Robert Price
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ROBERT PRICE: Why voters are choosing independence
If you are disappointed, annoyed or fed up with the Democratic and Republican parties to the point of abandonment, you have a growing number of friends.
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ROBERT PRICE: Our civil rights narrative must be preserved
They saw the smoke of the firebombs, heard the screams, felt the outrage of injustice -- and they acted on it. Janie Forsythe McKinney, a white girl then just 12, rushed water to the victims of a bus bombing targeting civil rights activists in Anniston, Ala., in 1961. Claude Liggins, a black college student then 20, was so troubled by what he saw of the incident on television that he joined the Freedom Riders, a group that stood up to racial segregation by riding buses throughout the South -- and he spent a month and a half in a Jackson, Miss., jail for his trouble.
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Next on 'Californian Radio': Employment law
Editorial Page Editor Robert Price is the host of "Californian Radio" from 9 to 10 a.m. Tuesday on KERN-AM 1180. He'll be discussing employment law, and the lawsuits associated with those laws, with his guest, human resources consultant Robin Paggi.
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ROBERT PRICE: Kevin McCarthy has more than the requisite hair
If you are a committed Republican and you are gnashing your teeth over the flawed candidates elbowing for position in the quest to unseat a vulnerable president, you may be amenable to today's fantasy: President Kevin McCarthy.
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ROBERT PRICE: So, what did we ever decide on a name?
Out in front of the new Bakersfield Federal Courthouse last week, a work crew was building the forms for a substantial concrete pour: a 2-1/2-foot wall that one day soon will bear the name of a giant of jurisprudence.
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Next on 'Californian Radio': Pedestrian safety
Editorial Page Editor Robert Price is the host of "Californian Radio" from 9 to 10 a.m. Tuesday on KERN-AM 1180. He'll be discussing the unusally high number of recent pedestrian fatalities in Bakersfield with his guests, city Traffic Engineer Ryan Starbuck and Donna Kunz, the city's economic and community development director.
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ROBERT PRICE: Providence occasionally shows a flair for drama
The tragic Jan. 6 hot-air balloon accident in New Zealand that killed 11 people caught my eye for reasons that go beyond the normal but unflattering human attraction to awful spectacles. Hot-air balloon accidents, rare as they are, stand out for me amid the daily onslaught of dreadful headlines because I've been there. My wife and I lived through an experience that, but for a millisecond of time, another 20 feet of altitude and the grace of God, may well have ended as badly as the catastrophe in Wellington.
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Next on 'Californian Radio': Plans for the defunct power plant
Editorial Page Editor Robert Price is the host of "Californian Radio" from 9 to 10 a.m. Tuesday on KERN-AM 1180. He'll discuss what's in store for the abandoned PG&E faciltty at Coffee Road and Rosedale Highway with his guests, Bakersfield City Councilman David Couch and PG&E spokeswoman Katie Allen.
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ROBERT PRICE: A suicide ill-fit for one profile but not another
Suicide among members of the U.S. armed forces is so grimly pervasive that the number of men and women in uniform who take their own lives is now roughly equal to the number killed in action. Each branch of service maintains a suicide-prevention office, and the Pentagon conducts an ongoing evaluation of causes and intervention strategies. And yet one U.S. facility alone, the Army's Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, has seen 30 soldier suicides in the past three years, including 12 in 2011.
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ROBERT PRICE: Optimism shouldn't be a partisan trait
Pessimism is all the rage right now. The half-dozen candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination know that "Things are looking up!" leaves a lot to be desired as a challenger's campaign slogan. So they bounce between negativism and buoyant energy, leavening their scorn with all the campaign-trail charisma they can muster. Ronald Reagan wrote the book on that approach in 1980, and Bill Clinton dusted it off with great effectiveness in 1992.
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Californian Radio: What to do about those resolutions
Editorial Page Editor Robert Price is the host on "Californian Radio" Tuesday.
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ROBERT PRICE: Audacity prize has many fine candidates
What America really needs is more end-of-year awards and retrospectives. That's how our media-driven, 24-7 culture processes the change of calendars. It's how we put the past 12 months to bed: We remember, categorize, rank and move on. It's like a mental health exercise.
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Parental involvement in education on 'Californian Radio'
Editorial Page Editor Robert Price is the host of "Californian Radio" from 9 to 10 a.m. Tuesday on KERN-AM 1180. He'll discuss the steps taken by the Bakersfield City School District board to address parental involvement in education with his guests, BCSD trustee Andrae Gonzales and Blanca Cavazos, chief instructional officer with the Kern County Superintendent of Schools office and former principal of Arvin High School.
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ROBERT PRICE: Let's debate the rules of the debates
Newt Gingrich is just what America needs. As a campaigner, I mean. In an era when the TV sound bite has nearly been rendered extinct by 140-character Twitter tweets, it's reassuring, in a masochistic kind of way, to hear Gingrich threaten us with a series of Lincoln-Douglas-style debates between himself and President Obama.
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ROBERT PRICE: Just words in a daily recitation
Ask any elementary school teacher about the many ways a kid can mangle the Pledge of Allegiance. It's pretty funny. "One nation under God" occasionally becomes "One Asian none are God" and "with liberty and justice for all" becomes "with liver tea and just us four all." I remember wondering whether indivisibility was anything like invisibility, which was at least a concept a comic book-loving kid could comprehend. Maybe some of my fellow fourth-graders fully grasped the fact that they were promising to be faithful to the founding principles of their country, but I believe the true weight of the Pledge only slowly dawned on most of us.
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ROBERT PRICE: Thomas was there for most of Gingrich's rise, fall and rise
It'll probably change tomorrow, because that's been the nature of the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, but a scant 30 days before the Iowa caucuses, Newt Gingrich seems to be on pretty solid ground. One recent poll had Florida voters favoring the former House speaker by an astonishing 24 points over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, with Herman Cain and Rick Perry well back.
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ROBERT PRICE: When telling the truth only blurs things
I did it again: I responded to a chain email that contained a laughably false claim. I supplied the offending forwarder with links to fact-checking organizations that had debunked the invented accusation. The sender seemed to take offense: Clearly, if I dared question her, I must be a (fill in the name of the political ideology you hate most). And besides, she wrote, "Whether or not it's technically true doesn't matter -- it's a message that needs to get out."
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ROBERT PRICE: UC Davis' stunning Occupy recruitment video
My daughter Jill was sitting in her Spanish class at UC Davis about two weeks ago when a small group of protesters decided to vent their feelings outside of her classroom. They banged on the door and shouted "This is our university!" Jill, one of perhaps 30 freshmen from Bakersfield who attend the school, was mildly annoyed by the interruption, but her professor was livid. She burst through the door and shook her fist in the direction of the mini-mob, which had continued to move down the row of classrooms, banging on metal doors as they went. "It's my university, too!" the professor shouted. Jill phoned home that night to provide her parents with a general update, and she mentioned the door-banging interruption. "They're complaining to the wrong people," she said. I don't know how many new recruits the Occupy UC Davis movement won that day, but there probably weren't any in Jill's Spanish class.
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Charitable giving and more on 'Californian Radio'
Editorial Page Editor Robert Price is the host of "Californian Radio" from 9 to 10 a.m. Tuesday on KERN-AM 1180. He'll check in on the state of charitable giving with Della Hodson, president and chief executive officer of the United Way of Kern County. Also on tap will be discussions of last week's pepper-spraying incident at UC Davis and the aftermath of the Central Cali Market shootings.
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ROBERT PRICE: Vongs aren't coming back; who would?
Now that Samrith Vong is off the hook for the fatal shooting of two men who harassed, threatened and assaulted him and his family on Oct. 18, his Central Cali Market can get back to the business of business in that underserved, low-income neighborhood. Right?
