The Opinion Pages

The “Emily” in the very successful Emily’s List fundraising organization is not a person but an acronym. It stands for the old political slogan Early Money Is Like Yeast, which means that a dollar given early in a campaign is worth many more dollars for the would-be candidate than one contributed at the end. Early dollars can be used to do fundraising for additional funds, and to reach out to undecided voters in time to recruit them as campaign volunteers. -more-

EDITOR’S NOTE: This letter was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle. -more-

Daily Planet columnist J. Douglas Allen-Taylor has been an un-abashed apologist for Mayor Dellums for too long. In a petty feud with Chip Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle, he uses his recent column to belabor the non-issue that Chip has been treating Mayor Dellums more harshly than former Mayor Brown. In the process, Allen-Taylor sadly misses the real story. Crime in Oakland is out of control and Mayor Dellums has failed to articulate a detailed action plan to address it. I for one applaud Chip Johnson’s tenacity in reporting the issue of crime. The Reader’s Platform in the San Francisco Chronicle relates the growing frustration residents face day after day with ever increasing crime and unresponsive and overworked police. Admittedly, Mayor Dellums did not create Oakland’s crime problem, but he has a responsibility to address it. -more-

I am not a member of the “Concerned Listeners”; nonetheless I am a ”concerned” listener. -more-

For the average KPFA listener, it’s not easy to understand what—if anything—is really at stake in elections for the Local Station Board, nor how to select and rank candidates. They’re divided into myriad slates and factions, all passionately denouncing one another, but they’re all experienced progressives, and at a glance their platforms and platitudes sound pretty similar. And beyond the official election pamphlet, the station itself isn’t doing much to help voters understand the issues: There’s been only one, poorly publicized in-person candidate forum, and as of this writing, more than three weeks after the ballots were mailed, KPFA had yet to begin airing the recorded pitches candidates were asked to make weeks ago. -more-

Although our City Council on Tuesday, Nov. 7 surprised many of us naïve citizens by reversing its position made two weeks earlier in support of South Berkeley residents, it was less surprising if one examines the council’s history. On many occasions, the council had led Berkeley citizens to believe that it was truly sympathetic to neighborhood concerns over RF radiation from cell phone antennas. They cite for their reason federal law as promulgated in the 1996 Tele-Commun-ications Act which pre-empts the city from being able to defend its citizen on the basis of health concerns. -more-