BIRTH DEFECT -- LIFETIME SENTENCE

Babies born with birth defects have a life time sentence of a pre-existing condition.

It is a fantasy that high risk pools can replace the requirement that health insurance covers all persons, regardless of pre-existing conditions.

California attempted to have a high risk pool. The insurance was both prohibitively expensive and often unavailable due to lack of funding. People who lost their jobs were devastated to learn that they could not afford the COBRA policy offered and that the high risk pools were also not affordable.

I think it is time to explore the idea that people can buy into the Medicare insurance plan.

I find it distressing that some Republicans are joyfully trying to destabilize ObamaCare. A policy of attempting to break the current system ignores the multitudes whose lives were saved or improved by ObamaCare.

I am pleased with the temporary, through September, budget. Except it does include a huge amount of new debt to pay for the military and border patrols. It seems to me that Republicans only hate debt when they are running for office. Once they are in office, they seem to believe that debt is better than taxes.

Democrats can also be short sighted. I support the so called sanctuary city idea. But to totally refuse to cooperate with federal immigration is dangerous and does not help immigrants who are being deported.

For instance, many rural California counties make money by incarcerating immigrants who are being deported. The county provides jail space, but the federal government pays the county for the jail space. If the immigrant is not held in a jail in California, the federal government can put them in a jail anywhere in the country. At least an immigrant who is incarcerated in California has access to California attorneys.

By the time something is a federal problem, it is a complex problem that is not easy to solve. If the problem was actually easy to solve, it would have been solved by local or state government, or by private industries or charities.

PUTIN'S PLAN -- KILL THE EU

Propaganda can be VERY POWERFUL. Fictional news gets LOTS of attention. Robots pretending to be people post comments designed to trigger your deepest fears.

The easiest fear to trigger is that a stranger is going to take your children, all your food, your life, or your job.

Since fear is irrational, the only way to fight propaganda is to be rational.

Rationally, we know that Putin is making every effort to support candidates who might remove their country from the EU.

France is holding an historic election. Please, France, pay attention to what happened in Britain and the US. Listen to your basic values of liberty, equality and fraternity. Russia wants you to treat Muslims in the same way the Vichy treated the Jews.

Putin succeeded in fooling the British into leaving the EU. Worse, Britain is unwilling to admit that propaganda influenced the election, and that rational Brits think leaving the EU is expensive, dangerous, and plays into Putin's hands.

It is fairly amazing what is happening in the US now that the robot trolls no longer control most of our social media.

Please France, learn from the mistakes made by your closest allies. Do NOT vote for Le Pen.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE!

My iPad keeps telling me that I may have won $1000. I NEVER reply to such ads. The virus I get will be expensive to fix, or I will get LOTS of trash emails and NO money.

Some of the email offers I get have fooled large law firms. Everyone seems to want something for nothing. I NEVER download an attachment unless I know who it is from and what it is about.

Emails from banks asking for ID information, Amazon free gift cards, warnings to change my password RIGHT NOW by clicking on a provided link -- all get my distain.

Even with all my vigilance, I still got a virus today. My entire computer stopped with a notice to call Microsoft at 855-624-0094. I panicked, took a photo of my screen and called my trusted techies at CorpWest in Campbell, CA. I followed their advice and my computer is now working and virus free. THANK YOU CorpWest.

Many people seem to be focused on the Mexican border. BAD guys can come into our country, they say. I have actually known many undocumented people. As a disabled person, sometimes the undocumented are the only persons I can find who are willing to work for a few hours moving boxes and cleaning floors and windows.

If we would stop the FUTILE War on Some Drugs, then the drug violence will stop in the same way that the bootlegger violence stopped when prohibition was repealed.

What is actually really hurting the old, the poor, the credulous, and the trusting, is the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS STOLEN BY HACKERS.

If you stupidly give out your banking password to a fake bank website, the bank can take the position that they are not responsible for the subsequent theft. Since the thieves are almost always NOT in the U.S., law enforcement has almost no way to get your money back or to put the thieves in jail.

It is my humble opinion that WWIII will be fought on the internet.

So is our country ready for the fight? Most of us have computers that are more modern than the computers used by most of the federal government. Many of the government's computers can not even load modern virus software.

Some of our power plants are using computers which take large floppy disks. I hope they are copying the disks often, as the floppy with my book died. I am lucky I kept a paper copy.

We are becoming more and more dependent on wireless communications. If cell phone towers go down, we will be helpless to even navigate home if our usual road is blocked.

Hordes of strawberry picking Mexicans pose WAY LESS danger than HACKERS living half a world away.

--BTW, the free trash pick up offered by California Waste Solutions is not free. The person paying the garbage bill can get two free pickups in one year, ending in July, I think.

MORE IMPORTANT THAN A WALL*

It is easy to climb over a wall, or tunnel under a wall, if there is nobody guarding the wall.

Our "wall guards" are correctly termed border patrol agents. Often, trained ICE agents quit when they discover the grueling work conditions.

I am totally AGAINST building a wall, which I consider a waste of money.

However, I am TOTALLY IN FAVOR OF GIVING A LARGE RAISE IN PAY TO BORDER PATROL AGENTS.

May I suggest a compromise? Do NOT put funding the wall into the current budget resolution. DO authorize a 20% raise in pay for all federal employees who work with immigration and border patrol.

BTW, sanctuary cities are NOT sanctuaries. They are just cities where the city police force concentrates on solving crimes, rather than on deporting the undocumented.

This is the way that ALL of our law enforcement agencies work.

The FBI investigates federal and interstate crime.

Local law enforcement investigates what we citizens need the most. Murder, arson, rape, spousal abuse, robbery are all investigated by local law enforcement. These are the crimes that affect the quality of the lives of most of us.

ATF investigates alcohol, tobacco, and fire arm crimes.

The DEA investigates large drug cartels.

ICE is in charge of immigration enforcement.

Sanctuary city is a non-descriptive term which means that the local police will not do the job of immigration enforcement, in large part to assure that their jurisdiction does NOT spiral into the violence caused when law abiding people are afraid to call the police for help with solving crime.

* The WALL is the proposed wall along the Mexican border. From photos, this looks like another problem that has already been solved.

COSTS NOW vs. COSTS LATER

San Jose now has a recycle program which picks up your bulky unwanted items FOR FREE. California Waste Solutions will make an appointment to take your unwanted TV, appliances, chairs, etc. 

Now you can get rid of your stuff without driving it to the dump. And you can be GUILT FREE as you know your stuff will not end up in the creek.

San Jose will hopefully save money since correct recycling keeps items out of our creeks and canyons, where they are EXPENSIVE to remove.

There are other decisions which can be made to spend money now to save money later.

If children do not get enough to eat, their brains do not develop correctly. This means that the taxpayers face coping with damaged children for the LIFETIME of the damaged child. Food is MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE than supporting a brain damaged adult.

It is much easier to fix a sewage problem before rising water levels cause the sewers to back up. Working in dry conditions is ALWAYS less expensive than working in wet conditions. (You may think coastal water levels are not rising, but insurance companies are starting to deny flood insurance for coastal buildings.)

I strongly disagree with suspending children from school. An uneducated adult is almost always an unproductive adult. Leaving disruptive children in the classroom can ruin the education of the entire class. I believe we should have what we called 'continuation school' where the disruptive children can be taught by teachers who know how to deal with disruptive students. Saving money on school psychologists, just means that we will may not be able to get disruptive children the help they need to become productive members of society.

Currently, many of our tax dollars come disproportionately from the poor. The poor do not get to save sales taxes by buying on line. The poor do not get to save sales taxes by buying an automobile in another county. The poor cannot afford electric cars. 

Many of you are not choosing wisely to avoid a future full of expensive problems.

WASTING ONE MILLION DOLLARS

Santa Clara County is about to spend ONE MILLION DOLLARS on REBRANDING the county. Worse, they have hired a NEW YORK firm to rebrand a CALIFORNIA county.

May I make some suggestions for spending the million dollars in a way that will automatically rebrand the county.*

ANNOUNCE THAT THE FUTURE REQUIRES JUSTICE FOR ALL.

Equalize the funding of the public defender and the district attorney, so that each public attorney on both sides of a criminal matter can draw on equal resources. Many people get convicted just because they are poor and inarticulate.

Fund the legal services corporation to provide legal services to those too poor to get legal services. In my experience, providing effective legal help for the poor fixes problems that affect us all.

Fund a housing program aimed at helping the poor find, and keep, housing, similar to the Section 8 housing that kept families housed in well maintained apartments, which paid reasonable rents to the landlords. Rents were set as a percentage of income. It is sinful that people are sleeping under bridges in one of the richest areas on earth.

Begin a reforestation project in large county parks. Once, the entire area was covered in redwoods. We can restart a forest, returning the land to how it was before we built all those neat Victorian painted ladies.

If you are set on wasting money on a self congratulatory project, at least hire a West Coast firm that understands the unique points of view held by Silicon Valley.

* I am leaving out fixing pot holes, putting in curb cuts, and other mundane things that need doing. I am aiming at spending the money in a way that will get international reporting on how Santa Clara County progressively represents the best of Silicon Valley.

IT IS A SAD DAY FOR POOR WOMEN

Women with money will always have access to family planning alternatives like birth control. Now we have a new Supreme Court Justice who has ruled that religious people can prevent women from having birth control medication though insurance.

I know many people are focused on the 2018 elections. Getting out the vote will be particularly important.

Do not forget that we can make many changes at the local level. The good news today is that the notorious tent city jail in Phoenix is being closed. Courts failed to close this jail, it took the voters electing a new sheriff to close tent city.

However, it is time to assess the daily annoyance caused by some liberal policies.

Low flow toilets were a brilliant idea to save water. Then someone decided that it would be even better if the toilets took half an hour to refill. Plumbers were told they would lose their plumbing license if they changed the toilet to fill up faster.

If you are a person who does not share a toilet, the slow refill is not a usually a problem.

If you have two people sharing one toilet, then the second user may have to accept a not completely empty toilet bowl. If it is a household with children, a bucket may have to be filed from the bathtub in order to get the toilet to flush out solid wastes so that the children can get to school on time.

The low flow can cause plumbing to back up as there is not enough water to move the waste into the sewer.

It is these little insanities that give liberals a reputation for over regulating things.

I do not want our rivers on fire, and our lakes filled with acid instead of fish.

But it is important for us all to realize that people are part of the environment.

Generally, the long term solution to problems take the middle road. Even though I believe that a woman should be in total control of all her health care decisions, I am willing to accept the principles set out in Roe v Wade. I am not willing to allow Republicans to prevent access to family planning clinics.