A meta-review of a mini-book

I want to make two things clear at the start of this post: I have not read Richard Sutherland's 43-page "book" None Dare Call it Reason, nor do I plan to.

However, I did read the Town Crier's review of it. Given that the book criticizes the Republican Party, and the Town Crier's publisher is a leader in a local Republican Party organization (a fact once again mentioned nowhere), you can probably guess that the thing did not get four stars.

This is my favorite part:

What the book doesn’t have is a consistent sourcing of the facts Sutherland cites. Considering his indignation over government officials’ so-called lies that the American people have embraced, Sutherland should have meticulously footnoted attributions lest readers suspect he is duping them, too.

Considering the Town Crier is consistently unable to point to any supporting evidence (let alone "meticulously footnoted attributions") for many ridiculous claims and assertions while ignoring overwhelming evidence against others, I hope somebody over there got the irony.

At least the review didn't criticize it for being a book.

Three things you might believe if you'd been reading the Town Crier instead of studying the last few weeks

1) Day workers sued the City of Los Altos as payback for the termination of a lease to which the city was not a party and not over an unconstitutional law forcing poor people to stand on the other side of El Camino.

2) Enabling more students to park closer to Mountain View High School will somehow reduce traffic there.

3) The South Peninsula Area Republican Coalition gets free advertising for its electioneering efforts because they are somehow newsworthy and not because the publisher founded the organization.

Meanwhile, the Daily News recently discovered that at least three Los Altos City Council members are rich.

Damnit

I got really excited when I saw the headline for the article "Big plans for St. Francis campus." Unfortunately, the plans do not include, as I had hoped, demolition.

Administrative president Kevin Makley tells the paper that the idea is to "add some things we haven't had before." Not surprisingly, a tolerable student population does not appear on the list.