Opinion

Congressman Steve King is the yokel who has organized the successful Republican effort to prevent the Berkeley Post Office from being named after Berkeley’s revered Maudelle Shirek. We won’t waste much space here delineating exactly how annoyed the people of Berkeley are at his presumption, because they’ll certainly make their opinions known in our letter columns. Instead, let’s take a good look at who King is, and what we might do from here to make sure the people in his district are suitably embarrassed by him. First, he’s been quoted speaking admiringly of old Joe McCarthy (dean of the Congressional witchhunters in the ‘50s, for those young readers who were shortchanged in their U.S. history class.) His website does a candid job of describing his other politics: -more-

A few weeks ago we received an email from a member of the Downtown Berkeley Association’s design committee asking if the Planet’s opinion pages would be available for a forum on the future of downtown Berkeley. The idea, not yet adopted A few weeks ago we received an email from a member of the Downtown Berkeley Association’s design committee asking if the Planet’s opinion pages would be available for a forum on the future of downtown Berkeley. The idea, not yet adopted by the DBA or fully fleshed out, was that there would be a two-part process. First, the public would be asked to submit ideas in writing for publication: a kind of “civic visioning exercise” to tap the creativity of Berkeley citizens to think about what Berkeley Downtown might be. That would be followed by a well-conceived scientific phone poll to gauge citizens’ preference for what should be happening downtown. -more-