Opinion

One more time, at the risk of becoming a tedious scold, the Berkeley Daily Planet wants to go on record on behalf of the public interest in demanding that those who run the government of the City of Berkeley (manager, staff, attorneys, mayor, councilmembers….?) make full public disclosure regarding any deals they’re making with the University of California before they take the final vote on such deals. Oh, and we don’t mean in the Friday release of a Tuesday agenda. We mean long enough in advance of the vote that the public, including the press, has time to investigate the details of the deal and comment on their ramifications. It’s a cliché that the devil is in the details, but the average voter/reader might not appreciate how deeply the bad details can be buried in the public process. -more-

Thanks to tips from the Daily Planet’s theater writers, we spent two evenings last weekend enjoying dramatic presentations, both of which did exactly what they were supposed to do: illuminated real life in ways we might not have expected. Parents like us who raised children born in the often tumultuous ‘60s and ‘70s sometimes wonder if the kids in that cohort were helped or harmed by their exposure to the crosscurrents of political and cultural change which were sweeping the country at the time. Judging by what we saw in these performances, the kids turned out pretty well. -more-