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.

A new entry for the Town Crier's greatest hits album

This week, we find the leaders of the fifth-most educated small town in America trying to one up each other with dumber and dumber reasons for opposing a tax on plastic bags. The Los Altos City Council began the shenanigans by voting 4-1 against Santa Clara County's proposed 25¢ per bag fee. The reasoning (apparently provided for them by the sinisterly-named American Chemistry Council) seemed to be that people ought to get paid for things that they should be doing already. A few days later, the award-winning editorial pages of the Town Crier joined the fray, and you can imagine where it went from there.

County should ‘bag’ the bag tax

Ha!

A recent proposal by the Santa Clara County Recycling and Waste Reduction Commission for paper and plastic grocery and retail bag reduction and a 25 cent per-bag tax received a cool reception from the Los Altos City Council. The issue wasn’t so much bag reduction – in these “green” times, reductions are appropriate. It was the "tax" part of it that council members rejected.

I'm sending both this headline and opening paragraph to the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

We’re glad they did. Councilwoman Val Carpenter hit the nail on the head when she said the city would be better off implementing incentives for residents using fewer bags than agreeing to impose a tax. And the prospect of another tax in this weak economy is equivalent to hitting the taxpayers when they’re down. Frankly, there are far bigger environmental issues to tackle, such as toxic waste disposal and water conservation.

The Town Crier editorial writer may be happy about this, and Val Carpenter did in fact say that, but everything else in this paragraph is wrong.

the city would be better off implementing incentives for residents using fewer bags than agreeing to impose a tax.

My idea to give people an incentive to use fewer bags: charge a fee that they can avoid by using fewer bags.

And the prospect of another tax in this weak economy is equivalent to hitting the taxpayers when they’re down.

Three issues here: 1) Technically, it would be the tax itself doing the hitting, not the prospect of it, 2) this fee would be especially easy to avoid, and 3) I'm pretty sure Los Altans can afford an extra quarter in the extreme circumstances where it becomes necessary.

Frankly, there are far bigger environmental issues to tackle, such as toxic waste disposal and water conservation.

This sentence is particularly egregious. Its premise is a false dilemma that imagines society can either address the problem of plastic bags or deal with other environmental concerns, but not both. It also lacks any evidence for its claims. And given that the Town Crier still pretends that we are not changing the climate, I find it a little hard to trust assertions like this one. In fact, I even question the writer's frankness.

The editorial goes on to argue that the market should magically provide reusable bags, missing entirely the idea that plastic bags are artificially cheap because of the external costs that the market is not capturing. And in a coup-de-grace against both logic and the English language, we get this:

For anyone who’s been in Whole Foods Market, an occasional price break would be quite welcome.

Let's leave aside for now the irony of complaining about high food prices and then letting it slip that you shop at whole foods. Also, let's ignore that one of Whole Foods' main selling points is that the food it sells has fewer associated externalities than does the food from Safeway, Trader Joe's or Ralph's, thereby justifying the higher costs. The main problem with this is that Whole Foods presumably sets its prices in a way that takes into account the discounts it gives shoppers for using renewable bags, essentially taxing shoppers in the same way that the County's proposal would.

Hopefully Mountain View will have a more intelligent debate when it takes up the issue this week.

A customer then fell down

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman advocated that Israel conduct terrorist attacks against civilians. But, being a local blog, we'd much rather make fun of the Town Crier's parallel construction error.

... police and fire department officials responded to a pedestrian accident and alleged fraud at US Bank. Los Altos police arrested a woman on suspicion of attempting to cash a fraudulent check, according to Detective Wes Beveridge.

Los Altos marches to the left

Eight years ago, when Los Altos voters favored Al Gore over George Bush, the Town Crier predictably made sure to mention "the city's rich Republican history." (Just as predictably, the paper failed to mention its publisher's prominent role in local Republican politics). Four years later, a similar article by Miss Mischief characterized my hometown as "typically a Republican stronghold."

It's time to dispense with that idea. Los Altos is a place with many problems. But I am happy to report that Republicanism is not one of them.

Since the 2000 election, the margin by which Los Altos voters have favored the Democratic candidate for President has tripled, with Barack Obama pulling in more than twice as many votes as John McCain this year.

In Los Altos Hills, the margin is slightly smaller, but the trend is the same.



The local electorate's take on Prop. 8 is further evidence of the city's liberal tilt: despite the Town Crier's courageously bad endorsement of the measure, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills strongly rejected it (63-37 and 60-40, respectively).

Has Los Altos changed, or has the Republican Party?

Nationwide, voters with postgraduate degrees went Democratic by as much as 64-36 margin. (This is not surprising given their choice between a former law professor with Joe Biden as a running mate and Warren Buffett as an economic advisor and, on the other hand, the trio of a gas tax holiday advocate, Sarah Palin and Joe "the Plumber"). With 40% of its population over the age of 25 holding advanced degrees, Los Altos is likely lost to the Republicans for the foreseeable future. It may not be long before reporters are referring to its rich Democratic history.

A Holiday Fund appeal

Things are tough all over.

In Mountain View, the city is again facing $5 million or more in budget cuts, and the day worker center must divide among a hundred or so workers job requests that number in single digits. When one employer wrote a bad check after hiring several workers and declined to make good on it, the director drove all the way to Monterey County to collect. Things have become so bad that day workers are giving up and going back to Mexico and other home countries.

And in Los Altos, the house at 47 View St. appears to have been taken off the market after its list price was knocked down from $27 million to $19.9 million. (The absurdity of this property revealed itself again on Thanksgiving night, when a homeless veteran died in a bus stop just one mile away).

Some of you may need special encouragement to open up your wallets for charity this year, so here it comes:

It is time for NOE readers (and contributors) to support the best thing the local papers do all year -- the Holiday Fund drives through which the Voice and Town Crier fund a combined 22 local charities. The economic downturn is doubly painful for those who rely on these charities, as an increasing number of clients must share fewer resources. Even the Holiday Fund drives themselves have suffered, both at about 60% of last year's total. Please go to the websites now, read the profiles of the charities, and make a donation. For further inspiration, you can look to the example of Bob Schick, who made his dedicated his donation to the Voice fund to the memory of the prune trees in Cuesta Annex.

The Town Crier and the importance of editorial endorsements

Q: What was the largest newspaper in the state of California to endorse Proposition 8?

A: The Los Altos Town Crier

On October 22, our hometown paper joined the Paradise Post (circulation: 8,000) as only the second paper in the state of California to endorse Proposition 8.  The Town Crier's circulation of 16,500 made it the largest newspaper in the state in favor of the measure, a distinction it held through election day.

Given that the opposition of almost every other paper in the state opposed it yet the measure still passed, it seems that either newspapers don't have quite the influence they think they do, or that the Town Crier has a lot more influence than we thought.

My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between.  Blog-hero Nate Silver, as usual, probably got this one right:

When you're voting for Dog Commissioner, and you have no information about the candidates, you might well go with whomever your local paper decides to endorse.  In a race like Obama-McCain [or a 14-word measure like Prop. 8], on the other hand, you already have all the information you could ever want, and probably have established a fairly strong preference for yourself.

Precinct-by-precinct results are yet to come out, but the Town Crier's endorsement in local elections seems to be pretty crucial to a candidate's hopes: the five candidates they endorsed this year all won election.  At the same time, the electorate probably can make up its own mind about its feelings on things like children's hospitals and veterans' services.

NOE Newsflash: Town Crier endorses Los Altos

LOS ALTOS, CA -- The editorial board of the Los Altos Town Crier has selected Los Altos as the area in which Los Altos residents should do most of their holiday shopping.

In a studious, point-by-point analysis, the board argued, "why not shop and spend downtown and in our other shopping districts? The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. For starters, there’s available parking."

"Shoppers may choose from 11 women’s clothing stores, eight jewelry stores, five children’s stores and a toy store," the Town Crier writes, "the downtown also has two shoe stores and two pet stores."

The decision of where the town's residents will shop may have impact on retailers from Stanford Shopping Center to as far as the Gilroy Premium Outlets.

"We're beyond humbled," said Phyllis Dreer, 78, of Main Street Antiques. "It would have been easy for the Los Altos Town Crier to have urged Los Altos to do most of its shopping outside of Los Altos."

Edward Landis, 82, quickly interjected, "Just like it would have been easy for Town Crier to have endorsed against Prop 8, like the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Sacramento Bee, San Diego Union Tribune, and even the Orange County Register did. But no, our paper has the courage to speak out against the unpleasant things outside Los Altos, like homo-marriage and stores larger than Draeger's."

The editorial also reiterated one of its long running themes: Los Altans have more money than some other people who live nearby. "Residents from our communities will be shopping and spending more than other areas," writes the editorial.

After reading this, 36-year-old Mountain View resident Miguel Sanchez (pictured at right), an illegal immigrant living with 13 of his illegal immigrant relatives, could only cartoonishly shrug as he pulled out the insides of his pant pockets to reveal that they were completely empty.

CHANGE!!!!!

Change comes to Los Altos!!!!

I love the postal service as much as anyone, except maybe my college friend Addorio. I mean, just think how mind-blowing it is that you can put a letter in a box in Los Altos and for 42 cents have it probably show up in a box you've chosen 3,000 miles away. (And nevermind the fact that you could do the same thing much faster for free via e-mail). But: really? Still no mention anywhere on the site of the fact that Obama won?

The Town Crier isn't ignoring the election entirely. It has the results of the high school board election, although for some reason not the Los Altos Hills City Council race. (More on both races in a later post). Also, this:

This year’s presidential race and state propositions have engendered hurt feelings that go beyond the election results.

Also, with help from the Town Crier, they've engendered hurt feelings that are directly attributable to the election results. Of course, it hurts more to lose a campaign sign than to lose a fundamental right.

Congrats to the Bastards at the LATC

Bruce Barton and other Freedom Haters look as if they have scored a victory for the forces of darkness in an otherwise bright day. Proposition 8 looks to have passed with the full support of out-of-staters, the Mormon Church (which donated 40% of Yes on Prop 8 funds), ignorant LATC directors and the very slim support of California voters.

Its a sad thing when 1) there is a vote to deny rights to a certain sector of the population and 2) when it passes.

At least Toni Casey lost.

Breaking: Town Crier endorses Prop. 8

Why can't the Town Crier just come out and say it doesn't like gay people? Then we wouldn't have to endure a constant stream of illogical excuses for its positions:

We think it is time to stop the courts from making our laws. That’s why we elect a representative government. The ripple effect of letting the current court ruling legalizing gay marriage stand will be endless lawsuits, especially regarding tax-exempt status for churches and educational institutions.

If I were more mature, I could write several law review comments on all the things that are wrong about these three sentences. Instead, I'll do this my way.

We think it is time to stop the courts from making our laws.

The Supreme Court upheld the decision under due process and equal protection law. Other examples of courts "making our laws" under these doctrines include:

• Skinner v. Oklahoma, 1942, preventing the forced sterilization of a robber
• Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, desegregating public schools
• Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965, allowing married people to use contraception
• Loving v. Virginia, 1967, striking down bans on interracial marriage
• Roe v. Wade, 1973, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992, protecting women's right to reproductive autonomy

Obviously, it is time to put a stop to this nonsense.

That’s why we elect a representative government.

The California State legislature has voted twice to allow same-sex marriage. The governor vetoed the bills both times, saying he would prefer the courts to sort out the constitutional issues. The proposal that the Town Crier is endorsing circumvents representative government by asking the entire electorate to amend the Constitution in a way that would eliminate certain due process and equal protection rights for one group of people.

The ripple effect of letting the current court ruling legalizing gay marriage stand will be endless lawsuits,

It was not the gays who brought the original lawsuit; and, to repeat, they based their argument on due process and equal protection rights. Those are not the kinds of lawsuits we should fear.

especially regarding tax-exempt status for churches and educational
institutions.

This is a particularly obnoxious claim that basically threatens that churches and religious schools will illegally take political stances against the Constitutionally protected rights of gay people, and implies that the right itself is to blame, rather than the people consciously breaking the law.

Pointless or worthless?

I can't speak with any authority about Charlotte Jarmy's personal finances, even though I did have an unread compendium of her columns collecting dust in the "free book" pile atop the filing cabinet at the Voice. I am confident, though, that when politicians and talking heads refer to "Wall Street" and "Main Street," the latter is not a substitute for "Elite-Super Rich Families."

They are simply being good neighbors

Months ago, the Town Crier referred to Los Altos Hills as an environmental leader. If that seemed phony at the time, consider it again in light of last week's rather unsurprising report that the Hillpeople don't really give a damn if everybody else has to conserve water.

Responding to California’s second year of below-average rainfall and the driest spring on record, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a proclamation in June, officially declaring that the state is facing drought conditions and calling on citizens to reduce their water consumption by 10 percent voluntarily.

While the 27 water district agencies that serve the Bay Area have reduced water usage by 13 percent, Purissima Hills Water District, which serves two-thirds of Los Altos Hills residents, has cut back its water usage only 2 percent, according to data from the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency.

If any city has reductions to make, it's Los Altos Hills, where the residents use twice as much per capita as the rest of the Bay Area. At least, I suppose, they're not slobs.

Mom, maybe it's time to talk about those five lawns again.

It finally makes sense

The Los Altos City Council spent September caricaturing itself, first by ensuring that First Street remains inconvenient for bicyclists and then by putting the brakes on a proposed link to the Stevens Creek Trail.

Here is a sampling of quotes from the meetings, helpfully provided by the Town Crier.

Councilman Ron Packard:

"We want to encourage bicycling on the whole Peninsula. On the other hand, do we want to become part of a bigger community?"

Resident David Lambourne:

"It’s hard to support any plan in which a path runs in and out of our city."

Mayor Val Carpenter, paraphrased:

Mayor Val Carpenter said the project had already eliminated multiple street parking spaces, and that she was loath to remove more for a bike lane, noting that she observed many cyclists using downtown as a launching point for regional travel rather than a family-oriented destination.

Packard again, paraphrased:

City Councilman Ron Packard referenced the city’s Fremont Bridge remodel as a project that sacrificed charm for bicycle friendliness, and suggested that he didn’t want to make the same choice for First Street.

The takeaway from all of this: the City Council finds parking spaces charming, but not bicycle facilities, especially if they somehow connect to places outside of Los Altos.

Yes, Los Altos has a proud history of treating bicyclists like they were Gypsies. Perhaps that is what the Town Crier was getting at.

Whatever, we're rich

Grace Acosta is usually one of the few tolerable writers for the Town Crier, so I have been trying to give her the benefit of the doubt for this week's tired column about how much Jason Lezak pulling off one the greatest swims meant to Michael Phelps.

It's hard though, given sentences like this:

At a time when it seems like “whatever” can be a response to everything from “Soup or salad?” to “Atrocities are being committed in Darfur and the Congo,” there is nothing more gratifying than witnessing someone care a lot and/or express joy.

If my hometown doesn't have a motto (and I can't seem to find one anywhere online if it does), I propose that we adopt "Los Altos: Where "whatever" can be a response to genocide."

Loyal readers may remember that it can also be a response to earthquakes in China and flooding in Buurma.

Over the LATC's Head

Despite my recent resignation from this blog, NOE has yet relinquish my access to the site. So, I feel compelled to post, though I will resist from posting about how NOE and Koland's Labor Day Party at their new place in LA has been canceled and instead post about our favorite whipping-boy/rag the Los Altos Town Crier.

A while back I posted about local scholar David Grewal's new book Network Power and how the LATC probably would not cover it. Well, either LATC staff reads this blog or they actually flipped through the copy Yale University Press sent them a few months ago, because this past week someone "special to the Town Crier" decided to review it. But don't worry folks, the LATC hasn't lost its touch. The reviewer complains that it was over her head and makes a comparison of the theory of network power to that of String Theory. She wishes Grewal could use "techniques of creative nonfiction" to clarify his argument. If anyone knows what "techniques of creative nonfiction" are, please let me know.

Oh yeah, and for a more educated review of Network Power, check out today's Boston Globe.

Next week: An in-depth look at the greenness of our lawns

In more than two years at the Voice, I'd estimate I wrote around 500 articles. Perhaps 15 times did my my editors allow me to write 990 words on any particular subject. These were stories about the city's legal battle with Clear Channel, the effort to clean up Moffett Field, the police department's use of Tasers on unarmed (and often intoxicated) suspects who were doing little other than resisting arrest, the fight over BART-to-San-Jose, the push to open a medical marijuana facility in Mountain View, feature stories on immigrants and firefighters, and a drugging at a downtown bar. I also wrote one about bird-watching, but thankfully it doesn't seem to be online.

The Town Crier's Mary Beth Hislop just wrote 990 words about a hole.

Locals sustain injuries in city parking lot

To be fair, it's not just any hole.

Let me start by wishing a speedy recovery the nice-seeming old ladies injured in this non-news event. That being said, let's get back to aimlessly rambling about how this article is too long.

Instructor Barbara Klee is known to bring the students in her Stretch & Flex classes at the Hillview Community Center to their knees with floor exercises. But on April 17, Klee and friend Marjorie Lins were apparently brought to their knees -- by a hole outside the Los Altos center.

The awkardly forced irony -- a style known as Sutcliffian to baseball fans -- is but one of the paragraphs this article could have done without. The worst offenders might be the paragraphs of weird, irrelevant and barely readable legal jargon at the end, or perhaps this one:

"I put my arms around her," Klee said. "As I stepped back on my right foot, I could not find the ground to place my foot on because my was over the hole. ... I lost my balance and, hanging onto my student, we both fell and crashed onto the asphalt pavement."

Put another way, they fell. I know it's sick, but I couldn't help thinking of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. when I saw the incredible level of detail here.

No no no no no no no no no.

*Exasperated sigh*

Parking structure downtown necessary

Rather than buying a gift for my dad, I spent a good part of Saturday analyzing all the logical fallacies in this editorial. (Sorry Dad). However, I'm not exactly a logician, so I deleted them and will just give you the gist:

It's wrong.

Two days before this editorial ran, the city council told the high school administrators they needed to do more to encourage students to make more responsible transportation choices. Now, inspired by the putative failure of completely baseless parking regulations that ignore basic principles of economics, the city is considering a massive subsidy to encourage people of all ages to drive to downtown, which is about half a mile from the high school.

To briefly engage in my own fallacious ad hominem attack, the best information I have on this subject indicates that Town Crier employees are among the worst offenders at evading local parking regulations, so I guess we shouldn't expect objective analysis.

You can always give it back

Last year, the federal government gave John Vidovich $1 million of your money.

Vidovich, a Los Altos Hills developer whose Sunnyvale-based Sandridge Partners was the top recipient of the unconscionable corporate welfare in last year's farm bill, gave what appears to be his first interview on the subject with the Town Crier this week.

You can almost see a little piece of Vidovich's soul dying as you read him telling the TC that he doesn't really want the money, but will reluctantly accept it because the farm bill is a boon to small farmers and an important step in achieving food security. Vidovich received his $1 million for growing cotton, which by the way, you can't eat or even turn into a soft drink.

This is almost too perfect

Imagine you are assigned to write a fake editorial in the voice of the Town Crier. And it has to reference the earthquake in China AND the cyclone in Burma. I bet it would look something like this.

POSITIVE CHANGE AHEAD FROM LOS ALTOS

Every once in a while, the paper caricatures itself so well that the only possible explanation is that someone at the printer slipped in a mock article for their own amusement or that the writers took it upon themselves to satirize the publisher's world view. They could have done a better job with the headline -- something along the lines of "Don't let poverty, death of others get you down" -- but perhaps they were just trying to be subtle.

Recent news beyond Los Altos has been less than sunny, let’s face it: The national economy remains shaky, gas is officially more than $4 a gallon, the death toll from last week’s cyclone disaster in Myanmar could exceed 100,000 and another disaster close behind it – the 7.8 earthquake that hit China on Monday, killing nearly 9,000 people.

I'll give you some time to guess why the paper is bringing up the earthquake in China. (And ignore the disastrous punctuation and the tragicomically low alleged death toll -- I'm posting this at least a week after the editorial went to press).

Did you guess yet? Here's a hint.

All the more reason to count our blessings on the local scene.

This is some great character-writing here by the forger -- bringing up terrible calamities simply so that we can dismiss their importance by discussing our money. Can you think of the last time even tens of thousands of Los Altans died in a cyclone? I can't. We're rich. Leave us alone, world.

Certainly, the high quality of life in Los Altos is well documented, but here’s another thing to consider: Numerous plans and projects under way bid to make this community even better.

In the interests of time, let's use a mathematical equation to express the relative importance the forger places on these numerous plans and projects:

(Burmese cyclone + Chinese earthquake + foreclosures + high gas prices) < (New flowers and plum trees on San Antonio Road + two new downtown buildings + plans to sell lot at State and Main + Safeway expansion + post office replacement + new Loyola Corners landscaping + possible civic center renovation)

I just saved you six paragraphs.

It’s also encouraging that Los Altos residents don’t act like they live in a bubble, but are compassionate and continue to help others. Witness, for instance, the bake sale in front of Starbucks in downtown Los Altos last weekend in support of the Myanmar survivors.

Los Altos residents don't act like they live in a bubble? Sure, the city incorporated mainly to keep out low-income residents, and it has pass laws banning Mexicans and Gypsies from the town, and its local paper repeatedly writes about how great it is that bad things happen other places but not here (even when they actually do happen here). But we had a bake sale.

I like "It's a Wonderful Life" as much as any Jew I know, but this is a little too much.

While the structural improvements are nice and we look forward to them, ultimately we’re proud of the quality of people that make Los Altos the great community it is.

This conclusion is another reason I think this editorial might be a fraud. I suspect the real Town Crier cares more about the structural improvements.

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.