Pass the buffalo
The president intimated Tuesday that the Department of Interior may be in for some cuts, however Interior Secretary Ken Salazar followed up yesterday with a shadow state of the union address for staff. Click here for the text. Included in the oratory is a pledge to “increase available water supply for agricultural, municipal, industrial, and environmental uses in the western United States by 490,000 acre feet through Reclamation’s conservation-related programs.” Also on the promise list is increasing capacity for renewable energy on public lands, while at the same time ensuring complete environmental review. How the latter can be assured without the environmental reviews being a sham is unclear. Via the Great Basin Water Network.…
State of salmon
The best quip of the President’s State of the Union address: “… the Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater. And I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked.”
Nice joke, good speech, but the laugh is a short-lived one for Californians, raising as the gag does the suggestion that in streamlining the way we manage salmon it would somehow be possible to tilt power from the agency that protects the fish when they migrate (Commerce) toward the agency that drains rivers of the fresh water that they need to breed (Interior).
Or vice versa.
This taxpayer for one is happy that Commerce is there to demand that the Endangered Species Act be invoked when salmon are imperiled by freshwater diversions to farms and cities. At the same time, this Californian is …
Lights, camera, Antonio
The Los Angeles Times reports that after the Los Angeles Unified School District refused to admit ABC’s Jamie Oliver to its cafeterias, the celebrity chef has been granted an audience at West Adams Prep, one of Mayor Villaraigosa’s cluster schools.
If this is not part of the mayor’s long-running political tug-of-war with the school board, then it looks like it.
For how Oliver has used Facebook to urge parents to write school board members to demand that the district accommodate him, click here.
For how the ABC reality TV program opened Oliver’s nutrition ministry in Westwood, many freeway off ramps never mind bus stops from West Adams Prep (or any low income community), click here.
For how Oliver’s been larking around town conducting stunts, including filling a school bus with sand as if it were sugar, click here.
Meanwhile, for a source other than school lunches …
The Dry Garden: Dead in the pot
Planting season in Southern California is rarely busier than midwinter, when nursery lots crammed with Christmas trees give way to displays of fruit trees and roses. If you’re haunting stores to select an apricot tree, a flowering bramble, a hedge or even a specimen tree, plant pathologist Jim Downer has a message for you: “Good gardening starts with good plant selection.”
By which he means: If the stock you find is root-bound, walk away.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.…
LAUSD is right to say ‘no’ to Jamie Oliver
When a parent drops a child off at school, he or she is entitled to a small set of reasonable expectations. These include: 1) That their child will be educated. 2) That school meals will be available if the child does not bring a packed lunch. 3) That the child will not be exploited.
Item one is not going well. Item two happens, if not to the standards that some would wish. Item three includes keeping out child molesters and celebrities who view the world as background.
That British TV chef Jamie Oliver has arrived in Southern California preaching the gospel of healthful eating is fine. The city has plenty of pulpits, but the cafeterias of public schools are not among them. If he wants to help the school district improve its meals, then it would have been politic and orders of magnitude more …
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