About 1,500 people gathered on the west steps of the State Capitol Friday afternoon to express their anger with state environmental regulations, which they said were responsible for increased unemployment in the state. Present at the event were talk radio hosts Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty, Congressman Tom McClintock and Mark Meckler, head of the Sacramento Tea Party Patriots and the event's organizer, as well as several business owners and a representative from the National Tea Party Patriots organization. In addition to the protesters on the west steps, many tractors, big rigs and other trucks carrying signs and honking in support of the protest were on the streets around the Capitol.

Sacramento artists of all sorts have been asked by Richard St. Ofle and Jesse Vasquez to contribute to a weekly "participatory art project" on their new blog, "Topical Thursday." On "Topical Thursday," Sacramento's most creative are asked to consider a topic and contribute their interpretation, in whatever form they choose, to the blog. According to St. Ofle, the contributors will be "mostly artists, but also writers as well . . . we wanted to limit it to people who do something creative, but not just visual art." St. Ofle and Vasquez, themselves artists, reveal a new topic every Thursday, as the blog's name implies. Past topics have included "guilty pleasures" and "secrets." Upcoming

  20th Street's Mars Complex has been the location for a lot of recent development, with restaurants, bars, yogurt shops, and now Sacramento's newest yoga studio, Asha Yoga. Asha Yoga is owned and operated by Cori Martinez and Maureen Guildersleeve, two relatively newcomers to the area and longtime yoga practitioners who say they plan to make Asha Yoga into a public space and center for community, not just a yoga studio. Before moving to Sacramento three years ago, Martinez lived in Hawaii, where she established and taught at her first yoga studio, Yoga Centered. She says that she saw the space Asha Yoga now occupies four months ago, shortly before meeting her business partner Guildersl

As pleasant springtime weather becomes more and more common, many Sacramento residents head outside for relaxation and fun, especially to city waterways. This Friday, April 17, marks the begining of Creek Week, an event intended to make sure those waterways are still serviceable. Creek Week is an event sponsored and organized by the Sacramento Area Creeks Council, to draw attention to the condition of Sacramento's creeks. A week of activities, including tours of the Mather Field vernal pools and a "river-friendly" landscaping workshop, culminates in a day of volunteer cleanup work on Saturday, April 25. The Creeks Council emphasizes the benefits of well-maintained creeks, citing their us

Approximately 5,000 people gathered at the State Capitol Wednesday in a "Tax Day Tea Party" protest organizers said was aimed at fiscal irresponsibility in the form of Bailouts, the stimulus bill, increased taxation, and government waste. Speaking at the event were a mixture of media figures, politicians, and organizers, including State Representative Tom McClintock, talk radio hosts Mark Williams and Armstrong & Getty and others. The protest officially started at noon, but the crowd began gathering long before that. Many of the protesters were not Sacramento residents, traveling from Roseville, Grass Valley and other surrounding towns to be heard. The size of the crowd necessitated a gia

I'd wager that most of the people attending the Tea Parties aren't plants. Sure, some probably are, but there are enough people who sincerely hold Tea Party beliefs to make up a fair-sized crowd without any kind of dishonesty in that respect. I agree with the basic idea of the Tea Party rallies, fiscal responsibility and that, but frankly some of the rhetoric displayed there is a little off-putting and scary. It seems like a lot of the people holding signs about socialism, communism, and fascism don't quite know the definitions of each. For example, I saw one sign which said 'It's worse than socialism, it's Marxism.' I'm not quite sure what message that one is supposed to be getting across. If you were to ask a real, doctrinaire communist, they would probably disagree almost as vehemently with Obama's policies as any attendee of the Tea Party rallies. For different reasons, but the point is still worth making. And while anger at political leaders is perfectly normal and probably deserved, the level of what I have to call hatred and vitriol at these events has been scary. On several occasions while I was in the crowd I heard people talking loudly about killing democratic politicians and other 'communists.' No one even batted an eyelash, and I doubt they were speaking ironically or making jokes. So I guess what I'm saying is that the basic idea of the Tea Parties is a good one, but there does seem to be a lot of unpleasantness collecting around them. PS: I've just been talking to an acquaintance who used to work on a farm, and he is of the opinion that the whole water problem could have been solved by the farms in the valley adopting more efficient irrigation methods ten or fifteen years ago. Hindsight is 20/20, but perhaps some similar changes should be made now? I don't claim to know much about agriculture, though.

Yeah, I talked to the public info officer for the CHP. He gave me that number around 1:30 in the afternoon. I can contact the tech guy for the sacpress and see if he'll change it to a different figure. It does seem like 1500 wasn't accurate, based on all the other reports I've been seeing.

The 1500 number came from Police estimates. This protest did seem smaller than the first, but it's always possible mistakes were made.

I go to Starbucks all the time, but the idea of a city government going out of its way to beg the company not to close a location seems bizarre to me. Isn't there another Starbucks just a few blocks down the street anyway?

It was actually Jon Mendick who took the pictures. He did a good job.