Opinion

If you live on Ashby Avenue and wake up in the middle of the night, as I do sometimes, you can tell what time it is by how much noise comes in through your closed bedroom window. If it’s relatively quiet, with only the occasional roar of a really big truck which rattles the windows, it’s probably about 3 a.m. The trucks at that time of night are fewer, but they compensate by gunning their engines up to about 50 mph (when the speed limit is 25.) Commuters get going about 4, at a high speed because they’re not so numerous until about 5, eventually slowing down to just under 30 mph between 6 and 9. By that time traffic is often bumper-to-bumper, with students and employees who come by bridge and tunnel on their way to the UC campus. It’s pretty much impossible to sleep past about 6:30 because of the noise volume, even in the winter when the windows can be kept closed. -more-

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-