Wading In

January 26, 2012 | Daily Republic Save the Tomato Festival by Kelvin Wade The plundering of redevelopment agencies bites. The Fairfield Redevelopment Agency provided funds to the Fairfield Main Street Association to sponsor local events such as the Independence Day Parade, Tomato Festival and Christmas event. I’m not saying the other events the FMSA puts on aren’t worth saving, but the Tomato Festival must be saved. In 2010, we didn’t have a Christmas tree for the downtown Christmas event. While I give the Fairfield Main Street Association props for trying to make do with meager resources, it was a huge letdown for the event. The Tomato Festival should be Fairfield’s marquee event. It brings Fairfielders downtown who don’t normally shop downtown and is a boon to local businesses. It brings visitors here who spend money. It helps promote the city’s image, an image that has needed burnishing. When you hear the name Gilroy, I’m willing to bet the words that pop into your head next are “Ga...

January 19, 2012 | Daily Republic Three cheers for the creatively maladjusted by Kelvin Wade Occupy Vacaville “occupied” Vacaville City Hall this week. Vacaville police had their hands full trying to contain the several hundred protestors who converged on . . . Oh wait. No, that’s not right. It was nothing like the Occupy protests we’ve seen on the news. It reportedly started with three people and swelled to about a half dozen over the course of the day. A single tea party member showed up to counter-protest. Meanwhile, Vacaville police had made contingency plans to handle the crowd if it got out of hand. Bus routes near the Occupy site were delayed or diverted. And according to the Occupy Vacaville Facebook page, a woman who lives in a neighborhood near City Hall received a robocall, warning her that there would be an event Tuesday that might disrupt traffic. The only way that “crowd” was going to disrupt traffic was if the handful of people suddenly decided to jaywalk. But it’s not a...

Newt's Divisive Dog Whistle Blog post by Kelvin Wad e Newt Gingrich has been putting on a dog whistling, race-baiting clinic. In television interviews and debates he has referred to President Obama as the "food stamp president." If Hillary Clinton were president right now, would he be calling her the "food stamp president?" I don’t think so. But I'm pretty sure he would've come up with some kind of sexist dog whistle. Republicans have been using this particular dog whistle for a long while. Ronald Reagan, back in 1976, would talk about welfare queens driving their Cadillacs. He'd talk about a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store. The intent is to portray mostly black and brown-skinned people being given hardworking white people's money to live high on the hog. This rhetoric gets white voters good and angry and eager to vote. Facts don't seem to matter. It doesn't matter that the SNAP (Suppleme...

January 12, 2012 | Daily Republic A nanny law that I like by Kelvin Wade One thing a new year always brings is new laws. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed more than 750 bills into law. Most of the time, we pay little mind to new laws that don’t seemingly affect us. There is one new law that’s important if you have little kids. But first, on to some of the others. Some new laws are no-brainers. It’s now illegal to smuggle cell phones into prisons and illegal for inmates to have them. More than 10,000 cell phones were confiscated from inmates in 2010. In 2009, more than 2,000 cell phones were confiscated in California State Prison Solano in Vacaville. Why’d it take so long to pass a law? It is now illegal to openly carry unloaded handguns in public. Open-carry advocates are outraged and vow to openly carry unloaded shotguns and rifles, which is still legal. (Guess won’t be legal next year?) I’ve always thought openly carrying unloaded guns was stupid. It puts police in a dangerous posit...

January 05, 2012 | Daily Republic Earning an F in plea bargaining by Kelvin Wade I don’t quite get the plea deal given to former Rodriguez High School teacher Felicia Killings. Killings, 27, plead no contest to a single charge of having sex with a 16-year-old student. She’d faced five felony charges alleging she’d had sex multiple times with the boy between March and October 2009 at her Vallejo apartment. Under the terms of the plea bargain, she will receive 30 days of house arrest and have her felony conviction reduced to a misdemeanor if she stays out of trouble. She also won’t have to register as a sex offender. Residents just saw the former vice principal of Cleo Gordon Elementary School, Christopher Vargas, sentenced to eight years in prison for two lewd acts against children. Vargas will no doubt have to register as a sex offender when he’s eventually paroled from prison. Obviously the cases are different due to the ages of the victims. The law treats sex crimes differently when ...