To clear-thinking people, the nation's epidemic of obese children has an obvious cause--bad parenting. No amount of government intervention nor hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars can change that, but Michelle Obama and progressives will try. A recently published UCLA study shows just how misguided they are.

Santa Paula, Oxnard, and Port Hueneme had some of the highest weights of obesity in the state. The Star wrote an insightful article on why this might be the case, and how government programs to addres the problem are failing.

People can choose to blame weight issues among children in Ventura County on school cafeterias. They can criticize cities for providing too few parks. They can wag a finger at the convenience store a half-block from a Boys & Girls Club in Port Hueneme or the Jack in the Box beyond that.

But Jimmy Lambaren, a machine operator who likes to cook and insists his 12-year-old son works out regularly, thinks they need a mirror.

"It's the parents' fault," he said outside the Boys & Girls Club, remembering a recent trip to a fast-food joint where he refused to eat. "It was jam-packed. I said, 'These are people who don't like to cook a decent meal.' "

Jimmy Lambaren has more common sense than the First Lady and progressives who support throwing money at the problem.

Elementary schools in parts of Oxnard and Port Hueneme have salad bars. Hueneme High School in Oxnard offers water-only vending machines and a state-of-the-art weight training room. County public health officials are building a healthful-eating, active -living program funded by a $480,000 annual grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

However, it's becoming more and more clear that healthy eating habits can only be set by parents.

Leaders of some programs worry about funding during the state budget crisis. Others worry about what happens outside their doors.

"We can only control what they do for six hours," said Joy Epstein, principal at Sunkist Elementary School in Port Hueneme. "It's outside factors."

Steffanie Elliott, a mother of two from Port Hueneme, rejects the argument that parents can't find fresh fruits and vegetables. They can but they don't.

All parents can find healthy food, can afford healthy food (and if they can't, they need to rearrange some priorities like their cell phone plans) and only they can give their kids healthy food to eat. Government nanny state programs are a waste of money, ineffective, and lets it intrude into our lives.

Tom McClintock represented a major part of Ventura County in various roles from 1982 to 2008. I don't think anybody would describe him as wild or crazy. In fact, most people say the opposite. The Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters wrote that McClintock has "consistently been one of the very few legislators who has been right about what California is experiencing." The Wall Street Journal said he was "about the only man in California who has consistently projected correctly the magnitude of the budget crises of the 1990s." The OC Register noted he's "consistently been among the most accurate forecasters of the effects of state tax and spending policies." The Washington Post calls him, "one of California's most prominent conservative politicians since the 1980s."

He "graduated", so to speak, from the minor leagues of budget messes of Sacramento to the major leagues of national debt crises when he was elected to Congress in 2008. Not one to compromise on his conservative principles, McClintock--a Tea Party leader--fit right in with the Republican wave that swept into Congress in 2010.

With many freshmen Congressmen last year, Rep. McClintock voted against raising the debt limit, which he called, "the biggest explosion of debt in American history."

In an editorial called, "No experience necessary to write U.S. laws," the Star implied that such congressmen are "confrontational, hyperpartisan zealots who don't feel they have to learn anything because they know with total certitude what they know" and they "came close to driving the national into technical default" as "we revert to a nation of dirt roads."

Since McClintock is a leading figure of those "zealots" (The Hill refers to him as a "leader of GOP budget hawks"), agrees with them ideologically and votes with them, then he must be just as guilty as those Republicans the Star editorialized against.

He too, must be a hyperpartisan zealot who doesn't feel he has to learn anything--he who was reelected multiple times by the same people who are currently serviced by the Ventura County Star. He who is noted by multiple major publications as being a public budget expert. He who voted the same way Americans wanted their congressmen to vote by a 2-to-1 margin.

And if he's granted an exception--i.e. ok fine, they're all crazy but Tom McClintock--then one has to wonder that maybe freshmen GOP congressmen know more than we give them credit for if McClintock is one of their leaders and they vote the same as him and think the way he does.

It could just be--just maybe--that they (along with many other experts that follow the government debt problem) see it as a huge problem and are trying their best to slam the brakes on overspending before it's too late, even if it means getting called less-than-flattering names by respected publications.

Unless they're already committed ideologically one way or another, Americans tend to think highly of political moderates. They like the words independent, bipartisan, compromise, and nonpartisan. They cringe when they hear about extremists, die-hards, polarization and hardcore ideologues.

Linda Parks fits the popular definition of moderate. She's a Democrat-turned Republican who has served Ventura County as a supervisor. Now she's a Republican-turned-independent as she runs for Congress.

Her independence was the focus of a recent Star column that asked, "In polarized politics, is there room on the equator?"

She has what on the surface appears to be a compelling message at a time when the approval rating for Congress among California voters stands at 17 percent.

Her message: Congress is broken and the war between parties has rendered it dysfunctional. "The extreme partisanship in Congress diminishes their very ability to legislate," she writes on her campaign website.

Beneath the surface it may not be a clear cut case of an independent person trying to bring common sense to Washington, an image Parks would like to portray. Surely a catalyst behind her nonpartisan registration is that neither party wanted her. I'm probably too cynical to think that if the GOP establishment was going to get 100% percent behind her that she would reject their financial and organizational assistance so she could remain independent. It's easy to go your own way when nobody else wants to go with you.  

Circumstances may have chosen independence for her, just as electoral politics may have decided her switch from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party so many years ago when she was a Democrat eyeing a seat in a Republican district. She wisely switched parties and became a successful location politician. But her heart didn't seem to change with her party registration.

All that's required to be a "moderate," according to the prevailing wisdom that almost everyone accepts, is that you cross party lines from time-to-time. That you "play things down the middle."

Under that definition, Parks is indeed a moderate. She was a liberal Republican who often sided with Democrats and was at odds with Ventura County's conservative Republican establishment.  But, while she's proven to be flexible as far as party registration has occurred, is she moderate in her political beliefs?

She has a strong environmental record that will appeal to Democrats and most independents in the district.

Until earlier this month, when she had to change her voter registration so that she could run as an independent, Parks was a registered Republican. She may now be able to appeal to disaffected Republicans based on such issues as her support for a woman's ability "as a last resort" to choose to have an abortion "without government interference."

That's an apt summary of her ideology. She's a pro-choice environmentalist, and she won't say if she prefers Pelosi or Boehner. That's nice, but that's hardly middle of the road on the liberal/conservative spectrum.

Here's the problem with labeling someone as a middle-of-the road moderate because they are ideologically inclined one way but registered another way.

Anyone who's read anything I've written would call me a committed conservative. Probably a hard-core conservative Republican, or a right winger. They'd say I'm anything but moderate.

But all I would have to do to become a "moderate," using the prevailing definition, would be to change my party registration to Democrat.

Then, even though I've retained every single right-wing belief I have, I'd suddenly be working across the aisle since I'd be a Democrat that finds Republican legislation palatable. In other words, in order to get praised by the public as a moderate, I just have to hide from them my true beliefs!

And so it is with Linda Parks. From what I can see, she never dropped her liberal beliefs when she left the Democratic Party to run in a Republican district. When pointing out that she also has beliefs on the right side of the aisle, we're told that well, she's pro-choice. If that's her biggest GOP credential, then she must not have had to do much soul-searching for her to drop her Republican registration.

Ironically, I'm a real moderate. While Parks is crafty enough to avoid saying whether Pelosi or Boehner is better, I'll tell you straight up that they both drive me nuts. I'll tell you that George W. Bush and Barack Obama have spent and are spending the country into oblivion.

As far as my political preference is concerned, the aforementioned big spending Obama isn't going to get my vote, even though I think he's a genius and an effective leader. He's just going in the wrong direction. And though I'm called a conservative, I'm not sold on Santorum since I don't think he has enough executive experience to make me comfortable with him running a huge bureaucracy. Nor do I think he can beat the Obama machine. Romney has proven to be an effective executive, but I think Romneycare was a disaster. I love Paul's fiscal policies but his foreign policy would be national suicide. Gingrich has the right policies and the chops to run an organization, but I have problems with his morality.

Isn't that how a real moderate thinks?

Vladimir Putin's back as Russia's president--not that he was ever far away from it. He retained power behind the scenes during his ally Dmitry Medvedev's presidency, and the plan all along was for Putin to return. The ex-KGB strongman wants to reconstitute the empire that was lost when the Soviet Union fell. Putin and Medvedev are playing Good-Cop-Bad-Cop on a geopolitical scale.  When Russia needs to be conciliatory Medvedev is the man to do it. When it needs to be strong and aggressive, enter Putin.

To win reelection, Putin resorted to rigging the election, as outlined in a Ventura County Star editorial. Every word of it is true. We tend to look down on other democracies, with good reason. They're often subterfuges for dictators. Only Sean Penn thinks Hugo Chavez was elected fairly, and I haven't yet heard anyone say Putin was fairly elected. Maybe George W. Bush.

But it struck me while reading the editorial that, while we clearly see the faults other nations have, we often overlook our own faults. Our democracy is not corrupt. Our elections aren't rigged.  Consider the following statements in the Star editorial.

The Wall Street Journal cited a poll that says 35 percent of Russians think the elections are illegitimate and 40 percent distrust the government, a figure surely on the low side.

Even if 40 percent is a low figure, it has a long way to go to match up with the 83% disapproval rating Americans give to Congress. Incompetence is not proof of corruption, but for some reason these people keep getting reelected. We already know that gerrymandering all but ensures reelection for career politicians--isn't that something we'd expect to find in a banana republic?

To ensure the outcome, the Kremlin resorted to a vote fraud so crude it would make a Chicago alderman blush -- "carousel voting."

Interesting that Chicago is held up as a model of corruption, because that's the president's political home.  In fact, he had close ties to ACORN there, which even the left-leaning FactCheck.org said "had widespread problems with phony [voter registrations]."

If the election had been honest and confined to Moscow, where three months of nonstop protests led up to the election, Mr. Putin might have gotten less than 20 percent of the vote.

Even though conservatives are the largest ideological group--twice as numerous as liberals, we're still dominated by them. Interestingly, Gallup has the percent of the population as liberal at 21 percent, just like the pro-Putin minority. Like them, we find ourselves outnumbering the opposition but losing to them. Democratic leadership is pretty far to the left--nobody (except the media) would say that Obama or Pelosi or Reid or Schumer or Durbin or Frank are moderates. Let's be nice and call them "social Democrats" instead of outright socialists.  But when it comes to Republican leaders, we have to put up with moderates. Bush, while socially conservative, was not fiscally conservative. McCain, our 2008 presidential nominee, tried to out bailout Obama. We're going to have Romney next, and he out Obamacare'd Obama in Massachusetts. For governor here in California, we had Arnold, who practically declared war on his own party. In short, why is it that the biggest ideological group never has a candidate that represents those beliefs? Simply put, the media is corrupt and with the exception of Fox News and talk radio, conservative candidates are piled on by the media. Just look at poor Rick Santorum.

Outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev will return to his previous role as prime minister. President Medvedev and Mr. Putin exchanged jobs so Mr. Putin could comply with the Russian Constitution's limit of two consecutive terms. The president's term, meanwhile, was extended from four to six years.

In America, we too get around term limits by having our close associates run in our stead. The elder Bush was the outgoing President Reagan's vice president. Then we got Bill Clinton, and several years after he got termed out Hillary ran (and Chelea is a being groomed for a political future). Between the Bill and Hillary campaigns we had the younger Bush. The only reason Hillary didn't win is because the lightning President Obama captured in a bottle. Will we next see a Michelle Obama campaign?

There is a growing backlash against officially sanctioned corruption and the numerous overweening perks of Kremlin favorites.

Do we need to even get into the perks that Washington favorites get, like legally sanctioned insider stock trading? Gold plated medical insurance? Payouts to your political supporters, like $500 million for Solyndra?

During the campaign, Mr. Putin made promises to voters that would total more than $160 billion, money the Kremlin doesn't have.

Wow, our politicians never promise to buy us anything with money we don't have. $160 billion sounds like pocket change for us.

Mr. Putin might surprise his critics. A key test will be three measures before the parliament: one restoring the direct election of governors, another eliminating at least some restrictions on political parties, and a third giving the opposition access to state-controlled broadcast media.

Opposition access to state-controlled broadcast media? Show me where conservatives have access to PBS.

Russia's corruption might be cruder and more obvious than ours, but ours still exists. We just have nicer words for it. Other countries have state run media outlets that disseminate pro-government propaganda. We call it "public broadcasting." In Russia, journalists get intimidated with violence. Here, they get intimidated by Media Matters. In other countries those that say the wrong political things get assassinated. Here, their character gets assassinated (just ask Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, or Sarah Palin, or Michelle Bachmann, or any other high-profile conservative).

Face it, our system is corrupt. Romney, despite having almost no support from non-political establishment Republicans, is the likely GOP nominee. And President Obama--let's just say that any other president wouldn't even try to run for reelection with $5/gallon gasoline and 9% unemployment.  But he'll probably do what nobody else has been able to do and win, because he'll benefit from about a billion dollars worth of free advertising from the complicit media. Our elections aren't rigged, in the strict sense of the word, but the establishment has such an advantage that it can almost always ensure that someone from the single largest ideological group never gets elected president.

I don't often see a letter-to-the-editor in the "most viewed" section of the Star's home page, but one entitled "Conservative thinking" made its way up there over the weekend.

To summarize the letter, the writer cites the problem of high gas prices and urges voters to "wake up" and "vote for those who have conservative thinking."

The first commenter advised the writer to get out some popcorn and "sit back and enjoy the liberals bad mouthing you."

It didn't take very long for "teabaggers" and home schoolers to be ridiculed by subsequent commenters.

Conservative comments tended to defend George W. Bush's energy policies while liberals countered that the price of oil rose under his watch. An example:

Conservatives are "the thinkers"? One of the most clueless letters in years. It is "conservatives" who are refusing to regulate speculators while they sit on the Commodities Futures Board.

FACT: Highest domestic oil PRODUCTION since 2003.

FACT: Lowest US DEMAND since 1997.

FACT: There is NO doubt the speculators are to blame as they PURCHASE 81% OF ALL OIL FUTURES.

So let's get educated folks and stop all this stupid clueless garbage.

I wonder if the author of that comment stopped to consider if inflation plays a role in the price of oil. Certainly, if the dollar's value fell by half, all things being equal, oil's price in terms of dollars would double.

Inflation is a tool used by the powers-that-be as a better solution politically than raising taxes. When a government spends too much money, it faces pressure to try to generate revenue by increasing taxes, or by borrowing, or by printing more money. Politicians respond by desperately avoiding raising taxes on the voting public (unless it's  on the relatively few-in-number rich) and instead reverting to borrowing, until they borrow so much they realize other adverse consequences like having to commit a huge portion of the budget to servicing the debt or facing a credit hit.

Since they can't raise taxes and they can't borrow, they print money. When money gets printed out of thin air, the value of the dollar plummets and inflation increases, which increases the price of gas in terms of dollars.

So, we can directly link high gas prices to spending too much money, which means blame can be assigned to both the Bush and Obama administrations.

However, it cannot be assigned to conservatives, at least fiscal ones. President Bush was definitely not a fiscal conservative, and we're reaping the benefits of his and Obama's progressive spending policies.