Whenever the City Council wants to do something they don’t want us to know about, they hold what’s called a “closed session.” This is a secret meeting the public and the media are not allowed to attend. Whatever agreements are reached are hidden forever, never to be publicly revealed.
“My environment made me a criminal”
Happy 2025!
Let’s hear it for Fremont!
Fremont, our sister city to the south and the fourth largest in the Bay Area, has done something that Oakland steadfastly refuses to do: crack down on illegal and dangerous homeless encampments. Their City Council, unlike our feckless one, just passed the strictest encampment policy in the Bay Area, mandating “the removal of personal property left on any public space—including buildings, parks, streets, open areas and waterways. It also allows authorities to enforce the abatement of belongings left unattended on public property for 24 hours or more.”
The myth of racism
I want to start by praising Jimmy Carter. The Republicans have always loathed him because he epitomized decency as a human being, something their own politicians rarely demonstrate, and also because his life was a beautiful repudiation of the fake Christianity so often expressed by the hypocrites in the GOP.