Enviro-scold speaks out

Two weeks ago the City Council acted on a recommendation of the Transportation and Circulation Committee (TCC) to close a lane of traffic on Chapala between Mission and Constance and turn it into a bike lane. The Council freely admitted in their discussion that there was no need for a bike lane there (there is no connecting bike lane on Mission); the whole point was to slow traffic on Chapala, a major crosstown thoroughfare.

The City had done two surveys of public opinion in the Oak Park/Samarkand neighborhood, and in both cases the people who responded to the surveys were overwhelmingly against the "traffic calming" plan the City was pushing, which included the Chapala Street lane closure. But alternative transportation activist Alex Pujo, who lives on Chapala and who is on friendly terms with many on the Council, was able to convince the City to ignore the wishes of the people. After all, sometimes the people aren't smart enough to know what's good for them (or at least, what's good for influential people like Mr. Pujo). So the city went ahead with the lane closure, and will create a "bike lane" to nowhere, that will rarely be used. This has generated a few acerbic letters-to-the-editor, and today there was a reply from enviro-scold Ken Yamamoto:

Oh no, bike lanes are invading. How are we to put up with healthy, nonpolluting transportation?

Why should we get off our lazy duffs and exercise? And narrowing streets? We need wider streets for our fatter cars, while we drive like maniacs and run over anything in our hyperactively pathetic lives.

We like making things unsafe for insignificant pedestrians, immigrants and children. Our heads are too distracted on our cell phones to recognize any life forms outside of the sanctified automobile.

Ken Yamamoto is a massage therapist and bicycle enthusiast. The June 2002 newsletter of the Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition characterized him this way:

He has been a vegan for 23 years, composts, has a vegetable garden, recycles, and uses greywater.

Ken's house is filled with skylights. One corner is filled with drums and the walls are covered with books and decorated with Tribal baskets and masks.

Ken expressed fatalism about the way "humans are like a virus destroying the host organism," the earth. "We are an evolutionary mistake because we are not in balance with our ecosystem." He fears we are headed for extinction, an ecological collapse, or a nuclear holocaust.

Cheerful guy. Unfortunately, his prejudices are not that different from those of many of the people on the TCC and the City Council. They have decided that there is a lesser class of humans who must be coerced into abandoning their destructive ways by making the driving experience more and more frustrating.

I come to praise the News-Press

The Santa Barbara News-Press is a liberal (in the debased, late-20th-century sense of that term--i.e., socialist) paper in a majority liberal town. It is not uncommon to find unhinged anti-Bush editorials and propaganda pieces such as Sunday's pro-illegal-immigrant articles. But every so often, someone on the editorial staff gets it right. (I presume not Wendy, as she's probably too busy working up the News-Press's 33rd editorial against feral pig genocide, but who knows?)

Today's editorial rightly criticizes the City Council for spending time on feel-good socialist policies (the recently passed "living wage" ordinace, discussion of putting a limit on local political campaign spending), while ignoring the city's real and obvious problems, such as the ever-increasing hordes of slovenly and abusive vagrants that now throng State Street, and the increasingly violent Latino gangs--the editors note the two recent stabbings downtown, in broad daylight. But such problems are difficult to solve, and would require standing up to the people that want to tear this city down. Much easier to protest against the war in Iraq.

Congratulations to the News-Press editors for pointing out what should be obvious: city council members should be addressing the city's serious problems of security and safety. But given Santa Barbara's propensity for electing lefty ideologues with little real-world experience in business or leadership, this may be hoping for too much.

Red Star over De la Guerra Plaza

News-Press staff writers are, in general, deliriously happy about illegal immigration, but Shelly Leachman's Sunday front-page article on Saturday's illegal immigrant rally downtown sets a new standard for partisan rabble-rousing thinly disguised as reportage:

Wet weather Saturday didn't dampen the determination of the masses who marched in Santa Barbara in support of immigrants' rights--as the rain came down, their spirits rose up.

The "masses"? Yes, comrade, a glorious Red Dawn is just around the corner. The photographs that accompany this piece of agitprop prominently feature the American flag, which marchers have been told to carry--the much more popular Mexican flag sends the wrong message to some of the racist xenophobes who read the Press. Speaking of racist xenophobes, Ms. Leachman goes on to tell us in more detail who the good guys and bad guys are:

As the waterlogged marchers made their way through the downtown area, shoppers, passers-by, salespeople and others stopped to watch, listen and, mostly, show support.

The few nay-sayers included a dark-haired woman passing by Saks Fifth Avenue [store of choice for the oppressive bosses], who said to the woman beside her, "What's the point?" A heavyset, red-faced [white racist] man muttered "Keep it, buddy" to a volunteer passing out informational fliers.

But some white folks are almost as enlightened as Shelly herself:

But then there was the by-all-appearances well-heeled woman outside high-end clothing store Natasha, who smiled, nodded her platinum-blond head, and formed two fingers on her right hand into a peace sign.

She may be well-heeled (i.e., she pays the taxes that pay for illegal immigrant education, medical care, and welfare benefits), but her heart's in the right place!

Racism in the News-Press

The News-Press published an article today by Douglas Turner, a white liberal columnist with the Buffalo News, on the fundraising effort to build a Slavery Museum. Do we need another museum denigrating America? How much space will this museum devote to the Anglo-American role in destroying slavery, an institution that had existed everywhere in the world from time immemorial? My tentative answers are 1) No, and 2) Little or none. Oh well. I'm sure it will be built. But the gratuitously racist remarks with which Turner closes his article are astonishing even by News-Press standards, where no insult is too vile as long as it's directed at the Bush administration. Mr. Turner elaborates on the point that the museum will be privately run, in contrast with another "African-American"-themed museum being built on the Mall in Washington D.C.:

I think I prefer a private place run by African-Americans to one governed by the Smithsonian Institution and Congress, particularly this Congress. They are, after all, white establishments.

Beautiful.

Slow news day

That must be the explanation for today's News-Press editorial, one of Wendy McCaw's trademark, over-the-top animal rights screeds. Just for variety, today's object of violent solicitude is not the feral pigs of Santa Cruz Island, but some 200 coyotes in Arizona:

We doubt any of the killings really had to take place. The government lacked documentation that the coyotes posed huge threats to calves. If they did--and that is a big if--non-lethal alternatives surely had to be available.

The best course would have been to just leave the coyotes alone. They were, after all, there first. The ranchers could simply better manage their cattle if the coyotes truly were preying on them.

I don't know the facts of the case, but I doubt Wendy does either, and I'm sure her knowledge of cattle ranching is approximately zero. I do know that coyotes are not an endangered species (we could certainly do with less of them here in Santa Barbara), and that I'm more inclined to trust cattle ranchers in Arizona than I am Wendy when it comes to evaluating the threat that coyotes pose to cattle herds. But animal rights activists know best--the threat was not "huge," non-lethal alternatives were "surely" available (coyotes make great pets!), and, best of all, the coyotes were there first. I suppose that last point would also be a good justification for razing Wendy's seaside estate and re-establishing the native plants and animals. After all, they were there first.

Wendy McCaw is zealous in protecting her own property rights; witness her long, costly, and ultimately futile battle with the Coastal Commission to prevent public access to the beach below her Hope Ranch home. Other people's property rights? Not so important, it seems.

A tale of two rallies

The News-Press published a story by Joshua Molina at the top of page A-3 today entitled Peace activists hit the street:

About 40 opponents of the war in Iraq rallied Saturday afternoon on State Street as part of a national "Out of Iraq" day of events.

Now, finding 40 leftists to march down State Street on a Saturday afternoon beating drums and carrying peace flags isn't hard--this is Santa Barbara after all. But wait, there's more!

The event on the busy downtown street featured people who displayed signs with biting political barbs denouncing the Bush administration: "They lie to us. They spy on us. Impeach." Another said "Rich man's war, poor man's blood."

It's unclear how these biting political barbs differ from the usual heavy-handed, dull-witted progressive slogans, but perhaps in Joshua Molina's eyes they sparkle. Visiting Los Angeles peace activist Jamie Green had this perceptive comment on American foreign policy over the last sixty years:

"American foreign policy has been immoral since World War II," said Ms. Green. "This war rivals Vietnam in terms of wrongness. It's probably worse, considering what we know from Vietnam."

I'm not sure what I can say about Iraq in terms of wrongness, or in terms of worseness relative to whatever Ms. Green knows from Vietnam. But I feel confident in saying that one of the cornerstones of American foreign policy after World War II was opposition to the spread of Communist dictatorships. Most self-styled progressives, then and now, supported such dictatorships. Immorality, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder.

Meanwhile, over on page A-5, a wire service story was headlined Turnout low at illegal-immigration protests. Apparently yesterday was also "Stop the Invasion" day, with events planned for cities in 17 states. Many of these it seems were sparsely attended. For instance, only fifty people showed up to protest illegal immigration in Danbury, Connecticut. Danbury is however smaller than Santa Barbara, and the weather there on Saturday was cloudy, with a high temperature of 40 F (a temperature at which many Santa Barbarans would expire). Fifty people in chilly Danbury rallying against law-breakers is termed a low turnout, but forty leftists rallying on a sunny Santa Barbara day to impeach the president...that's newsworthy! And it's as neat an illustration as any of how the news filters work at the News-Press: Heads, we win; tails, you lose.

Our Easily Offended Vagrants

The front page above-the-fold photo on today's Santa Barbara News-Press is priceless: Two scruffy-but-healthy, tanned young men lounging with their feet on the seat of one of the downtown benches, their slovenly backpacks taking up space on the public sidewalk. Behind them a little hispanic man is diligently tending one of the sidewalk planters (no doubt for wages that Allen and Lars Peterson, 30 and 33 years old, would consider beneath them). These sturdy beggars are complaining about the signs that some merchants in Old Town have posted, signs asking passersby not to give money to panhandlers (who use it mostly for booze and drugs), but to instead give it to one of our many local charities. Allen and Lars are offended at being lumped in with drug users.

If Santa Barbara were not so assiduous in catering to the needs of the so-called homeless, perhaps the outraged sense of entitlement that afflicts the least worthy of our beggars would ebb. In a better world, able-bodied young men resting on public benches meant for elderly shoppers and tourists, and begging for coins in a town full of opportunity, might even feel a little shame.

Article link, unfortunately only good for a week, and requiring registration: http://news.newspress.com/toplocal/070705panhandlers.htm?now=66308&tref=1