lazy press went with the sensational without examination. Time magazine used the same cover with a penguin perched on an iceberg to sell the coming ice age in 1977 and then global warming in 2007. I guess they got a three-for […]

Trump showed his true colors this past Veterans Day weekend.  The president of the United States had time to meet with Vladimir Putin overseas, but he didn’t have time to visit the Aisne-Marne American cemetery in France, the final resting place of 2,289 U.S. troops killed during World War I? The White House said the […]

Back in the “olden days,” when your TV started acting up and a couple of good thumps didn’t fix it, you would take off the back cover and pull out the “tubes” (if I’ve lost you, find an old person and ask them, “What is a tube?”). The next step was to go to the […]

Thank you Santa Maria voters for supporting Measure U. Your generous support will allow our city to continue to provide professional public safety services and keep up with the ongoing growth we experience.  As vice chair of the Measure U Citizens Oversight Committee, I will continue to work to ensure your hard-earned tax dollars are […]

Thursday night is my favorite night of the week! Why? Because that is the night that I join other musicians from all over the Central Coast in performing jazz in the Allan Hancock College Jazz Ensemble. Last Thursday night we learned that Hancock’s Department of Fine Arts is canceling the Jazz Ensemble for Spring 2019 […]

I once read a bestselling novel about the Great War called The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. The author vividly describes the horrors of the costly and tragic conflict; however, she also provides invaluable historical context that ultimately reveals the underlying rot of nationalism. Not only was the Great War a failure in American […]

If we want to continue to have clean water for drinking and ag use, we need to step up. A company called ERG is planning a huge increase in oil production between Los Alamos and Santa Maria. These hundreds of oil wells would require a large amount of natural gas to power the steam generator […]

A while back the Sun wrote a small piece on my son Sebastian Saiz (Athlete of the Week, Aug. 23) who is the quarterback of the Santa Maria High School Saints this year. His mom, my wife Irene Rodriguez Saiz, recently passed away from cancer. The outpour of support is so awesome that I want […]

Well, according to CNN, MSN, CBS, NBC, ABC, and the rest, there are between 1,600 and 6,000 people coming this way through Mexico from Honduras and Guatemala. I see these comments about the president being a racist for trying to stop them. He has to stop them. All you guys that want to just let […]