2011 was a momentous year locally and while deciding the top story was easy, in other years any of the top three would have been the top story and as many as the top six or seven could have been.
We knew going into 2011 that it was going to be an interesting year. The year began with a council vacancy to be filled, a city manager to hire, a budget to pass, and a water project looming.
One of the greatest lessons from Watergate has apparently been lost on the latest generation of leaders, and that is that no matter how badly you believe you acted, the worst thing that you can do is try to cover up your crimes.
It is not, in fact, the crimes of Watergate – shocking as they probably should have been for operatives working under the President’s reelection committee to have broken into the offices of political rivals – but rather the elaborate and yet clumsy and hasty ways in which they attempted to hide these facts from the American people that led to the only resignation we have had of an American President.
2011 was a momentous year locally and, while deciding the top story was easy, in other years any of the top three would have been the top story, and as many as the top six or seven could have been.
The other factor is also time, the longer the articles have been up on the site, the more read they may be. The two most-read stories this year both focused on the water issue, but not the one that has dominated headlines late this summer and fall, rather the Conaway Deal from last winter.
Voter lists have long been open to the public and therefore it is relatively easy and straightforward for campaigns and other activists to get ahold of the latest list of registered voters. And sophisticated companies have been able to obtain and compile lists ranging from permanent absentee voters to those who voted in the last election.
Perhaps you were like me, and were concerned by what you know about the incident at Davis High School where two students were apparently pulled out of class and, according to one account, threatened by police that they either turn over the names of potential taggers or face legal consequences. Perhaps you were not concerned about that incident at all.
At several different points of time, the City of Davis has talked about becoming more transparent in its dealings. The city has always complied fully with requests for information about employee salaries.
This is a weekly feature that will attempt to emphasize some of the more thoughtful and illuminating comments made during the previous week. This is not an exclusive list – but will represent all sides of the issues. But we want to encourage thoughtful and civil, but still insightful and, at times, critical comments. Hopefully this effort will strike the right balance we seek.
hpierce – “Poll Suggests Majority of Voters Favor Commuting Death Sentences to Life Without Parole”
This is a new feature that we are going to try that will attempt to emphasize some of the more thoughtful and illuminating comments made during the previous week. Obviously, given limitations, this is not an exclusive list. But we want to encourage thoughtful and civil, but still insightful and, at times, critical comments. Hopefully this effort will strike the right balance we seek.
hpierce May 1 “Sunday Commentary: Gas Prices a Curse or Blessing?”:
May is “Bike Month”… perhaps the Vanguard “community” should pledge and follow through on a commitment to ride a bicycle, when possible, in lieu of a motor vehicle trip. I have committed, thru my employer, and hope to have every trip within Davis accomplished via bicycle this month. A “Vanguardian” group could be established, and they could compete with the other groups that have signed up.
The relationship between the stories most commented upon and the stories most-read is often far less than linear. Sometimes stories that are tremendously commented on end up being well-read, but often the most-read stories are stories linked elsewhere that build readership over time.
Since we moved to davisvanguard.org we have been able to track the number of people who have read a given story.
The City of Davis is structurally like an old dinosaur, built for another era of government and so encumbered by its current obligations and hamstrung by a continually sputtering economy that there is little hope that we can make the changes we need to its governmental structure to be able to fix it.
That is no small problem, but it is worth emphasizing that our policies on compensation and retirement benefits not only are costly, in terms of trying to fix them before they lead to fiscal collapse for the city, but they are costly in terms of limiting our ability for government to meet the changing needs of its citizenry.
For a brief time last week conservatives thought they had an additional reason to crow when liberal commentator Keith Olbermann from MSNBC was suspended for the audacity, apparently, of proving MSNBC policies absurd.
That celebration must have been brief for conservatives when they were presented with the reality that not only do the commentators on Fox News donate money, but as Rachel Maddow showed with her brief expose, actually cheerlead for conservative candidates and solicit money for them on the air.
I inadvertently got into a debate over the difference between reporter and blogger with one of the reporters from the Davis Enterprise. As it turns out, there was a sore spot left over from last week’s story on the Enterprise newsroom cuts and the inexplicable blame that was placed on Bob Dunning.
It appeared the blame was placed there by Editor Debbie Davis. The crux of the story was run in the Sacramento Business Journal, which appeared to have interviewed the Davis Enterprise publisher. The key statement was, “The cuts also follow loss of an advertising contract with Hanlees Toyota, and fall-out from a column written by Bob Dunning. Classified advertising is down, too, due to the sluggish economy.”
I would have liked to have compiled the Vanguard’s second annual City Council Scorecard for 2009 but there is one big problem, to do so, I would have to reconstruct votes from Vanguard articles and memory. Why is that? Because if you go to the council Agendas and Minutes webpage, you see that the last minutes posted from Tuesday, December 9 of 2008!
That makes it a little difficult to go back and look at how people voted. I know it has been brought up during the council meetings at least once.
Beginning on Monday for the first time in our over three years in existence, the Vanguard will engage in a pilot project where registration will be required. At this time, I encourage anyone who wishes to post beginning on Monday to register a name–either your real name or a moniker. There will be a limit of one moniker per email address. However, if there is an abuse of the policy and a single individual is found to have registered under multiple email addresses, their rights to post on this forum will be terminated.
The Vanguard has proven partially if not mostly successful in its efforts to quash a subpoena seeking records by the plaintiffs in the suit Calvin Chang v. the Regents of the University of California.
The plaintiff’s subpoena sought identifying information, including names and addresses, of those individuals who under the names “Mack Chuchillo” and “anonymous” posted certain comments about Mr. Chang and his lawsuit. The comments were posted on the Vanguard just a few days after plaintiff filed suit in February 2009.
On August 8, 2009, the Vanguard ran a story on its court battle to protect the anonymity…
Member of the Davis City Council Leaks A Constituent Communcation to Bob Dunning – Written communications either sent via letter or electronically are considered public documents which are subject to the California Public Records Act. In fact, city staff often reads them, prints them out, and disseminates them as well.
Residents of Davis may rightfully rejoice at the news that Davis will house the Bicycle Hall of Fame–an honor that announced this week. However, in a lot of ways it obscures the more sinister and ominous developments of the week that will caste dark shadows over the governance of this city.
Mayor Asmundson’s second tenure as Mayor has been somewhat less eventful than her first tenure that saw open civil unrest befall the city. However, more quietly she has effectively moved to stifle debate and dissent at least within official city hall.
Last week from March 15-21, 2009 marked "Sunshine Week" across the country. This is the celebration and a reminder of the need to advance the cause of "open government." Since the foundation of the People’s Vanguard of Davis, we have strived to uphold a very simple principle–notion that the public has the right to know what the government is doing and the duty to hold the government accountable. Our focus has primarily been on the city of Davis with extensions into Yolo County, the region, and even the State of California from time to time.