Opinion

One of the perks of this job is that you get an early window on what lies are currently being launched in the D.C. fabrication industry. No sooner do the Republicans dream up a lie in one of their many captive think tanks than it’s on the Internet as a press release directed at editorial writers across the country. That’s how we first found out about that masterpiece of doublespeak titling, the Healthy Forests Initiative, which was a covert attack by the logging industry on the nation’s old growth forests. Frankly, we laughed at it. We didn’t believe that such blatantly untrue propaganda would find any audience among thinking people. We set our Netscape filter to deposit the Healthy Forest people’s press releases in the trash folder and forgot about it. Boy, were we wrong! It passed, with some Democrats supporting it. -more-

Wow. We never thought the city of Berkeley was such a major philanthropic organization. You probably didn’t know that Berkeley citizens annually provide scholarships to at least 1,100 UC students, but this figure was confirmed last week by Chancellor Birgeneau himself. He told the Regents that if UC Berkeley paid $3 million toward what it costs the city of Berkeley to host the University of California, that would mean depriving 300 UC students of an education. You can do the math, no matter whether your S.A.T. math scores would have gotten you into Cal or not. Since the city actually subsidizes the University to the tune of more like $11 million in uncollectible property taxes, according to Birgeneau’s figures we are now providing 1100 students with a education that they’d have to forego if UC paid its own way, as do other universities like the University of Michigan, Stanford and Yale. If we take the population of Berkeley to be in the neighborhood of 110,000 (give or take a few thousand for ease of calculation) that means that every man, woman and child in Berkeley contributes about $100 a year to this scholarship fund. Pretty generous, wouldn’t you say? -more-