Opinion

The combination of watching the Berkeley City Council and hearing the results of the Massachusetts elections on Tuesday night could give you a serious case of mental indigestion: just too much to swallow in both cases. Even though it was completely predictable, even though I stopped just short of predicting it a couple of weeks ago in this space, Massachusetts was a sad spectacle. -more-

THE ALAMEDA -more-

In November 1978 Harper’s magazine published my article on the passage of Proposition 13 with the headline “Californians Rush for Fool’s Gold.” -more-

The Board of Directors of the Free Speech Movement Archives (www. fsm-a.org) includes a number of participants from the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and we believe we can speak with some authority on behalf of those who made that movement a success. -more-

On Dec. 15, 2009, the Berkeley City Council held a public hearing on the city’s proposed $8,000 lien concerning the boarding-up of Dr. Rash Ghosh’s McGee and Dwight property. City officials supervised the city’s boarding-up of Dr. Ghosh’s buildings, which violated its own order to board from the inside as well as a court order, and defeated the alleged purpose for boarding. -more-

In what is being hailed by electoral reform activists as a landmark victory for future third-party election efforts in the East Bay, the Oakland City Council on Jan. 5 passed a measure that dramatically transforms the City of Oakland’s election process. -more-

I am not a masochist and therefore I cannot explain why I allowed myself to suffer for two minutes seeing and listening to Bush and Clinton ask us to help Haiti (YouTube). My stomach turned over seeing George W, poised unblinkingly before the cameras, saying, “When confronted with massive human suffering Americans have always stepped up and answered to call to help.” Witnessing such incredible boldness is excruciating. Here was the worst president in our history speaking as if he sincerely wanted to do for the black residents of a benighted island what he failed to do for the black residents of his own country in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. -more-

Like Hurricane Katrina that ripped the Gulf Coast and New Orleans in particular, the earthquake that shook Haiti and Port-au-Prince is not simply a “natural disaster.” The death unfolding on a scale impossible to imagine is not simply the result of an “exceptional set of circumstances.” Rather, powerful impacts of this event are in large part due to past actions of the United States, uncovering the poverty that lurks just below the surface from Alexandria to Oakland. -more-

Thanks to a would-be Jockey-short Jihadist with three ounces of powdered explosive in his shorts, I recently found myself flying back to the U.S. smack in the midst of air travel’s Scared New World. The prospect of being denied access to a bathroom during the last hour of flight left me pondering the creative repurposing of airsickness bags. -more-

Police misconduct is epidemic in this country and anyone with two eyes and a heart knows this is true. The few protections against abuse that once existed have been removed. The Berkeley Police Review Commission, once a model for the nation, has been emasculated to the point that its hearings are held in secret and its findings are confidential. As most observers know, our elected officials are loathe to offer any public resistance to police supremacy. -more-

We have a national predisposition to hold assumptions and generalizations regarding people based on pigmentation and accents. Educated people who are white or have light enough skin and features that allow them to pass for white and who speak Standard English—as spoken by national network television newscasters—are more easily employed and elected to public office. There has always been a hierarchy based on color in America as well as within the black community itself. In white majority communities minorities, foreign-born and people of color are less likely to win elections. Unfortunately, historically in America the darker the skin and the stronger the accent the more limited the opportunities and the harder it is to get a job or elected to public office. -more-

Now that the Jew-on-Jew battle has reached the screechy stage (“Your side helped the Nazis!” “No we didn’t! You’re a Nazi for saying so!”), I strongly suggest that it’s time for Becky O’Malley to impose some filters; there’s no reason why the Berkely Daily Planet should provide a platform for a three-thousand-year-old-and-still-ongoing family argument. -more-

The recent stunning defeat of Democrat Martha Coakley by a previously unknown Republican state senator for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts is a wonderful gift to the Obama administration. -more-