Its iconic status is especially evident in Southern California, where it is known by several names as it runs through the heart of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, carrying 300,000 vehicles a day.

To those who continue the region’s tradition of naming roadways, it’s the Santa Monica Freeway. Traffic reporters refer to it as “The 10.” At one time, there was even a serious movement for Christopher Columbus – before, of course, the explorer became politically incorrect.

By any name, I-10 is an important artery for a region that still depends on autos and trucks to carry people and goods. Its vital role makes it, from time to time, a political lightning rod.

The freeway’s biggest political brouhaha erupted in 1976, when the pavement of one lane in each direction was marked with diamond-shaped symbols and reserved for cars carrying at least three passengers — the state’s first experiment discouraging single-occupant driving. The immediate result was traffic chaos both on the freeway and on nearby surface streets and countless angry drivers.

Although the so-called diamond lanes experiment had been planned during Republican Ronald Reagan’s governorship, Jerry Brown was governor when Caltrans made the switch, just as he was launching his first campaign for president.

Nevertheless, it reflected Brown’s philosophy. “Obviously,” he said that year in a speech, “the ethic of unlimited freeways that attempt to pour cement from one end of the state to the other is over and it takes a while for people to adjust to that.”

Adriana Gianturco, an old college friend of Brown’s who had been an urban planner in Boston, became Caltrans director the same day and had nothing to do with the project, but immediately became its much-despised symbol.

Five months after the diamond lanes experiment began, a judge ruled that it had not undergone a needed environmental impact review and with opposition still raging, the Brown administration quietly dropped it.

Eighteen years later, in 1994, I-10 once again became the center of political attention when the Northridge Earthquake seriously damaged the elevated structure. Although many other public facilities were also damaged, I-10’s central role made repairs a priority.

Then-Gov. Pete Wilson declared a state of emergency and the state hired a construction firm from the Sacramento area, headed by a larger-than-life builder named C.C. Myers, to rebuild the freeway with huge financial incentives for rapid completion. Myers’ crews worked around-the-clock and finished repairs 74 days ahead of schedule, earning a reported $200,000 a day bonus. The tab doubled from $14.9 million to $30 million, but it was worth it since closure of the freeway was costing the local economy an estimated $1 million a day.

The fire put Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on the spot to get the freeway fixed and back in operation as quickly as possible. During a Monday press conference, with workers in the background shoring up scarred pillars, both pledged to do so and on Tuesday Newsom estimated that repairs would take three to five weeks.

Newsom and Bass deflected suggestions that the homeless camps next to the pallet yards might have been responsible for the fire but the suspicion adds to the already raging public anger over such camps.

The I-10 countdown begins again.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Instead, while some of the small growers who characterized the illegal business have been licensed, the new market has quickly become dominated by a handful of huge corporate farmers. Hoping to save the small growers from extinction, the California Legislature is considering rolling back some of the very environmental guardrails that were supposed to make the legal industry more sustainable.

This is a big mistake. While the intent of proposals like Senate Bill 508, introduced by John Laird, D-Monterey, may be laudable, removing environmental safeguards would set a bad precedent, and it won’t save the beleaguered growers who are struggling to survive in the new market.

In fact, it will probably hasten their demise.

The state’s environmental regulations are not to blame for the struggles of small farmers. County permitting decisions, the local political climate in places where there is opposition to the industry, and the inability of law enforcement to completely eradicate illicit cultivation have been much bigger hurdles.

But the largest obstacle has been simple economics.

Cannabis prices have fallen rapidly since the product became legal, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. Prior to legalization, about 80% of the cost of producing weed came from trying to avoid law enforcement, according to a RAND Corporation report. With that huge cost of production gone, larger growers entered the market and were able to use technology and other efficiencies to lower their costs.

The result is a glut of supply that has driven down the price, making it nearly impossible for small farmers in the remote forested mountains of Northern California, who once dominated the industry, to compete.

Changing the environmental rules wouldn’t change this economic reality. Instead, it would punish the small growers who navigated the permitting system and are playing by the rules. And it would give still another advantage to the large corporate farmers who have had little trouble creating and expanding their operations.

The state should focus on changes that would actually help small growers. Increasing law enforcement spending against illicit producers for at least five years would send a clear message.

Limiting the size of farms, which would give small growers a chance to compete while they establish their businesses, would also help. This was part of the original intent of Prop. 64, but the state created a loophole that allowed larger farms to be created and dominate the market.

California needs to make it easier for small growers to reach their customers. Large farmers have the resources to build vertically integrated businesses where cultivation, processing and distribution are all under one umbrella, while small growers currently lose much of their revenue to middlemen.

When voters agreed to legalize marijuana for recreational use, they were told they were helping both small farmers and the environment. The state can and should continue to pursue each of these goals, instead of retreating on both.

Rosalie Liccardo Pacula is a professor of health policy, economics and law at USC and former president of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy. Michael Sutton is former president of the California Fish and Game Commission. They wrote this commentary for CalMatters.

Yes, both men are unpopular, remarkably so. Only one-third of Americans view President Joe Biden favorably, and two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters want to nominate someone else for the presidency (no one in particular, just someone else, please). Trump is the overwhelming favorite to become the Republican nominee for the third consecutive time, but his overall approval rating is lower than Biden’s. And while 60% of voters don’t want to put Trump back in the White House, 65% don’t want to hand Biden a second term, either. The one thing on which Americans seem to agree is that we find a Biden-Trump 2024 rematch entirely disagreeable.

This disdain may reflect the standard gripes about the candidates. (One is too old, the other too Trump.) But it also may signal an underlying reluctance to acknowledge the meaning of their standoff and the inescapability of our decision. A contest between Biden and Trump would compel Americans to either reaffirm or discard basic democratic and governing principles. More so than any other pairing, Biden versus Trump forces us to decide, or at least to clarify, who we think we are and what we strive to be.

Trump is running as an overtly authoritarian candidate; the illusion of pivots, of adults in the room, of a man molded by the office is long gone. He is dismissive of the law, except when he can harness it for his benefit; of open expression, except when it fawns all over him; and of free elections, except when they produce victories he likes. He has called for the “termination” of the Constitution based on his persistent claims of 2020 electoral fraud, and according to The Washington Post, in a new term, he would use the Justice Department as an instrument of vengeance against political opponents. We know who Trump is and what he offers.

Biden’s case to the electorate — for 2020, 2022 and 2024 — has been premised on the preservation of American democratic traditions. In the video announcing his 2020 campaign, he asserted that “our very democracy” was at stake in the race against Trump. In a speech two months before the midterm vote last year, he asserted that Trump and his allies “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundation of our Republic.” And the video kicking off his 2024 reelection bid featured multiple scenes of the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The question we are facing,” Biden said, “is whether in the years ahead, we have more freedom or less freedom.” That is our choice in 2024.

Rather eat glass

Like so many others, I also wish we could avoid that choice or at least defer it. As journalist Amy Walter has put it, “Swing voters would rather eat a bowl of glass than have to choose between Trump and Biden again.” Well, it may be time to grab a spoon and unroll the gauze. When half the country believes democracy isn’t working well, when calls for political violence have become commonplace, when the speaker of the House is an election denier, it is time to face what we risk becoming and to accept or reject it. We have no choice but to choose.

Even if some combination of poor health and legal proceedings somehow pushed Biden and Trump aside — and some blandly likable generic candidates took their places — we could not simply rewind the past eight years and return to our regularly scheduled programming. America would still face the choices and temptations that Biden and Trump have come to represent; the choice would not change, even if the faces did.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll that shows Trump leading Biden in five battleground states also asked registered voters which candidate they trust on key questions. Trump won on the economy, immigration and national security; Biden received higher marks on just two issues. The first was abortion, a core priority among Democratic voters and one that proved powerful in last year’s midterms and the off-year elections and ballot initiatives last Tuesday in states like Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia.

The second issue on which Biden commands greater trust? By a slim margin, it is democracy. This advantage is pronounced among Black voters, who trust Biden over Trump by 77% to 16% on democracy, and Hispanic voters, who prefer Biden by 53% to 38%. (White voters, by contrast, sided with Trump 50% to 44% on that issue.) The protection of American democracy offers a potentially resonant message for Biden, precisely among parts of the Democratic coalition that he can ill afford to lose.

They need each other

Of course, we already faced this choice — and made it — in 2020. Why insist on a do-over? Because a country approaching its 250th birthday does not have the luxury of calling itself an experiment forever; this is the moment to assess the results of that experiment. Because Jan. 6 was not the final offensive by those who would overrun the will of voters. Because a lone Trump victory in 2016 could conceivably be remembered as an aberration if it were followed by two consecutive defeats, but a Trump restoration in 2024 would confirm America’s slide toward authoritarian rule and would render Biden’s lone term an interregnum, a blip in history’s turn. And we must choose again because the fever did not break; instead, it threatens to break us.

Carlos Lozada is a New York Times columnist.

Expose Trump, don’t
denigrate Democrats

Re: “World’s stage comes to San Francisco” (Page A1, Nov. 12).

Sunday’s front page had four photographs which included our president, our governor, our vice president, and San Francisco’s mayor. Under each photo were demeaning captions such as how 52% of Californians disapprove of Biden’s performance, Newsom’s sliding in the polls, and how Harris is struggling with “dismal polling.”

Who cares about polling right now? There is a solid year to get that information. Not one nice word about all of the accomplishments that Biden-Harris has achieved, and there are plenty.

Your front page should be calling out Donald Trump’s lies and what danger he is to our country, every single day.

Marlene Lerner-Bigley
Martinez

Let’s be honest about
Israel’s goals in war

I read Dr Khelfa’s moving description of the effect of the Israel-Hamas war on Gazan children. The account consisted of 18 paragraphs and 905 words. Not one of those words was “Hamas;” nor did any paragraph mention the atrocity of Oct. 7 when Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped over 200. The reader might have gotten the impression that Israeli military activity in Gaza was some random brutality inflicted for no particular reason.

Israel has been honest enough to admit that the death toll for Oct. 7 was 1,200 rather than the 1,400 originally reported and that it has not been possible to confirm reports of the beheading of babies. Likewise, Palestinians should admit that, while there may be strong objections to Israel’s strategy and tactics, the goal of the military actions — to ensure that Hamas can never have the ability to carry out another massacre — is legally and morally justifiable.

Merlin Dorfman
Livermore

Ex-trainer’s sentence
falls short of justice

Re: “Ex-SJSU trainer sentenced to 2 years in prison for sexually abusing athletes” (Nov. 14).

Upon reading the article about ex-SJSU trainer Scott Shaw sentenced only to a two-year sentence for sexually violating many SJSU students, I am outraged, not only by our justice system for the sentencing and restitution to the victims not being enough for his heinous actions, but also at the fact that he will still receive his pension.

His abuse of power as a trainer, and his taking advantage of so many young women, has broken my trust in the university.

Alivia Martinez
San Jose

MTC’s toll road plan
should be rejected

The MTC is considering making all lanes of Bay Area freeways tolled. Good intentions cannot pave new transit lines or construct infrastructure upgrades.

I understand and support efforts to encourage greater transit use and reduce emissions from travel, but this policy seems like it will not only fail on this goal but worsen conditions as a whole. Current express lanes have done little to nothing to reduce traffic, and are punitive against those with lower incomes.

Caltrain services are being reduced, BART remains a mess, and many folks live far from stations, rendering transit lines a poor alternative. This forces people to drive, and between a tolled highway or surface streets, many are simply going to reroute through the cities, worsening traffic, impeding emergency vehicles, and overloading municipal road resources.

Our transit should avoid becoming another political albatross like CPUC. MTC should reject this plan lest voters intervene.

Christopher Dooner
Sunnyvale

Valley buildings should
reflect cutting edge

Re: “Former Fry’s site to become housing” (Page B1, Nov. 13).

I’m writing to express my dismay at the uninspiring multi-story, high-density buildings that have proliferated in San Jose. These structures, lacking character and resembling prisons, are a design disappointment for a city that is a global tech hub. As we strive for recognition of technological achievements and innovation, our architectural landscape should also reflect the same forward-thinking vision.

How could the San Jose City Council and the Planning Commission approve such lifeless building designs? It begs the question of whether these decisions align with our city’s aspirations. San Jose has a unique opportunity to showcase cutting-edge designs that not only accommodate density but also contribute to a vibrant, aesthetically pleasing urban environment.

I urge our city leaders to reassess the architectural direction of current high-density housing and consider collaborating with visionary architects to create structures that resonate with our status as a technological powerhouse.

Bob Young
San Jose

Legislation would help
reach climate goals

Re: “Permitting reform may help cool the climate” (Page A6, Nov. 3).

Such a bill is underway in the U.S. Congress. The BIG WIRES Act was recently introduced in both the House (HR 5551) and Senate (S 2827). This bill hastens the extension and upgrade of our national electric transmission grid. Affordable, clean electricity will be more available to regions now distant from renewable sources of energy. The bill should attract strong bipartisan support because it improves the supply from both renewable and nonrenewable sources of electricity. It would provide more good jobs for Americans, particularly in rural areas of the country.

Rob Hogue
Menlo Park

The proposal, by an organization called Californians for Financial Education, is the latest of several efforts to make personal finance a required subject.

“California has lagged behind the rest of the nation when it comes to personal finance education,” Tim Ranzetta, a financial executive in Palo Alto and founder of the organization, said in a statement. “Only 1% of California students are required to take a personal finance course as a condition for graduation compared to 48% nationally.”

Ranzetta’s proposal is also the latest of many efforts to add specific topics to California’s school curricula. Scarcely a year passes without new proposals to expand required coursework, either as standalone classes or woven into other required classes.

A new state law, dealing with media literacy exemplifies the latter. Beginning next year, the state’s schools must modify existing curricula to include skills in differentiating legitimate journalism from fake news meant to sway opinion, prompted by the proliferation of social media with dubious validity.

“I’ve seen the impact that misinformation has had in the real world — how it affects the way people vote, whether they accept the outcomes of elections, try to overthrow our democracy,” Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Menlo Park Democrat and the bill’s author, told CalMatters. “This is about making sure our young people have the skills they need to navigate this landscape.”

Another new requirement, this one for high school graduation, is ethnic studies, which the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom decreed after years of often heated debate over what should be taught and how.

The first draft of a model curriculum basically suggested that high school students be indoctrinated into believing that anyone in America not a white male is oppressed.

“At its core,” the draft initially declared, “the field of ethnic studies is the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States,” adding, “The field critically grapples with the various power structures and forms of oppression, including, but not limited to, white supremacy, race and racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia, that continue to impact the social, emotional, cultural, economic, and political experiences of Native People(s) and people of color.”

In response to criticism, particularly from Jewish legislators who said the draft was antisemitic, it underwent two revisions before being adopted as a graduation requirement beginning in 2030. It still contains tinges of left-wing dogma.

New curriculum mandates might seem justified on a standalone basis. Conceptually, it’s laudable that students become more aware of California’s ethnic diversity, more adept at separating legitimate journalism from fake news, and better able to manage their personal finances.

California’s high school students are already required to pass the equivalent of 13 year-long classes in specific subjects for graduation, and a number of additional courses if they want to attend four-year colleges.

Adding new mandates takes class time away from basics that too many students are not already mastering. Financial or media literacy classes are pointless for kids who can’t do math or read at their grade level.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Chinese leaders have been adroit at extracting economic concessions from the United States in exchange for commitments that are usually restatements of prior agreements and seldom honored. Wildly uneven bilateral trade with China first hit American workers in the 2000s in the form of massive job losses. It then hit American consumers during and after the Covid-19 pandemic in the form of shortages and dependencies. Now, as China aligns with Russia and grows increasingly bellicose toward its Asian neighbors, it fuels the hit on American national security interests.

We shouldn’t expect Biden to turn all this around in one meeting. However, we should expect he won’t revert to the theater of unaccountability and handshakes that described U.S.-China relations for so long. The interests of American workers, consumers and security aren’t served by offering China’s leadership an open hand when it comes to trade.

In retrospect, normalizing trade with China was a destabilizing event in this country. American corporations rushed overseas to sell to Chinese consumers and took with them their manufacturing to take advantage of the huge and impoverished Chinese workforce. American factory workers saw their jobs leave for Asia, and more were laid off in the resulting flood of Chinese imports. U.S. manufacturing employment, a middle-class bulwark for Americans holding less than a four-year degree, was reduced by nearly 6 million over the next decade. California alone lost more than 650,000 jobs from 2001 to 2018. Addiction and mortality rates increased.

American shoppers, meanwhile, benefitted from cheaper prices at big box stores stocked with imports. But those price reductions evaporated years before the pandemic revealed that many crucial material goods – be it personal protective equipment for health workers or building materials for home construction – simply aren’t made here anymore.

This black swan event brought reality into relief: The United States has deindustrialized to a point where many supply chains were subject to grinding international bottlenecks.

Overreliance on Chinese trade has a lot of responsibility for that.

Bill Clinton argued “the more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people” to persuade Congress to normalize trade ties. George Bush was both too permissive and too disengaged. Barack Obama thought dialogue would bring about true market and political liberalization. Donald Trump, acting unilaterally, thought tariffs and browbeating Chinese leadership would close those trade deficits and reshore U.S. manufacturing capacity. None of it worked.

President Biden has maintained virtually all of Trump’s tariffs. He’s also enacted federal investments that create not only domestic manufacturing capacity but demand for it as well. He’s checked outbound investment in Chinese companies and erected export controls on technologies like semiconductor manufacturing equipment critical to industrial advancement and military platforms. He’s shown a willingness to work with allies against unfair Chinese trade. Consider, for example, the ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and European Union to create a clean steel bloc.

I hope the president will remember this, all accomplished since Washington adopted a tougher line on Chinese trade. Because, when he meets Xi today, the resiliency America is re-establishing can’t be traded away again.

Scott Paul is president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, an association of a number of large domestic manufacturers and the United Steelworkers union.

And I think that’s great. When I, say, take a stroll around Jackson Heights I see the essence of America as it was supposed to be, a magnet for people around the world seeking freedom and opportunity — people like my own grandparents.

And no, Queens isn’t an urban hellscape. It may not be leafy and green, but it has less serious crime per capita than the rest of New York City, and New York, although nobody will believe it, is one of the safest places in America. It’s also relatively healthy, with life expectancy around three years higher than that of the United States as a whole.

Trump’s plans

But Trump has declared that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that, to steal from the late, great Molly Ivins, might sound better in the original German. Look, I know there’s a debate over whether the MAGA movement fully meets the classic criteria for fascism, but can we at least agree that its language is increasingly fascist-adjacent?

And so are its policies.

On Saturday The New York Times reported that Trump, if returned to office, intends to pursue drastic anti-immigration policies — scouring the country for immigrants living in the country illegally and building huge camps to, um, concentrate them before deporting them by the millions. Suspected members of drug cartels and gangs would be expelled without due process. Suspected by whom, on what grounds? Good question.

If you believe that none of this should concern you, because you’re a U.S. citizen, you should know that on Veterans Day, Trump gave a speech promising to “root out” the “radical-left thugs” that, he says — echoing the likes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — infest America “like vermin.” Who counts as “radical left”? Well, today’s Republicans — not just Trump — have a very expansive definition. After all, they routinely accuse Joe Biden of being a Marxist.

Economic disaster

Given all this anti-democratic rhetoric, it seems almost crass to point out that a Trumpian war on immigrants would also be an economic disaster. But it would.

That’s apparently not what the Trumpists believe. That Times article quotes Stephen Miller, who headed anti-immigrant operations when Trump was in the White House, as claiming that mass deportations will be “celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.”

Very few economists would agree.

To the extent that there’s anything beyond raw xenophobia behind Trumpist hostility to foreign workers, it seems to be the view that America has a limited number of jobs to offer and that immigrants take those jobs away from the native-born. In reality, however, except during recessions, the number of jobs, and hence the economy’s growth, is limited by the available workforce rather than the other way around.

And the contribution of immigrants to America’s long-term growth is startlingly large. Since 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. labor force has increased by 14.6 million. Of these additional workers, 7.8 million — more than half — were foreign born.

Badly needed workers

Oh, and if these immigrants are taking away American jobs, how can the unemployment rate be near a 50-year low? In fact, we desperately need these workers, among other things because they will help us cope with the needs of an aging population.

Now, you might worry that less-educated immigrants will push down wages at the bottom, increasing income inequality. But the bottom line from decades of research on this topic is that this doesn’t seem to happen. Even less-educated immigrants bring different skills and make different job choices from their native-born counterparts, so they end up being complements to, not substitutes for, local workers.

None of this is to deny that sudden surges of migrants can place a burden on local communities and that we need policies to mitigate these impacts. But that’s very different from a sweeping rejection of immigration, which is as American as apple pie, not to mention pizza and bagels — foods brought by earlier immigrants who were, in their day, the targets of just as much prejudice and hatred as the immigrants of today.

America doesn’t need to be made great again, because it’s already great. But if you wanted to destroy that greatness, the two most important things you would do would be to reject its commitment to freedom and close its doors to people seeking a better life. Unfortunately, if Trump returns to office, he seems determined to do both of these things.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

Public must do
better by our pets

Re: “At beleaguered shelter, care for pets criticized” (Page B6, Nov. 12).

Our shelters should be providing adequate, if not better, care for the pets nobody wants. However, the greater public needs to take responsibility for the animal overpopulation problem as well.

Assembly Bill 702, introduced in 2021 to regulate “hobby” or “backyard” breeders, and opposed by the American Kennel Club among others with money interests, was not even heard. People bought “pandemic pets,” then found out they require too much work and returned them.

“Backyard breeders” breed dogs to earn extra income, and take the surplus to the shelter, if the animals are lucky. The rest are dumped.

As for puppy mills, they are poorly run; dogs are treated like livestock, hence they arrive with behavior problems. Yet people support puppy mills every time they purchase a puppy from out of state.

The public can do better.

Anne Filice-Gilbertson
Danville

Libraries lack new books
in Alameda County

Customer service seems to be lacking at our Alameda County libraries. No new material has been coming in for over a month so I contacted my local library (Union City) and they are clueless as to why and suggested I contact their circulation department. I did that last Wednesday, but I haven’t heard back. Very frustrating.

And, whatever problem our library group is having either internal or external must be that of Alameda County alone. My mother lives in Santa Clara County and said there’s no problem at all with getting new books in there.

Our tax dollar is definitely not working for us at the library.

Steven Anticevich
Union City

Critical thinking, media
literacy will benefit kids

Re: “Recognizing fake news now a required subject in California schools” (Nov. 10).

At a time when an immense amount of information is accessible in the palms of our hands, it’s vital to have the right tools to dissect that information. Having media literacy woven into the curriculum for California students will give them practice with thinking critically about the information they are given.

Students need to be encouraged to ask questions, specifically critical questions, when presented with information. For the past few years, critical thinking has been mostly absent when taking in the news. Preparing students at a young age to think critically and supplying them with the tools needed to dissect information will benefit us all.

Media literacy is a muscle that should be constantly exercised to be strong. It’s something that we must learn to use.

Paulina Robles
Oakland

Amid Gaza fighting,
prioritize Ukraine peace

Finding our way to a cease-fire, and bringing peace to Israel and Palestine, is a top priority.

However, let us not forget to continue pressing for a cease-fire and peace negotiations to end the nearly 2-year-old war in Ukraine that is also killing and maiming untold Ukrainians and Russians as well as devastating the Ukrainian landscape.

Eleanor Levine
Oakland

Hamas is the cause
of Palestinian suffering

Re: “Killing Palestinian children cannot be justified” (Page A7, Nov. 10).

I find it interesting how in Dr. Yousef Khelfa’s commentary, he decries the deaths of Palestinian children and not once acknowledges the kidnapping of 242 men, women and children, including the elderly, and mothers clutching babies, by Hamas. Nor does he mention Hamas’ slaughter of 260 young adults attending a peaceful musical festival, the butchering of captives, and the murder of over 1,200 people.

It’s also interesting how Dr. Khelfa and others who demand a cease-fire ignore Hamas’ brutal, authoritarian rule over the Palestinians or how Hamas hordes fuel while hospitals go without. These convenient omissions speak volumes.

Want a cease-fire? Then Dr. Khelfa and other Palestinians should demand that Hamas release the hostages. Want to “free Palestine?” Then demand to free Palestine from Hamas and all who deny the right of Israel to exist. That’s the real cause of Palestinian suffering.

Mark Cohen
Oakland

Age is an asset
for President Biden

Re: “Time for Biden to turn over the wheel” (Page A12, Nov 12).

Mr. Hogan’s letter criticizing President Biden’s advanced age demonstrates his ignorance of the fact that he is being gaslighted by the corporate media.

Biden demonstrates that age not only brings wisdom and experience but can also enhance our lives.

After almost three years in office, the Biden administration has demonstrated a regime run by political professionals with vast government experience and policy expertise. Compare that to Donald Trump’s four years of self-generated chaos with little policy output.

Corporate media shows little concern about Trump’s age (77 years) or mental capacity. Add to that one failed coup, two impeachments and 91 felony indictments.

President Biden has impressive physical and mental health and should be rewarded for his presidential accomplishments with another four years.

Andrew Wise
Fremont

MTC should invest in
transit, not impose fees

I am disappointed to learn about the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s proposal to implement a per-mile fee on major highways. Many people rely on highways to commute to work, and due to the underdeveloped state of our public transportation system and the size of the Bay Area, it’s impossible for people to travel without driving on highways.

We need a more effective transportation system that will incentivize individuals to use public transportation, rather than punishing them for using the only transportation that is available to them. Not only will this reduce the number of cars on the road by allowing large amounts of people that are going to the same place to travel together, but it will also lessen traffic pollution and long commute times that many people are struggling with.

The MTC should invest in infrastructure that supports efficient transportation rather than implementing tolls.

Itay Nemet
San Jose

Supervisors preserve
a South Bay jewel

Re: “County kills Coyote Valley development” (Page B1, Nov. 8).

Thank you, Santa Clara County supervisors, for defending Coyote Valley from the development of an “estate home” (mansion) in the middle of agricultural land. Let this moment be remembered as the first time eminent domain has been used to protect the environment in Santa Clara County.

Coyote Valley is a jewel, and with the open space areas and parks, it is accessible to all in the South Bay. Supervisors Susan Ellenberg, Otto Lee, Sylvia Arenas and Joe Simitian as well as the Open Space Board have preserved a wonderland from being blemished.

Paul Boehm
San Jose

Encampment, on-ramp
create danger

As homeless numbers increase, so will encampments. But, as in Sunnyvale’s Central Expressway entrance ramp at E. California Ave., a real traffic safety issue is going to get innocent people hurt.

Along with the adjacent neighborhood of Victory Village being held hostage, this entrance ramp has people wandering across vehicles’ paths. The county is paying for trash removal regularly and often. Drivers must avoid hitting people or debris on the ramp. This is an unsafe location for a growing encampment.

So, before someone gets killed, Sunnyvale officials and the county of Santa Clara need to act.

Don Dubocq
Sunnyvale

Trustees should act
to rescind tuition hike

I am deeply concerned about the recently approved 6% annual tuition increase in the California State University (CSU) system, which is facing a $1.5 billion deficit.

Now that it is approved, the hike will raise tuition for undergraduates starting in 2024, burdening students further in a time of financial stress.

The hike’s future implications for students are concerning, potentially delaying graduation and increasing student loan debt.

I urge the CSU Board of Trustees to reconsider this tuition increase, seeking alternative solutions to address the budget deficit without burdening students who are striving for a better future through education.

Rajiv Muvva
San Jose

U.S. isn’t wisely using
leverage with Israel

It is confusing, to say the least, about the United States’ stance toward the Israel-Hamas war.

It is clear that the Biden administration considers it going too far to risk the deaths of Palestinians as the Israeli army seeks to destroy the evil Hamas — “devils” really, using humans as shields — while continuing to imagine a logical, but fantasy pre-1948 world.

What is confusing is the amount of leverage the United States has and how it uses it. It is giving Israel billions of dollars a year — why can’t it say: listen to what we want you to do (i.e. more humanitarian pauses, more consideration of Palestinian lives, vacate West Bank illegal settlements, etc.) or we don’t give you any more money. Can someone clarify the logic in this?

Joe Margevicius
Palo Alto

Preserve a wide range
of technologies

Re: “California regulators should embrace a wireless future” (Page A6, Nov. 7).

Many people who embraced cell phones were unhappily forced to give up their landlines. It was not a choice. Why must it be cell phones vs. landlines?

Cells were useless in the CZU wildfire; people are now relying on radio for disasters. For EMF-sensitive people, with no choice at home, there are few places today where they can feel safe.

I am not opposed to progress, but I am for healthy and appropriate use of technology. I choose to benefit from the advantages of various communication technologies, including email.

Molly Rose
Palo Alto