BVN Opinion

EDITORIAL - What do you do if you’re an aide to a United States President who has recklessly self-sabotaged his chances for the second-term just eleven days before Election Day? You call in a political spin-doctor (fixer) to get your President and his campaign out of trouble and back on track. This is the two-sentence treatment for the 1997 political-satire film ‘Wag the Dog’ directed by Barry Levinson based on the 1993 Larry Beinhart book, ‘American Hero’.

The original novel by Beinhart tells the story of how Operation Desert Storm was a scripted and choreographed plot to secure President George H.W. Bush a second term. In ‘American Hero’ real-life characters are used in this “fictional” telling of the first Gulf War. The book starts with Lee Atwater, a Republican political consultant for both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, on his death bed laying out a plan to have the war professionally produced by Hollywood. The film adaptation of the book has very little to do with that plot other than the Hollywood connection and deceiving the public.

EDITORIAL – Madera’s Ron Montoya is back on the attack. This time he is attacking Madera Unified School District Athletic Director and CIF President Marty Bitter. He has already harassed the school board, city council, school site councils, and our mayor. Now he is taking on a school administrator who is only trying to provide an equal playing field to all students throughout the district. He is attacking another good man with false accusations.

Montoya’s latest ill-informed rant is comparing full-time district employees to walk-on coaches. He seems upset that Madera South Varsity Football Coach Matt Johnson is a full-time employee for the district with a job unrelated to his football duties. Coach Johnson was hired by the district to operate a program at Madera Unified for at-risk boys. This is the same successful program he ran at Edison High School for Fresno Unified a few years back. For that job, Johnson receives a salary from the district.

EDITORIAL - What happens when your Xfinity/Comcast Cable-TV bill tops $200 a month? You learn new (and relearn older) ways to save money on your television entertainment expenses. Over the last year, we have done everything we could think of to cut our cable bill but found the only way to really save money with Xfinity/Comcast is to forget about cutting the bill and just Cut the Cord. So that is what we did and now we have more great TV than ever before.

First thing we did was return all of our cable boxes to Xfinity/Comcast. These were costing us between $10 and $15 each per month. We replaced them with Roku streaming devices that have access to the Xfinity app. The Roku Xfinity/Comcast’s app gives you another way of watching the cable company's programming without the expensive cable box rentals. By doing this we started to save about $45 a month. 

EDITORIAL - The senior class of Madera South High School, like many senior classes throughout our country, has lost the best year of high school. They lost their proms, senior trips, yearbooks, and any chance of having a “normal” graduation. Their school year ended on the night of March 13^th when in a closed session meeting the Madera Unified School District decided to shut the schools down. But unlike other schools throughout the country or even just in our home town, the class of 2020 at Madera South also had to face being ignored by their school and principal.

While other schools put up signs of encouragement to their seniors and students, first-year Madera South Principal Ami Anderson has refused to allow any signs to be placed on the school's fences or any school funds to be used in any way to honor the class of 2020. I know of at least one senior from the class of 2020 who sent the principal an email asking if the class would still get their traditional senior sweatshirts with the entire roster of the class printed on the back. Ms. Anderson answered back telling the student that was not an “essential” item to get people to leave their houses.