Eeyores News and view

What do or would you do when the unthinkable happens in your neighborhood?

Standoff In The Neighborhood

You’re driving back from the mall. There is a police car parked in the intersection of your street and the cross street you take to the mall. Lights are flashing all over. You stop well back and park. It takes only a few moments to find out there is a hostage situation three houses down from yours. The husband went postal when he found out his wife wanted a divorce.

You look at your watch. Your high schooler is already out of school and on the bus. You ask the police officer where the bus will be stopped. Here, you find out. So Junior will know what is going on. Little Alice is at dance class just down from the school. A quick call on the cell phone and you leave a message at Hubby’s work to institute plan Alpha. It takes a few minutes to get to the dance academy. Alice is getting much better. You tell the car pool mom that you’re picking her up. It’ll be a few more minutes. Time to run down to the Quick-Stop and get a couple of things.

Alice thinks it is kind of fun to be doing Alpha when you tell her why you’re picking her up. They’d only just walked through the plan before, with her at school. It’s tempting to divert to pick up Junior, but he knows the route to Jessica’s house just fine. You’d have to go through the bad part of the city from here to pick him up. Better to just go to Jessica’s and get Alice set.

Another quick call. This one to Jessica. Nuts. The cell never works here. Doesn’t matter. Jessica and you have discussed this a few times and have a plan. It’s a little surprising, but Jessica is home. You won’t have to get the hidden key for the travel trailer and stay there until she gets home at her regular time.

By the time you explain what is going on, Junior shows up and knocks on the door. Another explanation. Junior brings in the items you picked up at the market. A little extra for supper, just in case. It would have been fine. Jessica and family were having hamburgers. There is plenty of extra for everyone.

Everyone is sitting down to eat when Hubby shows up, running late from work, as usual. Since there hadn’t been an Alpha Blue code, just Alpha, he’d not been in a hurry.

The standoff was still going on, according to the six o’clock news. It was over by ten that evening, but the sleeping bags were spread out in Jessica’s living room. No point in hurrying back. Probably run into the media wanting sound bites. Not worth the hassle. There would be no problem getting up an hour early the next morning and going home to get ready for work and school. The plan had worked just like the drills.

End ********
Jerry D. Young
Copyright 2004

L.A. County officials offer a novel idea to save millions
Supervisors suggest putting unemployed parents to work caring for their own children as part of proposed changes to CalWorks and other state government aid programs.
By Molly Hennessy-Fiske
June 17, 2009
With steep state budget cuts under debate in Sacramento, Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to push for changes to CalWorks and other government aid programs they said would save nearly $270 million.
Included in their suggestions is a novel proposal: Put unemployed parents to work caring for their own children.
"What we're saying is do not cut Welfare to Work outright: Target the cuts to the people who are the most expensive," said Miguel Santana, a deputy to the county's chief executive.
Parents now receiving assistance must attend job training and search for work. While they fulfill those requirements, they are eligible for subsidized child care, which typically costs the state about $500 a month per child in L.A. County.
The parents of children under age 1 may stay home and still receive benefits. Now, county officials propose expanding that to parents who have one child under age 2 or two children under age 6. Monthly job training and child-care costs for such parents often exceed their welfare check, Santana said.
In Los Angeles County, 8,000 households with more than one child under age 6 receive CalWorks-subsidized child care, according to the county's department of social services. If adopted, county officials estimate the proposal -- intended to counter Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's threat to eliminate CalWorks -- could save the state $140 million this fiscal year.
Some parents who would be affected by the change had mixed feelings.
After Antoinette Levenson's husband was laid off by a boat dealership two years ago, the mother of two applied for cash assistance and joined the state's Welfare to Work program.
Now Levenson, 27, is about six months from earning her associate degree in culinary arts and has a job lined up at Ralphs. She receives about $750 a month in assistance. The state also pays about $1,000 a month for her sons, Jaden, 4, and Gavyn, 2, to attend Canyon Vista Children's Learning Center in Chatsworth while she finishes school.
"If I had it my way, I'd stay home all day with my kids," Levenson said as she dropped the boys off Tuesday. "Then again, I love day care. My kids have learned so much."
Although Levenson said she is not sure she could replace her eldest son's preschool teachers, she is willing to try.
"There's times I just drive by and watch the kids," she said. "You'll never be able to get the kids' little years back."
But Priscilla Murillo of Canoga Park, a single mother with three children under age 5, said she wants to finish school and find a job as soon as possible. With her youngest child just a month old, Murillo, 27, could stay home now and still receive benefits. But she said the Welfare to Work program motivated her to continue pursuing her associate degree.
Murillo worries that if the state pays fellow single mothers to stay home, they will become dependent on welfare.
"I think it's good to push people," she said. "It helps them and it helps the economy."
Child-care providers also said they are concerned about looming cuts.
Michael Olenick, who heads the nonprofit Child Care Resource Center in Chatsworth, said 12,000 child-care staff members and parents in northern L.A. County alone rely on CalWorks.
"For many of them, it's the only source of revenue that they have," Olenick said of the CalWorks subsidies. "If they lose the revenue, then they end up on cash aid as well."
On Tuesday, a legislative budget committee in Sacramento rejected the governor's plan to eliminate CalWorks, proposing instead to cut it by $270 million. Those cuts include $175 million in reductions to child-care and employment services.
That would allow the county to move forward with its proposal, said Philip K. Browning, director of the county Department of Public Social Services.
"But it's still not a done deal -- the governor hasn't signed off on it yet," Browning said.
A spokeswoman for the governor said he will continue to push for the elimination of CalWorks but remains open to other options as he tries to close the $24.3-billion budget shortfall.
County supervisors -- who plan to pursue a waiver to get federal welfare funds even if CalWorks is eliminated -- also proposed Tuesday that the state cap and overhaul general relief for single people, as well as reduce payments to adoptive parents, disabled foster children and some child-care providers.
The proposal to allow more parents to stay home troubled some of the county supervisors, including Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who voted against exempting parents of children under age 2 from Welfare to Work.
"They should be seeking employment. In the long term it benefits everyone in the county," Antonovich said.
Supervisor Gloria Molina grudgingly voted yes.
"It doesn't fit with the spirit of Welfare to Work, but we're in a different situation," Molina said. "What we're doing is trying to say to them don't eliminate Welfare to Work -- here are some savings."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-calworks17-2009jun17,0,6294929.story

Minn. lawmaker vows not to complete Census
Outspoken Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann says she's so worried that information from next year's national census will be abused that she will refuse to fill out anything more than the number of people in her household.
In an interview Wednesday morning with The Washington Times "America's Morning News," Mrs. Bachmann, Minnesota Republican, said the questions have become "very intricate, very personal" and she also fears ACORN, the community organizing group that came under fire for its voter registration efforts last year, will be part of the Census Bureau's door-to-door information collection efforts.
"I know for my family the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home," she said. "We won't be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn't require any information beyond that."
Shelly Lowe, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Census Bureau, said Mrs. Bachmann is "misreading" the law.
She sent a portion of the U.S. legal code that says anyone over 18 years of age who refuses to answer "any of the questions" on the census can be fined up to $5,000.
The Constitution requires a census be taken every 10 years. Questions range from number of persons in the household and racial information to employment status and whether anyone receives social services such as food stamps.
Mrs. Bachmann said she's worried about the involvement of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, in next year's census.
"They will be in charge of going door to door and collecting data from the American public," she said. "This is very concerning."
ACORN has applied to help recruit workers to help conduct the census. Republican lawmakers and some public interest groups have expressed concern over their involvement.
ACORN staffers have ben indicted in several states on charges of voter registration fraud stemming from the organization's efforts to register voters last year.
Mrs. Bachmann, who is in her second term in the House, has become a lightning rod for criticism from Democrats and liberal talk show hosts for her unapologetic conservative views. She said she considers that "a badge of honor."
"It's clear when a person speaks out against those policies they become a target, and that should be concerning to everyone," she said.
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/17/exclusive-minn-lawmaker-fears-census-abuse/

EXCLUSIVE: Cuban spies' shortwave radios go undetected
MIAMI A retired State Department officer and his wife who are accused of spying for Cuba appear to have avoided capture for 30 years because their communications with the Caribbean island were too low-tech to be detected by sophisticated U.S. monitors.
Longtime State Department intelligence researcher Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 71, were arrested this month after a weeks-long sting operation in which they told an FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence officer that they received orders from Cuba's intelligence services over shortwave radio, according to a Justice Department affidavit.
U.S. intelligence spends little time combing the shortwave bands for secret, nefarious transmissions, said James Lewis, director and senior fellow for the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"I'm not surprised [the U.S. intelligence community] missed this," Mr. Lewis said. "We don't put an emphasis on monitoring this kind of activity."
Shortwave radio is a remnant of an era that existed before the Internet and satellite communications, including the sophisticated eavesdropping equipment of the National Security Agency.
But Chris Simmons, a former Cuba analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), said Cuban intelligence still likes to use shortwave to communicate with its agents in the United States.
Former DIA senior analyst Ana Montes, arrested in September 2001 and convicted of spying on behalf of the Cuban government, also received her orders in shortwave communiques. So did Jennifer Miles, who in the 1960s was the last State Department official before Mr. Myers to be arrested on charges of spying for Cuba.
"While some countries have moved to computer-based communications [for clandestine operations], Havana still largely relies on shortwave broadcasts," Mr. Simmons said.
The International Amateur Radio Union said there are more than 700,000 amateur radio operators in the United States.
Though shortwave operators are required to have licenses to transmit in the United States, many do not, said one shortwave user, adding that used equipment is readily sold online.
The Justice Department affidavit said Cuban intelligence appears to have sent the Myerses an unknown number of messages since the late 1970s, using simple number-to-letter codes.
"If you broadcast short messages and are disciplined, you are going to get away with it," Mr. Lewis said.
Even if U.S. authorities detect a transmission and determine that it is a coded message from a foreign intelligence unit, they do not know for whom the message is intended, Mr. Simmons said.
"When an intelligence agent broadcasts from Havana, the footprint it puts down on the earth is hundreds of miles across," he said. "And so from an investigative standpoint, it's impossible to find out who it went to."
Just 50 to 100 watts, about the power needed to illuminate a light bulb, can broadcast a shortwave message halfway around the world, said Moe Thomas, a broadcast television engineering technician in Washington and a shortwave radio enthusiast.
Shortwave radio is considered a "robust backbone system" that works when "all other means of communication are down," Mr. Thomas said, noting that shortwave transmissions have been useful for disseminating information after natural disasters.
Many foreign embassies and U.S. agencies in Washington have shortwave antennas on their roofs, and the news broadcasts of the federally funded Voice of America reach some of the most remote corners of the world via shortwave radio.
A short numerical cipher broadcast from Cuba can easily go unnoticed among the many shortwave transmissions filling the airwaves.
Mr. Simmons said Cuban intelligence uses its U.S. agents to monitor military movements and gather other information and then puts it up for sale.
"The view from Havana is that U.S. intelligence is a commodity that is to be bought, sold and traded to anyone that can come up with the right offer," he said, claiming that Havana told Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein about the type of equipment and forces the United States was using ahead of the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq war.
"Havana has a very keen understanding of where our weak spots are ... and they exploit them," Mr. Simmons said.
Efforts to contact officials at the Cuban mission in Washington for comment were unsuccessful.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/18/cuban-spies-shortwave-radios-defy-detection/