Opinion

The latest act in the seemingly ceaseless saga which is Mayor Bates’ Task Force on Permitting and Development is now underway. A “Discussion Draft” of a final report has been posted on the web, and the first of two discussions of it took place last Friday, with a second scheduled for next Friday. Participants included original task force members, selected by the mayor with heavy weighting toward developers, and self-selected residents who regularly attend the group’s meetings. -more-

Went to church again last night, for the second time this fall. Following Rev. Al Sharpton at Allen Temple Baptist Church on the revival circuit, this time the preacher was Rev. Molly Ivins, appearing at Berkeley’s First Congregational under the auspices of Cody’s Books to preach about her latest, “Bushwhacked.” The choir was all there to shout hallelujah—Berkeleyans of all descriptions who couldn’t be counted on to have a civil conversation at a commission meeting in the North Berkeley Senior Center, but who do realize that politics stops at the water’s edge. The water’s edge, in this case, is the easily predictable Bush-Schwarzenegger deal to carve up California and feed it to the corporations, especially the energy czars and the lumber barons. (Entrail readers on the Internet, notably Greg Palast, have seen the auguries in Arnie’s meeting with Enron honchos a couple of years ago.) And on the other shore, we’re on the edge of the deep muddy that is the Iraq occupation. -more-