Random Monday thoughts and links

January 21, 2008 by V Smoothe

I’m keeping things short today, on account of the holiday.

I was going to write a post about how deplorable it is that Mandela Foods Cooperative actively tried to limit the amount of fresh produce, meat, and dairy available to West Oakland residents in order to force people to buy their more expensive, organic produce. Seriously, I am so disgusted with these people I have no words. The height of bourgeois hypocrisy. Anyway, now I don’t have to, because a plucky new blog called East Bay Conservative beat me to it. Mandela Foods, by the way, continues to push back their opening date, leading some (and by “some,” I mean “me”) to question whether this black hole of taxpayer money is ever going to get off the ground. Back in September, the Council gave them yet another $200,000. At that time, they said that with the money, they’d be open in November. Their ETA is now April.

In my folder of half-finished drafts, I’ve been hanging onto a list of stupid things other cities have done that we can probably look forward to someone on the Council proposing during election season. I wish I’d posted it sooner because a wood burning fire ban was totally on my list. Sad for Nancy Nadel, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District beat her to it.
The City put together a list of events celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King today, if you’re looking for something to do.
Yesterday’s Freakonomics column focused on the unintended negative consequences of well-intentioned laws, a topic dear to my heart. I wonder if anyone on the City Council read it. If they did, I doubt they made the mental leap from the ADA and the red-cockaded woodpecker to a plastic bag ban or inclusionary zoning, but they should.
295bus has a nice post comparing public transit in Northern and Southern CA.
Council races are heating up. Nancy Nadel announced at the beginning of the month that she was running for re-election, despite the fact that she “find[s] limited joy in [her] work”. So far, her only declared opposition is Greg Hodge, of the Oakland school board. The at-large race already has three declared candidates: AC Transit board member Rebecca Kaplan, police staffing gadfly Charles Pine, and Oakland Globe columnist Clinton Killian. Crazy!

UPDATE! I’m so out of the loop, apparently. Sean Sullivan, of Covenant House, and the new weblog Incredibledaze, is also running for District 3 City Council.