Reader: Bakersfield is still a fairly conservative town, but your paper’s language and tone in reporting is substantially skewed toward the progressive (socialist/communist) mindset and is something we might expect in San Francisco.

Alan Tandy accomplished a lot in his quarter-century of service as Bakersfield's city manager, and he did it in an era of out-of-control government pension obligations and city services strained by what was, for an extended period of time, one of the fastest growing urban centers in the nation.

The smart shopper, according to one commonly shared line of reasoning, hits the big-box store the day after Christmas and snatches up holiday bunting at drastically marked-down prices and then stashes it away for 11 months.

Reader: I just wanted to express my thanks for your timely coverage of Sacramento's plans to eliminate the oil industry here ("Is the end of Kern oil production really upon us? Sure sounds like it," Aug. 11, et al.). California's ever-increasing importation of oil from foreign sources contin…

Reader: In response to your column about the city's street racing problem ("Deafening street racing has southwest Bakersfield residents fed up," Nov. 20): We live in a condo community on Ming Avenue called Piñon Springs. Each Thursday night at precisely 11:30 p.m., the race is on! Some night…

Every day is Thanksgiving at the St. Vincent de Paul mission on Baker Street. Every day, that is, except the actual day the rest of us celebrate as Thanksgiving.

The first thing that strikes you are the guard towers, then the razor wire-topped fencing with metal signs mounted along every 30 feet of chain link. The signs depict a black lightning bolt knocking down a lone silhouetted figure. Peligro. Fatal voltage.

Reader: I don’t mean to seem like a dick, but you’re a joke — I tell it how it is ("Deafening street racing has southwest Bakersfield residents fed up," Nov. 20). You are in the media so you are supposed to report fairly, is that not right? Well, I didn’t see any (quoted) opinion from any of…

Talk about incongruence.

In the two decades since Californians first started debating a high-speed rail system along the state's long spine, one stubborn but ever-growing camp of voters has always considered the undertaking too pie-in-the-sky, too remotely distant and, especially, too expensive to be anything more t…

Reader: There would be less homelessness if people were taught that they are responsible for the choices they make ("It's cold, they're homeless and we'll study it," Nov. 10). Now, people who become homeless rely on other people to help them and rely on compassion and the willingness of othe…

Weatherby's almost made it to 100 years.

It might be instructive, amid all this discussion about homelessness and emergency shelters, to get the perspective of the world's best-known homeless advocate, a man who was briefly a transient himself. He was not available for an interview, but a spokesman, Matthew son of Alphaeus, did pro…

Reader: It's a shame that true nonpartisan and independent news is a thing of the past. This article about suicides and isolation cells at the Kern County jail ("A sane and innocent woman went on suicide watch at Kern County jail. It nearly broke her," posted online Nov. 5) was clearly produ…

Louis Gill recognized that the occasion was auspicious enough to demand precisely the right words, and those words weren't coming. "You mind if I walk? It helps," he said, and he spun out of his chair to pace and compose. Except his office was so jammed with furniture and files, he couldn't …

Russ Nightengale doesn't look to me like the type of guy who would drive an electric vehicle. He is young, a bit grizzled, wears his ball cap in the flat-brim "bro" style and professes no love for intrusive government.

Reader: I am so pleased with your front-page piece on the potential of Bakersfield to be a music center ("How we can untap Bakersfield's tourism potential," Oct. 20). For years I have resisted the all-too-easy tendency of people here to wax snarky on the subject of our community, and have fe…

This week The Rev. Phil Neighbors brought a celebrity to the Sunday school class he teaches for retirement-age adults. He didn't quite know what to expect. Would anyone even know this tall, slender man with the salt-and-pepper hair and Arkansas twang?

Reader: Thank you for highlighting the beginning of what appears to be an innovative and thoughtful way to promote higher education in our community ("It's an emergency, but BC and CSUB are responding," Oct. 23). I do take exception with your characterization of what is being done to the Cen…

Mr. Bubba paused to consider the question.

Reader: Congressman Kevin McCarthy voted Oct. 16 to oppose President Trump's decision to pull U.S. troops from northern Syria, exposing the Kurdish population there to Turkish advances. Your column on McCarthy ("McCarthy needs to catch a different train while he can," Oct. 6) may have helped here.

They call it Cafe 1600 because that's the number on the outside of the county government building where it resides. But, considering all that goes on there, a better name might be the Second Chance Cafe.

Reader: Well, Robert, you may be an expert on the Bakersfield Sound, but as a political pundit you basically suck. Your article on Kevin McCarthy ("McCarthy needs to catch a different train while he can," Oct. 6) was an indication of your total hatred of President Trump. It began the day tha…

In August 1996, Kevin McCarthy invited me to accompany him on an Amtrak ride from Los Angeles to San Diego. It was a party train, in more ways than one: Thirty people from Kern County, happily sequestered in the far-rear car, were heading south for the Republican National Convention. McCarth…

Reader: I think you missed or didn’t know a very important incident that happened during the selection of the Cal State Bakersfield location mentioned in your Sunday column about Rio Bravo and the 1966 decision to reject it as a possible site for the new Kern County college campus ("Where We…

Tom Richardson was dressed to the nines Sunday morning, resplendent in his biker best. As a cancer survivor, he was taking this Distinguished Gentleman's Ride seriously.

Young Arun had been targeted and targeted again. White teens were beating him because his skin was too dark. Black teens were assaulting him because his skin was too light. Finally, Arun decided the only solution was physical superiority: He would pump iron until his muscles bulged. Then he …

Raphael Avenue just might have the best view in all of Bakersfield and, by extension, the entire San Joaquin Valley.

SACRAMENTO — The end of oil.

Four years before Gov. Gavin Newsom set in motion the managed decline of California's oil industry, Aera Energy CEO Christina Sistrunk was asking questions about the mechanics, and wisdom, of such an undertaking.

Reader: David Hogg was not on campus during the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018, where a lone gunman killed 17 people and injured 17 others ("Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg to hold lecture at CSUB," Sept. 20).

It's Extraterrestrial Week, an observance I made up just now to mark the confluence of two noteworthy news items concerning alien visitation.

Today's column was supposed to reveal precisely where Bitwise Industries, the coding-education, software development and coworking space innovator, intends to set up shop in Bakersfield.

Reader: I like The Californian and many of its features but I have been very frustrated with its political bias favoring liberals over conservatives and in the last two years slanting the news to always be critical of President Trump while never giving him any credit for his success, i.e., t…

Craig Garrett taught karate, but that was just a front. What he really taught was happiness — a concept that inspired every bit as much passion for him as did his quest to instill fitness, discipline and self-confidence in the children of his farm town.

Maybe we should drop the "y" and start identifying this part of the state as Kern counties, because it really is two distinct places: The Kern of the Central Valley and the Kern of the Mojave Desert. 

Reader: No news organization more so than our hometown paper has glorified this issue (of state lawmakers' attention to the large, uncontrolled surface leak in western Kern County's Cymric Oil Field).

Its 19th campus opens three years from now, and the Kern High School District needs to come up with a name for it. A number of factors must be taken into consideration in the decision-making process, but the most important one is this:

The Kern High School District isn't cooperating, so the Lamont High School booster club will just go it alone.

Reader: You managed to humanize the face of homelessness in your portrait of Danny ("Toilets and showers would be great, but dignity is in shortest supply," Aug. 25). From our comfortable perches, we are quick to judge and slow to help. We, too, are disgusted by the trash and vandalism left …

I have only a couple of faults that I'm willing to admit to, and one of them is football. I loved to play and I still like to watch, and I'll be in front of a television when the NFL season kicks off in eight days.

I was at a strip mall in Oildale considering my options for lunch-hour takeout when a thin, sun-ripened man walked past me. He was carrying three very full, 24-ounce cups of water, moving carefully so as not to spill.

Reader: I'm an avid consumer of your newspaper, both print and digital, and my only gripe is missing the New York Times bestseller list. This letter is, however, in response to the latest issue about Kern County oil and the state's apparent plans to shut down, eventually, its production.

Shari Rightmer calls it her Forrest Gump moment.

Reader: It’s very obvious the new owners of TBC are anti-oil, anti-Bakersfield and anti-Kern County. When an oil leak in McKittrick is front-page news ("Governor promises balanced approach after touring McKittrick-area oil leak," July 25) I have to think newsworthy stories are not their focus. 

The Kern River Valley has one of the most severe opioid problems in California. One particularly stricken burg in the area, Wofford Heights, has an opioid overdose rate five times the national average.

Kern County's days as a capital of crude oil production are numbered. California is seeing to that. Bakersfield hasn't reached the end of that road but we can see the T intersection ahead in the distance.