Posted 4:38 PM by Floyd

Palo Alto is home to a nice little newspaper called the Palo Alto Daily News. This is a tabloid newspaper that is published daily, and available free in bright red boxes. The paper is published as one section; the issue I am holding contains 84 pages. The masthead claims a circulation of 58,800. Unfortunately the Daily News does not operate a web page.

Friday's edition had a muckraking editorial that is useful to keep in mind the next time someone tells you that of course taxes have to be raised to deal with California's budget crisis because services have been cut to the bone.

Several administrators in the Palo Alto city government announced last week that they want to form a union of city management employees, presumably to end the injustice they see in their workplace.

Seeking justice are:

• Leon Kaplan, art and culture director, who made $114,622 last year;
  
• Kathy Espinoza-Howard, human services director, $114,480;
  
• ...
  

These five hope to convince about 250 other administrators in the city government to vote for creation of a union so that their grievances can be hear.

The Daily News then listed more evidence of their "oppression":

[T]hey work 26 Fridays per year, they only get 12 paid holidays and 12 paid sick days. They receive a mere two weeks vacation when they start with the city, although that increases to five weeks after they've been around a for awhile.

In addition, managers receive an automatic 80-hour "management annual leave" ...

Add it all up, and they only work 190 days out of a 364-day year.

Some managers get a $325-a-month car allowance. Others are assigned a city vehicle and can take it home nights and weekends...

They also receive retirement benefits that can pay as much as 90 percent of what they made in their best years on the city payroll ... Their pension benefits are defined in advance and guaranteed by the government.

...

The number of city employees in the "$100,000" Club has increased year after year, from 58 in 1999 to 128 last year.

While the pay may seem high, consider the working conditions. The city has around 1,000 employees, and 250 of them are managers. That suggests that each manager only supervises three people.

Note that Palo Alto has a population of only about 57,000 people.

Posted 12:53 PM by Floyd

Yesterday as I was driving to the bridge tournament, I listed to recall campaign coverage on the radio. First Cruz Bustamante was reported pandering to voters: He proposed that the state agencies that regulate utilities should also be allowed to regulate gas prices. Bustamente said that Californians were being gouged, and that gas prices should be cheaper in California because the state contains a lot of refineries.

Bustamante thus scores the following:

• 10 points for pandering
  
• 10 points for contempt of voters' memory (how about those lines and shortages the last time the government told gas stations how to sell their product?)
  
• 15 points for jaw-dropping economic illiteracy (that bit about refineries), which brings to mind Hitler's weird utterances as chronicled in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
  

The very next report was coverage of three candidates' appearance before representatives of the Indian gaming industry. One of those candidates was Bustamante, who was reported as being against restrictions on Indian gaming (i.e., casinos). Bustamante was quoted on the air:

I don't think there should be restrictions on how many slot machines a casino can contain. We don't tell merchants how much of a product they can sell. We should allow casinos to have as many machines as the market will bear (emphasis mine).

• 10 points for being a vote-grubber
  
• 15 points for implicitly telling the oil industry that matching Indian tribes' $3 million in contributions will make everything okay
  
• 20 points for contempt of voters' intellectual processes
  
• ...
  

(I can't link to the radio, but here's a Merc article that mentions both stories.)

Posted 2:30 PM by Floyd

I don't understand liberals who act like this:

San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez put a populist spin on his campaign for mayor Tuesday when he unveiled a proposal that targets new chain stores in the city.

He introduced a bill that would require chain-operated businesses to seek city approval to open if there's any formal neighborhood objection to the project.

"San Franciscans are highly sensitive to and proud of their distinct neighborhood character," Gonzalez said. "The increasing number of formula/chain stores has a homogenizing effect on our neighborhoods and makes it more difficult for local and independent business to have a foothold in the city." Gonzalez got a late start in the mayor's race and is only now starting to cement his platform.

...

Susan Leal and Supervisor Gavin Newsom, all expressed support for giving residents and merchants a say in whether big-box retailers, such as Home Depot and Wal-Mart, could locate in their neighborhoods. Gonzalez's plan goes further and would affect businesses of all sizes.

The bill takes aim at "formula retail businesses" -- companies with four or more stores that have such similar characteristics as merchandise, employee uniforms, signs and logos. Gonzalez already introduced legislation that focuses on coffee stores and pharmacies, such as Starbucks and Walgreens.

...

Peter Cohen, a neighborhood activist who helped persuade Starbucks to drop plans to set up shop in Hayes Valley, said the Gonzalez plan isn't an attempt to thwart business development but to give neighborhoods a greater say over their community.

"It's not about blocking anything, but to give people their day in court, so to speak," said Cohen, who moved out of Hayes Valley and to the Duboce Triangle neighborhood. "This is a way to allow public debate to take place and raise the issue."

What's the difference between getting the government to keep Starbucks out of your neighborhood, and getting the government to keep blacks out of your neighborhood? Or homosexuals?

You would think people in San Francisco, of all places, would understand live and let live. I guess a common reaction to being persecuted and bullied is for the victim to find some other people that he can persecute and bully.

Posted 1:04 PM by Floyd

There's no pleasing some people, viz. Hit and Run's Jesse Walker:

Grim Milestone

The number of American troops killed in the occupation of Iraq now exceeds the number killed during the conquest.

Since the number of Americans killed conquering in Iraq was amazingly small, this is not surprising. Would Walker be happier if US Armed forces took a few thousand casualties? (Germany's whirlwind campaign against Poland in 1939 cost them 15,000 men.) Then it would take awhile for occupation casualties to catch up.

Posted 6:08 PM by Floyd

Time for more drivel from the San Jose Mercury News letters page! First, let's see what Bay Area geniuses have to say about the aftermath of the war with Iraq:

What do we do about our quagmire in Iraq? The knee-jerk reaction is to send in more U.S. troops. Remember the constant demands for a few thousand more troops in Vietnam?

It is time to eat crow and request a sizable U.N. peacekeeping force with broad authority. Our current request for U.N. volunteers is too feeble to be successful.

Bob Roy
Sunnyvale

The UN will have "broad authority" to do what, Roy Bob? Get blown to bits and run out of Baghdad with their tails between their legs?

Imagine what Iraq could have done with all those billions of dollars which were spent on destroying it. Imagine the food they could have bought, the water treatment plants they could have built and the medicine they could have purchased to help heal the sick and suffering. War is such a waste.

Ted Rudow III
Menlo Park

Imagine all the palaces that could have been built and the Kurds that could have been gassed.

Ted is probably some aging hippie who protested the Vietnam war 35 years ago, and thinks that every half-baked idea that comes out of his head is popular and brilliant. Pacifism is such a waste.

The recent violence in Afghanistan, Baghdad and the Middle East emphasizes the fact that we lack the capability as an individual nation to deal with the various religious and ethnic related problems of the entire world.

The only solution is to make every effort to strengthen the United Nations. We simply cannot ignore the U.N. and dictate to the world on our own terms.

Mel Hirsekorn
Redwood City

Well, it is true that we lack the capability to fix worldwide religious and ethnic problems. That's okay though, because we are not trying to deal with those issues. We're trying to deal with the planes-flown-into-skyscraper-related problems.

As for strengthening the UN, let's run the numbers:

The US gets one vote.
Iran gets one vote.
Syria gets two votes (one for itself, one for its puppet Lebanon).

Posted 2:06 PM by Floyd

There was a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin played with a ball-attached-to-paddle toy for a bit, and then said "I resent the manufacturer's implicit assumption that this would entertain me." I get the same sort of feeling when I read the Mercury News letters page.

Here is a prime specimen of self-congratulatory ass-hattery, by one Annie Laurie Gaylor:

The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote, turns 83 years old on Tuesday. People today take it for granted. But 155 years ago, in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton issued a call for women's suffrage, she was greeted by howls of derision and opprobrium.

She died in 1902, so she never got the chance to exercise her right to vote under the suffrage amendment, which she herself composed, and which finally passed in 1920. But Stanton, who once edited a feminist newspaper called The Revolution, surely ignited one for women.

Although winning the right to vote took almost four generations of labor by women, and much work is left to achieve full equality, the revolutionary changes for women since 1848 are undeniable.

Yes, those three paragraphs were a waste of your time. I'm not apologizing, because I had to read them too.

Stanton, despite her blazing intellect, was, as a woman, barred from enrolling in college during her youth. Today, women comprise the majority on college campuses.

Also, women, have, gained the, right to, use, commas.

Stanton believed in ``a definite purpose for girls.'' And she railed against the ethos that women had to ``self-sacrifice.'' She said, ``Put it down in capital letters, that self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.'' Today, a majority of girls and women in the United States seem to have a ``definite purpose.''

Let's imagine trying to support Gaylor's vague and unsupported statement via polling:

Q: Madam, do you have a definite purpose?

A: I seem to have a ``definite purpose.'' Is that close enough?

Q. I'm sorry, I forgot to put the question down in capital letters. Do you have ``a Definite Purpose''?

Still, Congress has refused to ratify the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted 24 years ago by the U.N. General Assembly to help ensure human rights for women. By not ratifying the treaty, the United States finds itself in the company of a handful of countries, including Afghanistan, Iran and the Sudan.

Oh, I see. Congress refused to ratify a meaningless document promulgated by a dictator's club. Therefore America's treatment of women lags behind all but a handful of countries.

What's more, our right to abortion hangs by a swing vote.

In the first place, that's an obvious falsehood. If the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade, that would send the matter back to the states. Abortion would certainly be legal in liberal states like California, New York, and Massachussetts.

In the second place, Gaylor just praised most of the world's nations for ratifying the "Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women". And in most of the world's nations, abortion is illegal.

We have never had a woman president, and Congress and the judiciary remain predominantly male enclaves.

And what would our feminist foremothers who worked so hard for the right to vote make of an election process that brought us our current political mess? What would they think of President Bush's Orwellian suppression of civil liberties in the name of freedom, and his war without end in the name of peace?

Bush's "war without end" -- which has targeted two countries and killed a few thousand people -- liberated women in Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan? Gaylor got all huffy comparing the US to that nation, back in paragraph six.

I realize you are finding it difficult to remain focussed on this drivel. That's okay; you're doing a better job than its author.

More than 100 years ago, Stanton's friend and fellow suffragist Susan B. Anthony lamented about public indifference toward unjust foreign policy. ``I wonder if when I am under the sod -- or cremated and floating up in the air -- I shall have to stir you and others up,'' Anthony wrote in a letter on Dec. 17, 1898. ``How can you not be all on fire? . . .''

The anniversary of the 19th Amendment is always worth celebrating. But along with casting our vote, we need to raise our voice in protest, as Stanton and Anthony taught us.

I protest this contradictory, illiterate crap.

Posted 2:41 PM by Floyd

Q: Just how viciously anti-Semitic is the loony left these days?

A: Indymedia found out that Michele Catalano was making fun of them:

The Far-Right is targeting Indymedia with slander and threats of censorship. We need to shut down these extreem rightwing threats! Overload their servers, Far right sites, of the Zionazi variety, are planning on undermining Indymedia with slander and lies. The main culprits is a right-wing operator running a site called "A Small Victory" (see link below). The gameplan is to censor Indymedia by claiming (lying) that Indymedia censors. Yes Indymedia removes trash from far-right freepers who spam Indymedi with filthy jewpropganda. But that is not censorship! See this link and help us shut down this site:

http://asmallvictory.net/archives/004293.html#004293

(To be fair, the article was headed "Hidden with code "Policy Violation".")

Update: Via Instapundit, example 2.

I have a feeling that there are a lot more fish in the barrel.

Posted 10:50 AM by Floyd

There was no blogging last weekend because I was busy having fun. My friend Scott took my wife and I river tubing on Cache Creek. I spent considerable time Friday and Saturday preparing for the trip; my biggest effort was simply finding tubes, as the sporting goods stores had held sales last week to clear out their inventory.

Sunday we woke up "early" -- 7:15 a.m. is early only for lazy folk like the McWilliamses -- and drove up to Daly City to meet Scott. Then we drove our car and Scott's Mustang across the Bay Bridge, along the San Pablo Bay, across to Vallejo, northeast to Sacramento, and north on 505. After a few miles on 505 we took 16 west and drove along Cache Creek. After about 20 miles of driving through rural California, we left a car at the destination, left our cooler halfway down the creek, and drove up to the launching point.

After a few minutes inflating our tubes, we embarked -- and immediately faced our first set of rapids. Right then I found out that river tubing is fun. Cache Creek is mostly a Class 2 rapids river with some easy Class 3 rapids. This would be boring in a boat, but is challenging in a tube. Also, conditions were perfect: The water was not too cold, and the temperature was in the high 90s.

The tubing run was only about six miles long, but took five hours to navigate in our tubes. Halfway through we stopped for lunch, which was sandwiches, grapes, cookies, beer for me, water for Scott and Sherry. Soon after lunch we hit the "Mother" rapids, the roughest stretch of whitewater. We made it through unscathed. Sherry did take a tumble later, and Scott had bailed on some rough rapids near the start. I made it through with no spills.

The only blemishes on our outing were that when we shuttled the cars after finishing, we found that someone had taken Scott's cooler! I imagine that someone was cleaning up rather than stealing, as it was a used cooler with nothing of value in it. Also, I did not put sunscreen on my upper thighs and by the time we were ready to go, they were cherry-red and radiating.

On the way back we stopped by the Cache Creek Indian Casino to hit the buffet. I had better sum up Indian Casinos for my non-American readers: Earlier in America's history, a bunch of white people stole the Indians' land. So they get to operate casinos.

That made no sense. Let me explain: During the last phase of Western expansion, America subjugated many Indian tribes. The American government signed peace treaties with them, and maintained a pretense that the Indian tribes were still independent nations. These "nations" aren't able to interact with foreign countries, but they are exempt from some domestic laws. Over the last few decades, many tribes have taken advantage of their special status and have opened casinos. (Indian reservations also undertake other forms of commerce unavailable to most Americans, like selling cigarettes tax-free.)

So in the middle of nowhere in rural California -- Brooks, population 92, near metropoli such as Gundia, population 550 -- is this enormous building, with a parking garage under construction and a huge parking lot past it. I found it disconcerting to be standing across from a field of crops, waiting for a shuttle bus. It was still tremendously hot, and the bus was not well air-conditioned, so we were fairly uncomfortable by the time we arrived at the casino. The buffet was $16, which seemed overpriced. At least we got to drink a lot of water and soft drinks.