Public Comment
Letters to the Editor
GIVE COMPOSTING A CHANCE
Editors, Daily Planet:
According to a recent East Bay Express article on city-sponsored composting, some people find the new kitchen debris collecting simply “too icky” to do.
But fortunately, this can be made quite “un-icky” by using bio-degradable cellulose pail liners that remain leak-proof or up to 10 days.
Liners are available at local hardware stores and at least one supermarket. Here is a sampling: “Bio-Bags,” three gallons; “Bag to Nature Bags,” about three gallons; “Glad Recycling Green Bags,” about two gallons. These bags, incidentally, could come to replace the plastic bags currently used in produce departments, once those are banned for double duty, in stores, and at home. Any pioneers?
And also remember that empty milk cartons will do double duty beautifully.
With the use of liner bags, kitchen debris collecting becomes quite “un-icky” and achieves its stated purpose, namely relieving our landfills.
Moreover, with kitchen composting, we would hardly run our disposals, a problematic convenience which the good citizens of Geneva actually banned, to protect their lake. We would then use a little less water, produce less of a load for waste water treatment, and help save the bay.
Let’s do it, all of us, please.
Senta Pugh Chamberlain
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ADOPT A BUNNY
Editors, Daily Planet:
I’d like to call your attention to the fact that February was Adopt a Rescued Rabbit Month.
Please encourage your readers to adopt from shelters instead of buying from pet stores.
I know I love my rescued bunnies!
Karen Veitch
•
QUESTION
Editors, Daily Planet:
Why would the eco-friendly City Council of Berkeley allow Code Pink to hassle the marine mammals on Shattuck Avenue?
Robert Gable
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SUPPORTING THE PROTESTERS
Editors, Daily Planet:
Being born, and raised, in the so-called long-hair, pot-smoking City of Berkeley, I wish to express my support to the protesters.
I was a big time protester for the other useless war in Vietnam.
This war will never be won, it will only continue to kill our young people while the little turtle (Mr. Bush) who has the knowledge of a simple clown, continues to wave, and smirk, at his country.
Suit him up in his Air Force uniform and send him to Iraq with our troops. Enough is enough.
Alice Noriega
•
FROM THE HALLS OF
MONTEZUMA
Editors, Daily Planet:
Gordon Wozniak’s and Kriss Worthington’s grandstanding against the Berkeley City Council’s original stand against the Marine recruiters should end their political carreers—both of them, and especially the “progressive” guy who wants to move his opportunist ass up to Sacramento on the public dole. If Max Anderson wasn’t such a decent man—and an intellectual who believes in reason as well—he might take them both behind the woodshed for the level of disrespect they have shown for his own experience in Vietnam with the Marines and his effort to unite the council. Max tried valiantly to maneuver us out of this particular jungle without betraying the intent to stop military recruiting in our city (is this swift-boating against a native son here before eyes in this “progressive” city by the bay?). Let these self evident truths about a Marine career reverberate from an early high ranking Marine officer:
“The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag….I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps…In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism….I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests…Haiti and Cuba…for the national City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wallstreet. ..I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests…In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.” (brief excerpts from a 1933 speech by Major General Smedly Butler, USMC ret.) (Google Smedley Butler.)
Berkeley should press on with concrete efforts to mitigate and reduce all military recruitment—such as Joanne Kowalski’s suggestion of a Veterans for Peace coffee shop across from the Marine Recruiters. You have to believe that for every Marine—rightist or not—who pokes his finger in the air, there is someone like Smedley Butler, or Daniel Ellsberg, or Max Anderson out there too. Like those three, we all have to take a stand. On recruitment we simply can’t allow our kids to be fooled into believing that they are “defending democracy”—our rights—when they join the military. Max knows the outcome of that lie—and we do too. If people don’t stand up against the deception of children to make them warriors then the entire idea of American freedom itself becomes but a counterfeit. The assertion that U.S. militarism is in the service of “democracy” is an even more dangerous lie (being systematic, expansive and timeless) than the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Marc Sapir
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ONE-LINER
Editors, Daily Planet:
Berkeley is so....Berkeley!
Richard List
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A FEW QUESTIONS
Editors, Daily Planet:
Here are a few questions in my mind; I don’t know who can answer them:
• If the plane spray was actually meant to kill off the moth in apple trees, why is it done over urban centers?
• How many people have an apple orchard in their back yard?
• How does this so-called agricultural spray, performed over urban centers, resemble the bombing of European cities during World War II?
• Does this spray affect/damage the expression of our DNA?
• Does it cause undesirable genetic mutations?
• Does the government want us to be chronically ill and behaving like zombies?
Beatrice Reusch
•
MARINES
Editors, Daily Planet:
Michael Savage and Melanie Morgan wannabees drooling to bash Berkeley liberal degenerates will find little raw meat to feed upon nowadays here in our fair city. Berkeleyites, themselves, are falling all over each other to prove their loyalty to the homeland by bashing the protesters.
If the military really were here to defend us, they’d be stopping us from getting sprayed with pesticide instead of sulking because middle-aged ladies in pink T-shirts and schoolchildren are saying mean things to them.
Of course, that ain’t gonna happen, any more than letters from city councils decide where the federal government plants a recruiting station. We all must redeem ourselves by pledging our love and loyalty to our brave recruiters. After all, as we’re reminded ad nauseum, we wouldn’t have the liberty to stand out here making asses of ourselves protesting if it weren’t for the Marines.
Now, I’m not quite sure how that makes any sense. Anybody who would turn off their boob tube and turn on their brains for a minute should have realized long ago that the military doesn’t work for us anymore—if it ever did.
Marine Major General Smedley Butler, who served 35 years and earned the most medals for heroism of his day, pointed out that war is a racket, run for the protection of the corporate elite, not us poor slobs. Only if you are one of Bush’s base, The Haves or the Have-Mores, with stocks up the wazzoo in Lockheed or its ilk, have you correctly surmised that the military fights for your interests.
If you are part of the other 99.5 percent of us, the propaganda machine requires you suspend your power of reasoning, and serve up your children as necessary cannon fodder, and the fodder collection depot is conveniently located in close proximity to the local high school. Just a co-incidence, nothing to worry about folks. The kids know what’s in store for them, and they’re not happy to be shoveled into the infernal machine. They raised some noise last week, and I honor and respect them. Enter the police, who “put their lives on the line” (aren’t people just like parrots?) by shooting grandmas and clubbing noisy children. Who is it again, that they protect and serve? See above.
Barbara Henninger
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PESTICIDE SPRAYING
Editors, Daily Planet:
Please read the following paragraphs about how the Bush regime plans to do aerial pesticide spraying on cities in the San Francisco Bay Area this summer. Then decide if the Bush regime is (a) Insane, (b) Stupid, (c) Evil, or (d) All of the above.
(E)-11-Tetradecen-1-yl acetate, (E,E)-9,11-Tetradecadien-1-yl-acetate, cross-linked polyurea polymer, butylated hydroxyltoluene, polyvinyl alcohol, tricaprylyl methyl ammonium chloride, sodium phosphate, ammonium phosphate, 1,2-benzisothiozolin-3-one, 2-hydroxyl-4—n-octtyloxy-benzophenone.* These are some of the ingredients in CheckMate LBAM-F, which the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) and the California Dept. of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) are planning to use in a massive aerial pesticide spraying over San Francisco Bay Area cities this summer to sexually harass a small moth, specifically, the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM) (Epiphyas postvittana).
This proposed aerial pesticide spraying of whole cities in the San Francisco Bay Area is a hysterical over-reaction by the incompetent Bush regime to a hypothetical problem. The Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM), a native of Australia, has been present in New Zealand, New Caledonia, Hawai’i and England for many years. The residents and the farmers of these regions have been able to co-exist with this moth without having to resort to massive aerial pesticide spraying of whole cities and towns.
So far, not a single apple growing in commercial orchards in Northern California has been found to be visited by this moth. Over six hundred residents of the Santa Cruz and Monterey areas have reported new health problems after the aerial spraying of the Checkmate brand pesticide over their towns last year.
Just say no to proposed aerial pesticide spraying over cities in the San Francisco Bay Area against this small moth scheduled for this summer. We need to work on low-key biological controls for the Light Brown Apple Moth. There is no legitimate reason for the government to put the health of millions of people at risk with pesticide spraying of the air we breathe.
Visit web sites such as www.lbamspray.com, www.stopthespray.org and www.hopefortruth.com for more detailed information and suggestion on how to protest this absurd plan.
(* Listed in the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ask the Bugman column in the Feb. 23 Home and Garden section.)
James K. Sayre
Oakland
•
POLICE VIOLENCE
Editors, Daily Planet:
Recent developments in the East Bay doubtless will not have escaped the attention of your very alert readers:
Item: Oakland Police Department uses taser against a juvenile.
Item: Berkeley Police Department kills 51-year-old grandmother.
On Sunday evening, Feb. 24 at 6 p.m. at the intersection of Hillegass and Haste, this is the scene I witnessed: four Berkeley Police Department officers having arrested a man in people’s park, said man, cuffed hands behind his back and on his knees (trying lamely, it is true, to defend himself verbally).
Right out of the Abu Ghraib playbook, the picture with the prisoner on his knees qualifies for the Abu Ghraib family scrapbook. What does this say about the dignity of man? Both that of the prisoner and of the four cops, one talking on his cell phone, standing around in carefully studied indifference?
Cecile Leneman
•
SLAUGHTERHOUSE ATROCITIES
Editors, Daily Planet:
In response to the recent atrocities at the Chino, Calif. at a Hallmark slaughterhouse:
The Senate Select Committee on Food-borne Illness held a special hearing in Sacramento on Feb. 25. Inexcusably, only the chairman of the five-member committee, Senator Dean Florez (D-Bakersfield), deemed this matter important enough to appear. And he did a great job.
The others need to hear from us: Senators Carole Migden (D-San Francisco); Edward Vincent (D-Inglewood); Jeff Denham (R-Modesto); and Abel Maldonado (R-San Luis Obispo). Excuses given ranged from “s/he’s in the district office,” to “he’s getting physical therapy,” to “he missed his plane.” Not acceptable for a problem of this magnitude.
It should also be noted that the USDA did not testify, nor did either the State Dairy or Cattlemen’s Associations, or the PRCA, though their representatives were present. Shame on them all! Nor should anyone think that the Chino horrors are an anomaly. Such abuses are routine at slaughterhouses, meatpacking facilities and “factory farms” across the country, as has been well documented for decades. No one has a right to be surprised. And all in the name of profit, of course.
And consider this: the current meatpacking workforce is made up largely of immigrants, many illegal, many illiterate, from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia. They are a short-term, often migrant workforce (the average worker quits or is fired after three months), and they are performing the most dangerous job in the United States, with a rate of injury and job-related illness three times greater than that of the average factory worker.
Recommended reading: Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle; Gail Eisnitz’s 1997 expose, Slaughterhouse; and Eric Schlosser’s 2001 Fast Food Nation.
Bon appetit.
Eric Mills
Action for Animals
•
35 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
Editors, Daily Planet:
Senator Clinton is running in large part on her record and experience after 35 years in politics, which includes seven years in elected office. The most significant part of her other experience is her eight years as first lady of the United States (1993-2001).
She states, with some reason, that her influence on policies and decisions while first lady amounted to her having an equal importance in the running of this country to the president and describes herself as having been our co-president.
The Obama campaign does not question her influence as first lady but does propose that she is being somewhat selective in which things she chooses to include in her resume as first lady. They suggest there are things she does not wish to be associated with that might reasonably be a part of that record.
One of these things is the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was ratified in November 1993, late in First Lady Clinton’s initial year as co-president.
Although NAFTA was signed by President George Bush in late 1992, it could not become law unless it was also ratified by the Congress. President Bill Clinton made ratifying NAFTA a major priority. After intense negotiation and much pressure from the White House, Congress ratified the highly controversial NAFTA treaty on Nov. 20, 1993, the last day of the legislative session.
Now, 14 years later, there is a significant segment of public opinion, which believes NAFTA has been responsible for the loss of substantial numbers of American jobs.
The Obama campaign seeks to hold Co-President Clinton to account for the passage of NAFTA but she replies that it had already been signed by the previous president before she became first lady.
This seems a somewhat incomplete response since NAFTA would never have become law without the months of very hard work by the Clinton administration to have NAFTA ratified by Congress.
NAFTA was one of the major issues during Co-President Clinton’s first year. It would be interesting to know if during that time she enthusiastically supported NAFTA, was neutral and on the sidelines, or strongly opposed it in a quiet way.
Knowing what she did as co-president could help voters understand the kind of president we might expect her to be.
Brad Belden
•
SUGGESTIONS FOR BERKELEY’S CLIMATE ACTION PLAN
Editors, Daily Planet:
Berkeley’s city attorney has determined that city commissioners are not allowed to participate in Berkeley’s online Climate Action Plan discussion group. Therefore I am submitting my comments to the Daily Planet letters to the editor in the hope of public comment.
1. A net-zero energy plan for new construction: Increasing Title 24 energy conservation requirements for building permits could have the result of simply shifting construction to other cities where the enhanced standards are not required, resulting in no real reduction in GHG emissions. We should consider requiring that a plan be submitted for every building permit adding over 1,000 square feet of useable space that details how the building will be retrofitted to become a net-zero energy consuming building. The building construction plans would be required to be consistent with the proposed energy plan. Example: A new apartment building is built with a dedicated space for solar hot water panels on the roof, a shaft for water lines, and a hot water storage tank on the ground making for easy future installation. By planning in advance, considerable resources could be saved.
2. Facilitate a new design style: We are in the midst of an architectural revolution. Design standards are in flux and new ways of building are being explored to reduce GHG emission. Yet, with few exceptions, what we put in our buildings has not been addressed. Articles that can not be refurbished or recycled at the same level fill the home furnishing stores. History has shown that following architectural revolutions there will be a design style revolution. The new design style probably will emerge not from major manufacturers but rather from individual craftspeople and artists. Given our region’s concern with GHG emissions, the concern for the environment, and the strong community of talented craftspeople, it is probable that a new design style will emerge from the Bay Area. We should consider facilitating the emerging design style by hosting design competitions and exhibitions, and by publicizing important works.
3. Pairing meters: Many homes and buildings are not suitable for solar voltaic installations. By allowing individuals to aggregate two meters at different locations, off site solar installations could be facilitated and many buildings could meet a net-zero energy goal.
4. Establish a maximum carbon/square foot ratio: Cities are continually being rebuilt. Some construction materials are much more energy intensive than others. Some materials, like lumber, can be sustainably grown and actually store carbon. We should establish a carbon/square foot ratio that is not to be exceeded for construction that greatly favors non-GHG intensive materials. The carbon associated with new construction should be added on a yearly basis to Berkeley’s footprint.
5. Solar energy resources as a right: If a new building would block the solar access of an existing building at 75 percent of the maximum height allowed by zoning at the time the existing building was built, then the new building must acquire the rights from the owner of the existing building for the solar energy blocked.
Tim Hansen
•
BERKELEY NAACP
Editors, Daily Planet:
Wow! Just when you thought it was safe to assume the NAACP had backslid into irrelevancy, here they come again, charging seemingly out of nowhere to remove any doubt whatsoever that indeed they are irrelevant, if not downright retrogressive.
How embarrassing! The Berkeley branch of the NAACP, apparently having entered a federal witness protection program decades ago (no one has seen or heard from them in that time) recently condemned its own chapter president, Allen Jackson, for responding to the fatal shooting of a knife wielding 51-year-old black woman by saying that Berkeley Police Department’s intent, “is to kill any African American that they can.”
Clearly that is not the kind statement that is going to get anyone elected mayor.
On the other hand if anyone reads the Bay Area newspapers, to suggest that Berkeley’s Police Department or any other police department’s mission is to kill any black person they can, should not strike anyone as all that much over the top. In my mind it is a totally understandable comment to make (or issue on letter-headed stationary which Jackson did) given the current stage of urban warfare that exists in many population centers today.
The national NAACP organization has set the standard for irrelevancy by recently firing CEO Bruce Gordon after he brutalized the sensibilities of the corporate NAACP sponsors by attempting to mobilize black youth in support of Tookie Williams, a reformed Los Angeles gang leader who had been convicted and ultimately executed for murder.
In the 1990’s the NAACP had earlier successfully fought off relevancy when they were able to fire Ben Chavis for sexual misconduct after he outraged the corporate interests by opening dialog with L.A.. gang members.
(Warning to any future NAACP leaders-don’t try to engage the L.A. gangs in dialog!)
As for the statement from the Berkeley Black Police Officer’s Association, as a Berkeley citizen in my mind they have no credibility. I’ve seen black police officers profile black youth in South Berkeley where I live, the same way white officers profile them. Often, in fact, black police officers are worse when it comes to profiling issues.
Furthermore, when it comes to issues that impact Berkeley’s black communities the Berkeley Black Police Officers Association is even more invisible than the NAACP.
If visibility and positive impact on the black communities of Berkeley are any criteria, both these organizations need to throw a going out of business party.
Now that would be relevant.
Jean Damu
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TRULY CRUELTY-FREE
Editors, Daily Planet:
I have many friends who have peculiar West Coast eating habits, due to the fact that a gastronomical fetish is currently in vogue here in California. Among the most stylish of all the food fetishists are the vegans who claim to be the most ethical of all for promoting a cruelty-free lifestyle. Unfortunately for the vegans, plants have a decentralized nervous system, which can process information such as damage and pain according to the First Symposium on Plant Neurobiology (“Root apices as plant command centres: the unique brain-like status of the root apex transition zone,” Dr. Frantisek Bluska, Department of Molecular and Cellular Botany, University of Bonn).
This new information shows us that the produce department at Berkeley Bowl is really a vegetable slaughterhouse and torture chamber. I shudder to think how the folks at the Berkeley Farmers Market are following in the genocidal footsteps of the Nazi concentration camps. I propose a truly cruelty- and drug-free diet, called elementalism. The basic premise is that no life should be injured nor should any drugs or chemicals be ingested while following this diet. All followers of elementalism will base their diet solely on the elements contained in the periodic table, as these elements have not yet combined to form dangerous drugs and chemicals.
Most of the currently discovered 112 elements making up the periodic table are available for purchase from Cole Parmer. As an example, rather than eating the potentially fatal drug salt, followers of elementalism ingest a small amount of pure sodium followed by a few deep inhalations of a bag of chlorine. In addition a few lifestyle changes are necessary to ensure that no life forms are killed or abused. The swallowing of sperm during oral sex is not allowed since every sperm is sacred as well as alive, and all bodily parasites, such as lice, spinal meningitis and mosquitoes must be cared for rather than brutally murdered. I encourage all vegans to take the next ethical step in overturning our forefathers speciesist and human-centered dietary habits, and enjoy a tasty plate of arsenic with a little radium on the side, washed down with a tall glass of bromine.
Michael S. Bakeman
•
BUS PASSES
Editors, Daily Planet:
It is sad that the Alameda-Contra Costa Transportation District still has the price of the bus pass of $20 for both seniors and the disabled. Both seniors and the disabled neither own cars nor drive. They use the bus as their only transportation to buy food, go to school, or go see a doctor. Because they are using the bus instead of cars, both seniors and the disabled are helping to combat global warming in both Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
Lately, I have been reading in some local newspapers that AC Transit is thinking of raising the price of a bus pass from $20 to $28. This is madness. They should lobby the politicians in both Sacramento and Washington D.C. for more funding for the bus services so they can lower the price of the bus pass for both seniors and the disabled.
Billy Trice, Jr.
Oakland
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ROUNDABOUT SIGNAGE
Editors, Daily Planet:
Berkeley and Albany have the wrong signs for entering their roundabouts. The use of yield signs is done by all the other cities that have roundabouts.
The stop signs of Berkeley and Albany are an unnecessary bother for motorists who should just pause briefly. The police departments may be issuing more citations as well.
Part of this use of stop signs has resulted from Berkeley letting nearby residents decide what they want, which is a funny way to decide what is right and proper.
A full discussion of roundabouts is contained in the Tech Transfer newsletter number 58, published by the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California. You can contact them at 665-3632.
Charles Smith
•
BUDGET CUTS THREATEN
JUVENILE JUSTICE REFORM
Editors, Daily Planet:
At a time when state and local agencies are facing massive budget cuts, the Schwarzenegger administration and the Legislature must consider the consequences of slashing funds which flow directly to programs that protect public safety and save taxpayers money. For that reason, I encourage you to editorialize on the threat that state budget cuts pose to California’s recent juvenile justice system reform.
Last year, the state enacted landmark juvenile justice reform that will cut the number of juveniles in state custody in half, while providing new “realignment” funding to counties. The reform’s success will depend on whether counties provide effective services to the increased number of young offenders under their supervision.
However, while the Schwarzenegger administration says its proposed budget protects juvenile justice spending, it actually calls for over $30 million in reductions to important juvenile justice interventions with a strong track record of preventing crime, including:
• The Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act (JJCPA) would lose $11.9 million.
• The Juvenile Mentally Ill Offender Crime Reduction (MIOCR) program would sustain a $2.25 million cut.
• Juvenile Probation and Camps funds would decrease by $20.1 million.
Juvenile justice could be subject to even deeper cuts if the controversial proposed early release of adult offenders is defeated or scaled back.
Especially in this tight budget year, the state should prioritize investments that are cost-effective. Protecting existing juvenile justice funding—and freeing up new realignment funds for greater investment in proven interventions—will help save taxpayer dollars this year and in the years ahead.
For further information about juvenile justice reform and the impact of the proposed budget cuts, see www.fightcrime.org/ca/jjfactsheet.
For details about local programs that could suffer as a result of the proposed cuts, see www.fightcrime.org/ca/jj/countysheets/bayarea.pdf.
Fight Crime: Invest in Kids California is a bipartisan, nonprofit, anti-crime organization led by more than 350 sheriffs, police chiefs, district attorneys and violence survivors. We evaluate crime-prevention strategies to determine what really works to keep kids from becoming criminals. If you are interested, we would welcome the opportunity to organize some of our law enforcement members to participate in an editorial board meeting with your paper.
Jennifer Ortega
Communications Director
Fight Crime: Invest in Kids California
Oakland
•
BIGOTRY
Editors, Daily Planet:
There goes another bogus claim of the anti-immigration crowd. A report just released says that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than are native born citizens. People born in the United States are 10 times more likely than immigrants to be incarcerated.
Go to any cosmopolitan city, New York, Miami, San Francisco, and you will hear a wide diversity of languages from around the world being spoken. So much for the “speak English” only spiel of talk radio hosts.
As far as the assimilation argument goes, I see multitudes of Mexicans and Latinos and their children and they’re working, speaking English and assimilating quite well, thank you.
Every day the bigotry, intolerance and prejudice that drives the anti-immigration movement becomes more apparent.
Ron Lowe
Grass Valley
if they spray us in august,
spray us in earnest, too;
what they got in that bug juice
make me don’t know what to do.
just pray we all don’t vote republican
before the fall is through.
Arnie Passman
Letter From a Connecticut Yankee
TO: Disgraceful Mayor,
To the UN- American Mayor of Berkeley and the city council. You folks are about as true a form of knucklehead as I have ever seen in my life. You have the nerve to let the communist Code Pink jerks dupe you into rising up against the U.S. Marines and belittle yourselves, your city, state and Nation.
What is even worse than that, is the fact that the UN-honorable Mayor is a former Veteran and he has the nerve to stand up against the Veterans who are fighting to keep his no good butt Free. If there are any more Veterans on the City Council, you disgust me as well. You are not Veterans as far as I am concerned, your useless and void in matter and content. What did all of you do anyway, buy your way into office. Sure didn't get there on your intelligence.
As far as I am concerned, from this point on, after learning what I have learned from the news media and paying attention to this fiasco in Berkeley, the Mayor of Berkeley is a no good for nothing useless ex-veteran.
It (IS NOT THE VETERAN) who dictates war, God Damn it, you bunch of jerks, it is stupid politicians in Washington, just like you that have no frigging brains at all. For the life of me, I cannot understand how you folks got elected to office.
California and the city of Berkeley have been controversial for as long as I can remember and that speaks volumes as to how many jerks there were in the last 50 years that have children that live in your state and city and act as foolish as you do.
You folks need a wake-up call and (GOD FORBID) the next time there is a terrorist attack on this country, It should be in California and Berkeley and let you see what it fel like to hurt like all that lost their lives on 9-11-2001. You all need a 9-11-2001 to happen to you, so you can grasp the reality of what the Veteran is up against to keep it from happening again.
You all need a wake-up call and especially that useless form of life Mayor that you have. I am totally ashamed to call him a Veteran and every time someone ever mentions his name to me from now on, I will be able to say that useless Mayor in Berkeley, right.
I just cannot believe that I am living in a country that has people as stupid as you and the ones involved in Code Pink. The Code Pink Organization are people who cannot accept life for what it is and cannot look beyond the ends of their noses and see what is happening in the rest of the world. WHY, because they are all the off-spring of the generation of pot heads and draft dodgers and unpatriotic Americans that opposed the Vietnam War. I lived it in the 1960's and I had no use for them, at that time, I have no use for them today and I have absolutely no use for their children.
I believe in my heart that every useless form of life in this country like the Code Pink participants need to be forced to go to war and to see how other people live in oppression and fear and death and hunger and sickness. You people are all so used to living in this world we have of not wanting for anything and having a golden spoon in your useless mouth and it would really make me smile from ear to ear to see yo all squirm for a change.
You all need to go without and see what it is like and then maybe, just maybe you could see that the U.S. Marine is just one of the few that would help to bring you back up and save your useless butt. All you people in California need to drop off the face of the earth because you are not what America is and what America stands for. You would all rather support the terrorist than to support your country and the Veteran who gives you the right to act like a useless jerk all the time.
I shouldn't be using fowl words here, I should be using the word jackass, You are all like a jackass, you know, (The Democratic Symbol)The Donkey no frigging brains and no frigging direction. It's as though you are all lost in the wilderness and have no direction and no leadership to help you find your way. And you all certainly have (NO BRAINS).
If you all want to find your way, TRUST THE U.S. MARINE, HE/SHE WILL BE THERE FOR YOU EVERYDAY, 24/7 AND PULL YOU UP AND TRY TO MAKE MORE OUT OF YOU THAN THE JACKASS THAT YOU ARE ALL BEING NOW.
You people, and especially the Mayor need to have guts enough to step up to the plate and admit that you are all wrong here and apologize to these U.S. Marines who have written a blank check on their lives to protect your useless ass.
I just cannot believe that there are so many unpatriotic Americans living in California and Berkeley. You are all an abomination against what is good and great in this Country and you all disgust me to the point of barfing.
With Absolutely (NO) Respect for The Mayor and City Council of Berkeley & Code Pink,
Jeffrey B. McBreairty
New Milford, Connecticut
A Big (PS):
If any Marines get this message and you will, God Bless each and everyone of you. I love you all from the bottom of my heart and I pray for all of you every day and for every Veteran who is out there today fighting for my Freedom and the security of this Country. Without you, we would not be Free and that would be a travesty. I would be extremely proud, as an ex-Veteran to stand beside you any day and fight the terrorist and I would go into battle with you and I would support you in the quest that you would be fighting for and I would die beside you because I believe in you. (America Is You).
Keep up the great work and do not let the brain dead matter in Berkeley dislodge your from your mission, stay the course and stand tall and proud because you are UNITED STATES MARINES. America Will Always Need Brave Men And Women Like You Even If Berkeley, California Does Not.
Oh yea, lets see if the berkeley daily planet will have the guts to print this.
