One of the things that profoundly changed my thinking about religion and about liberalism was contrasting the belligerent anti-religious atmosphere in Berkeley with the tolerant Christian environment I encountered in Texas.  This is not to say that all non-religious places are belligerently anti-religious, or that all Christian environments are tolerant.  However, it did teach me a very useful lesson, which is that secularists can be every bit as rigid, dogmatic, and prejudiced as anyone else.

What’s interesting about secular prejudice is that it’s nihilistic.  Christians want to bring you to something; secularists want to back you away from everything.

The almost random hostility that is aggressive secularism reared its head in West Marin recently.  The Catholic Youth Organization (emphasis mine) sponsors all sorts of sports here in Marin.  Sign-up is open to everyone, not just Catholics, but the CYO doesn’t pretend not to be a Catholic organization.  It crossed a Marin line, however, when it announced that, before basketball games start, it wants to have a prayer.  A very non-denominational, practically Unitarian, prayer:

CYO Athletics provides an atmosphere of sportsmanship for youth that fosters their physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual strength.

Although it is not mandatory, we invite athletes, coaches, parents, and officials to take a moment to remember that God is present in each of us as we come together not just as competitors but as brothers and sisters. Please stand as we pray:

God, we pray that our hearts be open to see your presence in and through sports.

We pray for athletes who, through sports, develop character and values.

We pray for coaches who place players before winning and value sportsmanship.

We pray for parents who love their children for who they are, not for how they perform.

We pray for officials who inspire fair play.

We pray in God’s name. Amen.

It takes a special kind of mentality to be offended by a polite and voluntary request to a higher being asking for character development, sportsmanship, parental love and fair play. Fortunately for blogging fodder, here in Marin we have those special mentalities.  While some understand that a private organization sponsored by the Catholic church is within its rights to ask people to join it in a prayer, others are up in arms.  Some merely express discomfort — a la “religion has no place in sports” — but some are much more aggressive in their hostility to the idea:

A decision by Catholic Youth Organization leaders to ask young athletes to pray before basketball games has touched a nerve among residents of the San Geronimo Valley.

“I understand that if we rent to one religious group, we have to rent to them all. But I still don’t like it,” said Richard Sloan, a trustee of the Lagunitas School District, which co-owns the San Geronimo Valley Gym. “I’m going to put up a sign in front of the gym: ‘If you don’t pray in my school, I won’t think in your church.’”  (Emphasis mine.)

At least Sloan is honest about his incredible prejudice.  Others are trying different tactics, including the claim that many parents had no idea the Catholic Youth Organization was actually Catholic; that no one needs to ask God for help with pushy parents because there are only a few of them out there in West Marin; and that West Marin’s varying faiths are so delicately balanced against each other that no end of chaos could result because of this bland little prayer for good sportsmanship.

In a funny way (or maybe it’s not so funny at all), this secularist hostility and its aggressive efforts to shut down all forms of privately expressed faith in the public square reminds me of a problem I’ve always had with Islam:  namely the Islamists’ incredible fear that their religion can’t compete, so that the only way to preserve the faith is to kill (really kill, with sword, stone, hangman’s rope and bomb) the competition.

I like having a marketplace of religion.  This marketplace is not one in which practitioners of one religion coerce, kill, harass, humiliate, stone or demean members of other faiths.  Instead, it’s a marketplace in which various religions generously and often lovingly make their activities and rituals available to others, secure in the belief that there’s a viable product, one that builds, rather than destroys.  I’d be a lot happier if the secularists would have the same approach, rather than aping the Islamists, by trying to shut everyone else down.

I own (or, rather, the bank and I own) a nice lot here in Marin County.  I’ve got a pretty back yard with views of hills and water.  When the trees at the back of my property get too tall, I hire a reputable tree trimming company to cut them down.  That sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it?

It turns out, though, that in Marin, even cutting a tree on ones own property can be fraught with hazards and pitfalls, depending upon which town, or which “not town,” you call home.  As you read the following, keep in mind that I’m not talking about a situation in which you’re demanding that a neighbor cut one of his trees that interferes with your view, or that a neighbor insists that one of your trees should go for the same reason.  I’m talking about a situation in which one of your own trees is bugging you:

In San Rafael, there is no regulation governing removal of trees on private property, while in Tiburon, Sausalito and Belvedere, homeowners may cut trees that block views.

But in the San Geronimo Valley and other unincorporated areas across Marin, regulators want homeowners to spare that ax — unless they’ve got official permission and lots of cash to pay for the privilege.

Although the average tree-cutting permit charged by Marin cities is about $98, county officials now bill unincorporated area residents $1,490 for a “minor” tree removal permit — and twice that for a “major” permit involving a heritage tree.

The high woodsman fee and a plan to reduce from five to two the number of trees that can be cut each year before fees are imposed has residents up in arms in the San Geronimo Valley, where proposals to outlaw tree-cutting near streams to protect salmon habitat have prompted controversy for three years.

Read the rest here.

Silly though it sounds, I’m not ready to get my knickers in a twist.  Trees are the Marin equivalent of zoning.  Marin, after all, offers four things that make it so that people are willing to pay a fortune to live here:  (1) proximity to San Francisco without the inconvenience of San Francisco; (2) a temperate climate; (3) gorgeous trees; and (4) gorgeous views.  These last two, of course, have a nasty habit of conflicting with each other, which is why you can make a lot of money here as a lawyer specializing in view disputes.  (And no, I’m not one of those view lawyers.)  In other words, in Marin, tree/view laws are as important as zoning regulations are in other towns that regulate businesses and red light districts.

My purpose in raising this issue here is twofold.  First, I find it amusingly Marin-ish, and pass it on for that reason alone.  Second, it’s a reminder why local government is a good thing.  This is precisely the type of issue that should be fought out at the local level.  Can you imagine what would happen — God forbid! — if one of Obama’s federal agencies got involved?

No, my post title to the contrary, I don’t actually want to be a Democratic political operative.  Want I want to be is a speaker who can be pleasant, charming, and say nothing at all — and still get paid (at a guess) $30,000 per 90 minute speech.  I can do that.  I’m quite charming, I can be extremely clever, and I’m just a master at saying lots of nothing.

I mention all this here because I unexpectedly got the opportunity to hear David Axelrod speak at the Marin County Civic Center yesterday.  I took detailed notes but, once I reviewed the notes, I discovered there was nothing there, not to mention the fact that I don’t want to run afoul of Axelrod’s intellectual property rights in his own speech.  Still, I think I can keep my nose clean, and avoid intellectual property theft charges with this bullet point list of my impressions:

1. Axelrod got a full house, which means around 3,000 Marin-ites gathered to hear him speak.
2. The average age in the audience was OLD.  I was one of the young’uns there, and I’m no spring chicken. (More of a late summer, early autumn chicken.)
3. Axelrod was charming. He has a very pleasant baritone voice, and a relaxed, easy speaking style.
4. Axelrod was also dull. The Italians call his kind of speech “fried air,” meaning that there were lots of words, but there wasn’t much content.  (I’d be really good at that kind of speech, plus being charming.)  He described how he met Obama, how wonderful the young Obama was, how wonderful the mature Obama is, etc. He made a few half-hearted attacks against Republicans (especially Perry, which was interesting), but mostly he just wandered on with his canned speech. At periodic intervals, he spouted obligatory conclusions about the wonderfulness of his liberal ideology and the foulness of the Republican world view, but he never made the case for either of these points — which is unsurprising, I guess, since the audience was already on board with his position.
5. The whole thing was lifeless and lackluster. Axelrod seemed tired and, while the audience was very friendly, it lacked energy.

My main complaint about Axelrod’s speech was that he didn’t talk about his work.  I wanted to hear the nitty-gritty about how a major campaign operative plots a national campaign.  I wanted to learn how he looks at the demographics, how he targets speeches to different audiences, how he sizes up and plots challenges to opponents, and how he responds to attacks from opponents.  I didn’t need dirt, but I wanted detail.

Instead, Axelrod gave a Hallmark card overview of Obama being gifted at reaching out to people and Obama writing his own speeches and Obama this and Obama that.  Axelrod implies, graciously perhaps, that Obama ran his own campaign (and didn’t break a sweat doing so), but by vanishing so far into the woodwork, he sounded bored and the audience never got interested.

Victor Davis Hanson hits it out of the park with his post explaining why higher taxes are not the answer.  Some of his twelve reasons are better than others, but all are worthy of your consideration.  This is my favorite of the twelve, but I think you’ll like them all:

2) Inequality?

Liberals reply that income inequality is worse than ever. (Note here in their own lives they have no problem with other “merit”-based inequality: e.g., Why can’t Johnny Depp turn down a couple of roles so other less fortunate actors could star? Why doesn’t Cornel West at last break up his endowed mega-salaried professorship into three or four lectureships for the struggling part-timers? Why doesn’t Maureen Dowd go down to one column every other week to allow less compensated New York Times op-ed writers a chance to catch up? In other words, why not back off from the trough and let others have a go?) But back to income inequality: some of those figures are not just attributable to the proliferation of $200,000 orthodontists, but to factoring in the mega-fortunes of a Johnny Depp ($50 million last year in income alone) or a Warren Buffett. The onset of a globalized market allowed a new top bracket to make tens of millions of dollars, a world away from the lesser professional. There is no aggregate homogenous group of “the wealthy.” My big-farming near neighbor (500 acres in vineyard plus), who probably nets $300,000 on a rare good raisin year like this one, is a world away from the late Steve Jobs or the thousands of million-dollar-plus incomes in Silicon Valley. This incongruence is not a rhetorical point or special pleading, but evident through the president’s own rhetoric: “Millionaires and billionaires” is a deliberate attempt to weld two disparate groups together — one making 1000 times the other (if the president is talking of annual income), or one worth 1000 times more than the other (if the president is talking about net worth). But is the Menlo Park bungalow owner who teaches at Foothill College and might be “worth” $1 million (given housing inflation) really comparable to Meg Whitman? Mr. Obama knows that there is not enough of the 1% of the 1% to come up with enough revenue to cover his new $4 trillion in debt, but does he think that by going after the top 5% or 10%, well, there just may be?

I’m actually sensitive to this comparison issue, because Marin skews things. In most other parts of America (other than the other rich liberal enclaves scattered about America), we’d be rich. In Marin, we’re squarely in the middle. Because prices here are so ridiculously high, we live in a middle house, drive middle cars, shop at middle stores, and send our kids to public schools. If we had the same income in Kansas or Texas, we’d be much more comfortably situated — and in Texas, we wouldn’t be turning more than 50% of our money over to the government (state, federal and local).

Of course, we could move, but I like it here:  our house is near my aged mother who is too old to be relocated; the temperate climate suits me, because I’m a wuss; and our neighborhood is unique by any standards, providing a truly perfect backdrop to raising decent, honest, nice children.

A big issue in Marin is low income housing.  Marin liberals feel guilty that they don’t have poor people living near them.  Rather than hauling themselves into a nice slum, what they do is use legislative fiat to put poor people into the middle income neighborhoods of Marin.  (Interesting, none of these low income houses end up in Marin’s really rich neighborhoods.)  Marin has done this low income housing experiment before, most recently in the town of Corte Madera, which was forced by court order (love those activist judges) to build housing for poor people.  (And the hell with the marketplace, community norms, or people’s investment in a safe, economically stable community.)  A month ago, one of the residents in this court ordered housing was arrested for running a meth clearing house in one of the units.  She wasn’t making the stuff, thank God, but she was acting as a middle man.

A similar fight is now shaping up in Novato, the northernmost town in Marin, and the most conservative.  Hundreds of people spent their life savings to buy properties in what they anticipated would be a middle class neighborhood, with a “medium dense” population.  Novato politicians are now planning to re-zone the entire district for densely packed, low-income housing.  People who have already bought in the community are, unsurprisingly, devastated and quite angry.  This is a government taking, and they fully understand that.

What few people know, but I’ve been hearing through the Marin political grapevine, is that this is part of a whole plan to turn the Highway 101 corridor into a densely populated, low income community that will vote Democratic in perpetuity.  The rezoning goes along with the push to create a light rail (which will work only if there’s a huge volume of poor commuters) and a desalination plant, which is necessary only if the powers that be are contemplating vast increases in Marin’s water demands.  These vast increases are tied to a projected growth in population which, in turn, is tied to high density, low-income housing.

If you’re a Marin resident, and you’re contemplating a choice between Democratic incumbent Jared Huffman and Republican opponent Bob Stephens for the California Assembly, and if you like Marin as a safe, affluent, aesthetically appealing community, you might want to think long and hard about making the knee-jerk decision to vote for the Democrat in this election.

[To keep things clear, unless I explicitly preface a statement by saying "Bob said" or "Bob pointed out," or something similar, the opinions expressed in this post are mine, and reflect my understanding of Bob Stephen's approach to governance, as well as my view about California's myriad problems.]

I went to a party last night held to introduce Bob Stephens, the Republican candidate to represent Marin in the California assembly.  Bob is a courageous man.  How courageous?  Marin is so overwhelmingly liberal, he’s the only person willing to try to run as a Republican against Jared Huffman, the Democratic incumbent.  Even the good news that registered Marin Republicans have swelled from approximately 26,000 to approximately 31,000 since Obama was elected means that, in a county with about 100,000 liberals, he’ll have a hard time finding a winning majority.

Still, if anyone can penetrate Marin’s liberal hegemony, Bob might be the one to do it.  He’s got a straightforward political platform, which is really predicated on a single issue:  California is broke and going broker.  Politicians like Huffman who tinker with green this and green that, are essentially putting make-up on a soon-to-be corpse.  Bob explained that, unless the climate is made more business friendly, unless the bureaucracy is cut, unless pensions are controlled, and unless out-of-control spending is stopped, there will be no California left at all.  As it is now, Bob pointed out that Moody’s bond ratings place California, once the wealthiest state in the union, at number 50 out of 50.  (Hurricane ravaged Louisiana ranks higher than we do.)  Bob also reminded the party’s attendees that, in education, California, which was once the top-rated state in the union, is now 48 out of 50.

California’s government infrastructure is so bloated it has to be seen to be believed.  To make this point, Bob unfurled seven pages of paper, taped together (meaning they are taller than I am) listing, in single space, without hard returns, and without paragraph breaks, California’s many agencies — more than 500, in fact.  Bob acknowledged that many are necessary for a functioning state, such as the Department of Transportation and the Department of Education (although I’d seriously clip the latter’s wings).  Others, however, are duplicative or of dubious necessity (or both).  Bob brought our attention to a perfect example of overkill in the consumer protection realm:

• California Consumer Hotline
• California Consumer Information Center
• California Consumer Information
• California Consumer Services Division
• California Consumers and Families Agency

Surely those can be consolidated? As it is, each of those agencies, which serves the same constituency (people who buy things in California) has its own staff and budget.

It’s clear that, whether or not he is associated with the Tea Party movement, Bob is a tea partier insofar as he is a fiscal conservative who believes that taxpayers should not and cannot be forced to pay for a bloated, ineffective government that sucks up money without generating conditions within which wealth can be created.

My major concern about Bob after hearing him speak is that he is manifestly a really nice guy.  As the RINOs in Congress show (nice guys all, I’m sure), nice people can easily be intimidated by Democrats who have no compunction about smearing people as racists, if they oppose illegal immigration or out-of-control welfare spending; or as murderers, if they point out the necessity of cutting back on programs that benefit children and the elderly.  Bob told me that he can handle this heat.  He explained that he is not a career politician.  At 75, he’s entering politics to try to salvage California for his children and grandchildren, not as a means of starting a glorious political career.  With a focus on the bottom line, he says that he refuses to get sidetracked by name calling.  In his mind, the answer to every gratuitous swipe is an obvious demand for one vital piece of information:  “Show me the money.”

And with that last statement, Bob made me see why it’s possible that, in today’s bizarre political climate, a Republican might be able to win in Marin.  You see, unless the Assembly has mastered Rumpelstiltskin’s trick of turning straw into gold, all the Leftist name-calling in the world won’t trump California’s new reality, which is that we’re broke.  If Bob, who is a good communicator, can help Marin voters understand the reality of that bottom line, he stands a better chance with worried people than does Huffman, a man who seems committed to spending taxpayer money so that green, wealthy Marin, can be green long after the wealth is gone.

(By the way, on the point of green, one of the guests at the party told me that Huffman is less green than he appears.  Three of his pet projects — SMART rail, a desalination plant, and a consolidated energy plan — will inevitably result in significant low-income, Democratic-voting population growth along the new train corridor in Marin.  This will bring about 500,000 extra people in Marin, turning Marin from a wealthy, green oasis into yet another California community of, bland, back-to-back, ticky-tacky houses crawling across cement covered hills.  I’ll blog more about this, with greater coherency, if this guest sends me the information he promised on the subject.  Otherwise, this may be all I have to say on the subject, so I throw it out here for what it’s worth.)

I live in Marin County, one of the most affluent counties in America.  It is an extremely well-managed community (although budget cuts might have their effect here too).  Crime is low, streets are clean and well-maintained, and lovely flower beds and hanging pots brighten public walkways.  Our libraries are well-stocked and well-staffed, our town offices pleasant to work with.  It is a prime place to live, that’s for sure.

Across the Bay from me is the City of Richmond, California.  Richmond has some major industry, since Chevron has a ginormous refinery there (ugly during the day, a bizarre fairyland, because of the lights, at night).  It also boasts a vast regional Social Security office, a Kaiser hospital, a cool model train museum in the charming historic Pt. Richmond district, some shopping centers, a BART station, and other stuff of ordinary life.  Sadly, Richmond also has one of the worst crime rates in California. It’s no surprise that, in Marin, crime stories in the news routinely report that the perpetrator wasn’t local, but came over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge for the easy pickings here.

Beset by troubles, the Richmond government is taking seriously its responsibility to . . . stamp out cigarette smoking.  Yes, one of the most violent cities is apparently directing significant energy and resources to ensuring that its citizens do not get one last cigarette before their gang banger executions:

Richmond, not usually associated with stellar air quality, won praise Tuesday for protecting its residents’ lungs by enacting some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in the country.

“We have lots of challenges in this city, but we can also be at the forefront of change,” said Mayor Gayle McLaughlin. “We managed to pass some groundbreaking legislation and we’re very proud of this recognition.”

The American Lung Association lauded Richmond for turning the organization’s annual tobacco-control grade from an F to an A in just one year, due largely to a first-in-the-nation law the City Council passed in July that bans smoking in apartment buildings.

The city also barred pharmacies from selling cigarettes and banned smoking in parks and other public spaces.

[snip]

“What this says about Richmond and its leadership is extraordinary,” said Jane Warner, head of the American Lung Association’s California branch. “They took a bold move, expecting to get political backlash, but in reality they didn’t. It’s phenomenal.”

Richmond, home to one of the largest oil refineries in the country and numerous factories, has some of the worst air quality in the region, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Richmond has the region’s second-highest rate of sulfur dioxide, which is linked to lung cancer and respiratory problems. Only Crockett has a higher rate.

McLaughlin said the city’s authority over industrial emissions is limited, but tobacco legislation is relatively easy to enact. The smoking ban in apartments met almost no opposition.

I loathe cigarettes with unrivaled fervor, but I find it very disturbing that a citizenry that is beset by the worst types of violent crimes should be denied the right to smoke in their own homes.  I also find disturbing the fact that the City is manifestly directing a great deal of energy towards dealing with a problem that is, as much as anything, a personal choice, rather than a public crime.  I know I’ll hear about the children who are saved from a life smothered by Daddy’s and Mommy’s cigarette smoke, but I still think that it’s better if Mommy and Daddy aren’t gunned down.

Interestingly, practically-perfect-in-every-way Marin has failed the cigarette smoking test:

Measures taken by Marin’s cities and county government to curtail cigarette smoke have improved slightly but continue to fall short, according to a new report card from the American Lung Association.

The annual study gave five Marin cities failing grades, while four got D’s, two received C’s and Novato, which passed sweeping tobacco control legislation in 2008, garnered a B, one of only 11 jurisdictions statewide to do so. The marks were a slim improvement over the association’s 2008 report, in which seven of Marin’s cities received failing grades.

The report card based its grades on three categories: laws to encourage smoke-free air outside places like restaurants, movie theaters, and ATMs; regulations on smoking in multi-unit housing; and reduction in sales of tobacco products, particularly to minors, through the creation of local licensing of tobacco sales.

Perhaps our local Marin governments are just paying lip service to this whole ALA thing, since the fact is that there is little smoking in Marin.  I can go weeks without smelling cigarette smoke.   You see, in Marin, we have the strongest possible disincentive to smoke:  it’s socially unacceptable — and that is a very good reminder that societies can police themselves simply by setting acceptable standards of behavior without the need for government intervention.

The Marin IJ reports that almost $3,000,000 in stimulus money Americans will help the public school district in Ross, California:

Ross School has won the federal stimulus fund lottery.

School officials learned Friday they would receive a $2.85 million school construction bond tax credit as part of the federal stimulus bill – a credit Superintendent Tammy Murphy believes will save Ross taxpayers $5.4 million in interest.

“We were so fortunate. It’s just a wonderful story,” Murphy said. “This would have been a 25-year term for our bond. Now we’ll be able to pay it off in 15 years at zero to little interest. It’s just great.”

[snip]

Because so many applied for the limited funds, the state Department of Education held a lottery Friday, choosing 43 school districts and county offices to receive the funds. The single-school Ross Elementary District, which is overhauling Ross School at a total cost of $39 million, was the only district in Marin County to apply for the program.

Ross was smart to apply for funding, and I certainly can’t blame it for being lucky enough to win a random lottery. However, I think that you, as a taxpayer, should know a little bit about Ross.

Ross, in Central Marin County, California, is a small and very pretty town, with a population of about 2,300 people.  The 2000 census reveals a little bit about that population.  It’s lily white; heavy on the stable, two parent homes (although rumor has it that wife-swapping is big in the town); and rich, really, really rich.  The median income for a family in Ross is around $102,000.  That median number doesn’t quite do justice to the wealth oozing out of Ross, since it’s brought down by the 5-6% of the population who are poor — elderly people living in decaying mansions and students living in squalid apartments (because the College of Marin is in neighboring, and even more wealthy, Kentfield).  A decade ago, Ross was the 20th richest town in America.  Indeed, some of the richest people I’ve ever met in my life, including the single richest person I’ve ever met in my life, live in Ross.  Here in Marin, its name is as synonymous with wealth as Kentfield, Belvedere and Tiburon, all of which are some of the richest communities in America.

What this means is that, even though the Ross School district is a public school that’s dependent on government funds, it also has an enormously wealth community shoring it up.  The public schools in Ross, Kentfield, and Bel-Tib don’t look like any public schools you’ve ever seen.  Thanks to generous support from families in the community, they have the same polished gloss that pricey private schools offer.  The only difference is that, unlike private schools, Marin public schools are in thrall to the wacky curriculum mandates perpetually emanating from Sacramento.  To give you an idea about the school’s high quality (despite those government diktats), I know several wealthy familes that, having looked at every private school within a 25 mile radius, concluded that their local public school was completely comparable, and would save them a tiresome commute.

Again, please understand that I don’t think the Ross School did anything wrong or that it should be forced to give the stimulus money back.  Its administration was intelligently proactive in seeking funding for a legitimate construction project, and it won the money fair and square.  Nevertheless, as a taxpayer being squeezed to death by an avaricious and incompetent government, I find it outrageous when I see my tax dollars go to one of the wealthiest communities in America.  That type of wealth distribution reflects a profound failure in the way in which the federal government, which takes my money essentially at gunpoint, is managing that same money.  It has nothing to do with stimulating the economy and everything to do with politics and bureaucracy as usual.  Stories such as this should elicit outrage from taxpayers, outrage directed not at the lucky fund recipients, but at the federal government itself.

UPDATE:  In a striking irony, today’s Marin IJ also reports about massive fund cuts to those in need:

Six years ago, Herschel Ferguson’s life took a devastating turn for the worse. The Santa Venetia resident, now 65, returned home from his San Francisco State internship, felt light-headed and passed out. He’d contracted acute disseminated encephalomyelitis and spent the next three months in the hospital, briefly slipped into a coma and lost feeling in his left arm. His memory often fails him.

Ever since, Ferguson has received 15 hours a week of assistance from a caregiver in his home through the In-Home Support Services program, which is funded by federal, state and county money and is facing a rash of cuts in the wake of the state budget deal reached last month. The cuts were supposed to have taken effect Sept. 1, but have been delayed indefinitely by the state.

“If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be able to get through life,” Ferguson said of his caregiver. “It gives me an idea of what day it is when she comes. I couldn’t get along without her.”

The IHSS program pays caregivers to help low-income elderly and disabled people whose needs range from bathing and grooming to laundry, shopping and meal preparation. More than 1,600 Marin residents receive such services through the program, and a comparable number of people provide them, according to Kara Beuerman, acting program manager for adult and aging services with the county of Marin. Roughly 250 recipients face losing those services; another 200-300 people could see their service reduced.

Read more here.

UPDATE II:  As one of my friends commented, it’s staggering that the Department of Education was incapable of rousing itself to look at the various school district’s economic needs, as opposed to throwing things open to one giant, undifferentiated lottery.  Do you really want a government that is this lazy and unresponsive to be in charge of your health care?

The Marin IJ is running two polls today, one concerning employing illegal immigrants and the other asking whether “most Marin residents are environmental posers.”  As to the latter, with 375 votes cast, 82% of voters have answered that, yes, Marin residents are environmental posers.  I was vote number 375 in that regard. It’s a good question, because it taps into the feel goodism that is the core of Al Gore’s Nobel Prize winning environmental theories.  Like Al, we live in our big houses, drive our big cars, and consume like mad, but we are still careful tol put our kids into a panic about their future, dutifully sort our garbage, use recyclable shopping bags, and are sure to lecture everyone about the evils of climate change.  If that’s not posing, I don’t know what is.

In Marin,  9 out of 10 bumperstickers one sees are liberal in context.  Make that 9.9 out of 10.

There’s the “Endless This War” sticker; and the still popular “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot” sticker; and the saccharine, unrealistic and facile “Coexist,” with the symbols of various religions used in lieu of letters.  More concretely, there are uncountable Gore and Kerry bumper stickers on older model cars.  And with increasing frequency, there are the “Barack ’08″ and “Change ’08″ bumper stickers.  Those last are popping out like fungus after a rainfall.

But today I saw a lovely first.  It was a “Hillary” sticker, partially overlaid by a “McCain” sticker.  I gather that someone is deeply offended that a woman who has paid her dues (and this is true whether or not one likes her), has been cast aside for a man who has paid nothing.