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I find that adding an extra space at the end of a web ink, right before any ending html tags (including those likely inserted by the blog editor) helps to keep the links the way you want them!— August 7, 2010 4:11 p.m.
This Crisis Is New? The City Confessed Six Years Ago
RE "I think we need to all step back and see that the 1/2 cent sales tax increase is not the only "tax" that this City Council is subjecting us to. "As long as the City Council refuses to look at the 1970 electricity franchise agreement with SDG&E and raising the 3% annual franchise fee to pay for vital public safety services, we will be "taxed without representation" if the Wildfire Expense Balancing Account (WEBA) and PeakShift at Work/PeakShift at Home (PSW/PSH) rate hikes are allowed by CPUC, including a $118 million charge to all SDG&E consumers for a five-year television ad campaign to convince us that paying more for daytime electricity usage is good for our checking accounts." ----- Just got word this morning that SDG&E is seeking a 7% hike in its general rate case as a hedge that WEBA or its related Z-Factor application may go down in flames. Of course, City Council members will probably remain silent as to the "tax increase effect" of those SDG&E-proposed rate hikes on both small business and residential consumers. I'm still waiting for the SDG&E GRC to show up at the CPUC website, so that I can look at the alleged 25,000 pages of it myself. Come to think about it, I've still been waiting days to get an email back on my inquiries RE that tax increase effect from one local chamber of commerce that tried blogging at the Reader... Oh, the sound of silence.— August 7, 2010 4:04 p.m.
What Does Ethics Mean?/edited again 8/7/2010
RE #121: OK, but I'm writing my definition of ETHICS as a sleep aid for friends against sleeping pills...— August 7, 2010 3:36 p.m.
Kinder, Gentler SDG&E Proposes 7% Rate Increase RE Uninsured Wildfire Legal Costs
RE #1: No, no, no... I am definitely not the Don!— August 7, 2010 3:27 p.m.
The American Christian Theocracy of the Majority
At the time Jefferson wrote prior to the Revolutionary War, "religion" meant one of a rather limited set of things: (1) Roman Catholicism, where canon law was still very much a real legal thing in the world with the force of the Inquisition, (2) the Church of England, of which the Crown was Protector of the Faith even if it meant hacking off the head of the Queen, (3) the state churches, of which there were several, or (4) any other church existing with congregations on then-English colonial soil. I don't think any of the Founding Fathers was interested in establishing a Church of the United States of America, which was why the First Amendment became the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, in order for there to be a ratified Constitution of the United States of America. At the time, nobody was prepared to do away with the official churches of any of the individual states that had them, but they (the state churches, not the states) did slowly disappear in the decades after ratification.— August 7, 2010 3:19 p.m.
What Does Ethics Mean?/edited again 8/7/2010
OK, if you're done, then I'll post my definition of ETHICS on my own blog (which ought to annoy the heck out of philosophy majors and others who enjoy the protections of semantic ambiguity and fungible definitions).— August 7, 2010 1:24 p.m.
The American Christian Theocracy of the Majority
If I read the opinions of the United States Supreme Court correctly, then an individual's religious opinion leading to a vote or other government decision can carry no more weight than a non-religious opinion, which is to say that the Constitution and the government institutions empowered thereunder must be neutral in the treatment of religion as part of the public discourse. As Mr. Chief Justice Burger opined in LEMON V. KURTZMAN (1971), "Our prior holdings do not call for total separation of church and state; total separation is not possible in an absolute sense. Some relationship between government and religious organizations is inevitable", 403 US 602 at 614. Neither is it possible to separate the influence of individual religious morality from the decisions by individual voters as to MATTERS WHERE THE INTERESTS OF PUBLIC SAFETY AND CONTINUITY OF GOVERNMENT ARE UPHELD AND PRESERVED that coincidentally are found to be consistent with Christian religious teachings on the morality of public relations.— August 7, 2010 1:10 p.m.
What Does Ethics Mean?/edited again 8/7/2010
RE #98: Thanx a bunch, but it's not about me. I'm old and am gonna die soon enough anyways. It's about the hundreds of my neighbors who were exposed to friable asbestos because SDG&E would not supervise its contractors, the main one of which was allowed to go bankrupt instead of facing the music in federal court. It's about the hundreds of Orange Line riders who never heard about their exposures. It's about the employees of subcontractors who had their faces in asbestos dust daily, when the owner of the site wasn't willing to step forward and hold a safety briefing about what they were breathing, as the law in this state required SDG&E to do. As far as things go, I am comfortable enough with my ethics that I don't lose sleep at night. If you saw like we saw the look of the individual defendants in USA v. SDG&E who were later found guilty, then you know they weren't getting much sleep at all.— August 5, 2010 9:41 p.m.
The American Christian Theocracy of the Majority
What I am speaking of is less about politics than most non-Christians think.— August 5, 2010 9:22 p.m.
Connect the Dots 20100802
RE #1: I am no attorney, but I suspect that Big Mike is definitely doing his thing in the Wildfire Expense Balancing Account (WEBA) billing application. There is a new motion filing in the WEBA matter that does not include Ruth Henricks or her attorney, but the motion seems to bounce off of her motion by Aguirre requesting the filing of a protest for the utilities not submmitting their ordered amended application. As for a big blowout journalistic investigation of all of the moneys collected and distributed by SDG&E, that's a tall order. I've only been digging through CPUC decisions for a couple of years, and the published record of those decisions go back a long way, back to when it was the Railroad Commission. SDG&E is older than that. My interest now is in gathering all of the decisions in all of SDG&E's recent (since Enova became Sempra Energy) CPUC applications to get a view of the whole mess.— August 5, 2010 5:15 p.m.