Wading In

Texting ban while driving is good idea By Kelvin Wade | | June 25, 2008 15:25 How do you ban handheld cell phone use while driving and leave a loophole you can drive a truck full of BlackBerries and iPhones through? While handheld cell phone use while driving will be illegal come July 1, texting for adults will still be permissible. Isn't texting more dangerous? Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, proposed legislation last week that would ban texting while driving. Simitian, who championed the handheld ban, evidently thought adding texting to the original bill would have sank it. When he first proposed the cell phone ban legislation years ago, he reportedly underestimated how widespread texting would become. Violators of the new ban would be fined $76. OK, yes, it's dangerous to drive while trying to type a message with one hand on a phone. That's a skill set that most of us simply don't have and shouldn't be trying to acquire. Simitian's original...

McCain's history reveals flip-flops By Kelvin Wade | | June 18, 2008 16:30 In 2000, I supported John McCain for president. I'd read his 1999 book 'Faith of my Fathers' and admired the straight-talking maverick. I respected him even more when he admitted that he pandered on the Confederate flag issue in South Carolina. He'd called his flip flopping on the issue, ' an act of cowardice. ' However, somewhere along the way, straight talk became spin. In 1999, McCain told the San Francisco Chronicle he didn't support the repeal of Roe v. Wade because it would force women to undergo 'illegal and dangerous operations.' Around the same time he told CNN that he had no litmus tests for Supreme Court justices. McCain today? Well, from his Web site: 'John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench...

Focus should be on the good students By Kelvin Wade | | June 11, 2008 16:43 School is out and summer indulgence is here. But lately, I've been spending time looking at 2006-07 school district suspension rates. I was surprised that my middle school, Grange, has a nearly 23 percent suspension rate for violence and/or drugs. Armijo, my alma mater, has a 14 percent rate. How are we going to improve this next school year? Or do we have to? Unfortunately, I have a little experience with suspensions. I was in Mr. Gaut's 7th grade science class at Grange. We were supposed to be doing something involving microscopes but I was busy playing with this big fat red rubber band. It suddenly popped out of my hands and hit a classmate in the eye. Now this was an accident, and I immediately apologized but I was still suspended for it. Perhaps my reputation as a wiseguy didn't help me in this case. I used to complain to anyone who would listen that my suspension wasn'...

Save a life, stay off the car phone By Kelvin Wade | | June 05, 2008 15:43 I was driving home from a doctor's appointment the other day while talking to my friend Joyce on my cell phone. I was deftly piloting my ginormous vehicle in and out of traffic one handedly while cursing the other numskulls driving while talking on their cell phones. There's something about talking to someone on a cell phone while driving that shields the speaker from feelings of hypocrisy. On July 1, a law will go into effect hopefully reducing the number of chattering distractions on the road. Come July 1, motorists will be required to use hands-free devices to speak on their cell phones while driving. Minors would be prohibited from talking on the phone, period. I'm all for shutting minors up. It's bad enough I'm sharing the road with young people who learned to drive from Grand Theft Auto III, but I don't want my fiery death in a car accident to be preceded by a co...