Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

There’s more than just politics at the recent GOP Spring Dinner in Alta Sierra (that’s State Sen. Ted Gaines addressing the group in a photo from Facebook under a bold “Taking Back America” sign. My mom and dad were lifelong Republicans, without the high-pitched rhetoric, though. My mom met Ronald Reagan numerous times when he was Governor and volunteered in many GOP campaigns.)

“At the Nevada County Republican Party Spring Social on Saturday, April 28, Vice Chairman, Greg Marks presented the Ruth & Drew Bedwell Memorial Scholarship to Richard Young,” Rich Ulery reports on the GOP website.

“Richard is a senior at Bear River High School and will attend Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington this coming fall.

“This year’s essay question was ‘What do you think our Constitution means when defining our freedom and limited government?’ Young pointed the finger at President Obama, ignoring Congress, reading in part: “Unfortunately, since President Obama took office, the U.S. government has drastically strayed from our constitutional ideals. As a result, government has greatly expanded in size and today there is increased federal control over the lives of U.S. citizens.”

So it goes nowadays. Personalizing and oversimplifying politics — in fact, a very complicated process — is a sign of the times, too, just like a “Taking Back America” sign. But it happens on both sides of the aisle. I largely blame the rise of television, going back to Nixon’s famous Checker’s speech. We debate in “sound bites.”

I admire the efforts of Rich Ulery as chairman of local GOP group, as I’ve written before. There are many shades of GOPers in our county — from moderates to the extreme right. Rich is a good public spokesperson for the local GOP. He keeps it issue-oriented.

(credit: Local GOP’s Facebook page)

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“Marin County and the town of Fairfax on Monday asked the California Public Utilities Commission to suspend SmartMeter deployment in their areas while the commission considers creating an opt-out program for whole communities,” The S.F. Chronicle is reporting.

“The commission in February gave individual PG&E customers the choice of refusing the wireless meters, which some consider a threat to their privacy and health. But it has not decided whether towns and cities will be able to opt out en masse.
‘So what we’re looking for is some kind of agreement, a stipulation, to stay put until this process is finished,’ said Lawrence Bragman, a member of the Fairfax Town Council.

“Officials in Marin County and Fairfax have tried to stop SmartMeters before, by imposing moratoriums to block their installation.

“PG&E has installed about 9 million of the digital electricity and natural gas meters throughout Northern and Central California and plans to install roughly 1 million more. The meters transmit data to the utility automatically using a Wi-Fi communication network. That alarms people who believe that radiation from cell phones and other wireless devices endangers human health.

The rest of the article is here.

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Editor’s note: Some residents are reporting that Google’s Street View cameras are in the area this week. We’ve seen them in the past. Here’s an article about a damning FCC report on Google’s Street View program.

“Was Google’s snooping on home Wi-Fi users the work of a rogue software engineer? Was it a deliberate corporate strategy? Was it simply an honest-to-goodness mistake? And which of these scenarios should we wish for—which would assuage your fears about the company that manages so much of our personal data?” Slate magazine writes this week.

“These are the central questions raised by a damning FCC report on Google’s Street View program that was released last weekend. The Street View scandal began with a revolutionary idea—Larry Page wanted to snap photos of every public building in the world. Beginning in 2007, the search company’s vehicles began driving on streets in the United States (and later Europe, Canada, Mexico, and everywhere else), collecting a stream of images to feed into Google Maps.

“While developing its Street View cars, Google’s engineers realized that the vehicles could also be used for “wardriving.” That’s a sinister-sounding name for the mainly noble effort to map the physical location of the world’s Wi-Fi routers. Creating a location database of Wi-Fi hotspots would make Google Maps more useful on mobile devices—phones without GPS chips could use the database to approximate their physical location, while GPS-enabled devices could use the system to speed up their location-monitoring systems. As a privacy matter, there was nothing unusual about wardriving. By the time Google began building its system, several startups had already created their own Wi-Fi mapping databases.”

The FCC report is here:fcc-report-on-googles-street-view

The rest of the article is here.

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