Opinion

The Internet yesterday was flooded with tributes to Teddy Kennedy. For many Americans he was the last surviving representative of a generation of liberals who believed that with steady work and good will all noble things were possible. It was a faith that was severely tried during the Reagan and Bush I and II administrations, and it was a bit shaken even under Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. -more-

URBAN DENSITY -more-

The downtown plan could have moved Berkeley toward a more cooperative approach to planning. Instead, it has stirred up antagonisms that will poison the debate about smart growth for many years to come. -more-

The referendum of the Berkeley Downtown Area Plan will go down in history for the assistance it received from the most unlikely of sources—its opponents.  -more-

A bad characteristic of the Bush-Cheney Administration, one of many, was the reliance on fear as a weapon to manipulate the American people. One would think that, now they are out of office, this would stop. However, Dick Cheney has other ideas. -more-

An important objective of meaningful health care reform is cost control. President Obama’s sweetheart deal with the drug companies and the dropping of a public option to provide meaningful competition to for-profit health insurance companies will not provide needed cost control. Given the way health care reform is heading, is it any wonder the drug and health insurance companies are smiling? -more-

For 12 years, beginning in 1970, I was director of studies for international educational programs sponsored by UC Berkeley Extension at Oxford, Leningrad, Venice and elsewhere. On several occasions both in England and the Soviet Union, persons in my programs got sick. -more-

Why aren’t reporters asking the following questions of those they choose to interview? This in-cludes the predictable “public television” (e.g., News Hour, Bill Moyers’ Journal) programs.   -more-

If television cameras had focused on the urban poor in New Orleans…before Katrina, I believe that the initial reaction to descriptions of poverty and poverty concentration would have been unsympathetic.” So writes Harvard scholar William Julius Wilson in More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. As we approach the fourth commemoration of the storm and flood, the nation has reverted to its pre-Katrina blindness to the poverty endemic to New Orleans—and to local Bay Area communities, whose conditions are ripe for just such wide scale disaster given our proximity to the ticking Hayward fault. -more-

Kéllia Ramares’ Commentary in the Planet Aug. 20 calls KPFA’s elections “silly” because “a tiny minority of listeners get totally worked up about” them but notes they “do not yield democratic results.” -more-

KPFA listeners remember 1999 as the year of the Lockout and the massive response. 10,000 people marched through the streets of Berkeley chanting “Save KPFA!” “Save Pacifica!” That dramatic moment was followed by a decade of board meetings, mostly held inside the dark chambers of the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse. And yet, basic issues are still not settled, their resolution still up for grabs. -more-

Was Donald Goldmacher’s commentary on the KPFA election fair, truthful and unbiased? Or did he conveniently leave out many crucial facts? You decide. -more-

It’s 2009, and the first community radio station in the country, KPFA, born right here in Berkeley in 1949, is entering its election cycle once again. And I feel sick.  -more-