Opinion

As Berkeley prepares to remake its downtown once again at the behest of the University of California, we had the pleasure of spending Friday night in downtown Santa Cruz, which remade its downtown at the behest of the Loma Prieta fault. After the 1989 earthquake, the city hastily demolished many of the buildings on Pacific Avenue, and has been rebuilding the streetscape there ever since, with the aid of a redevelopment authority to coerce reluctant property owners into going with the flow. Berkeley won’t have the Draconian power that the earthquake gave Santa Cruz (G_d forbid we should have such an earthquake here!) But it’s useful to take a look at what works and what doesn’t, in a situation where almost everything’s possible. -more-

Congressman Steve King is the yokel who has organized the successful Republican effort to prevent the Berkeley Post Office from being named after Berkeley’s revered Maudelle Shirek. We won’t waste much space here delineating exactly how annoyed the people of Berkeley are at his presumption, because they’ll certainly make their opinions known in our letter columns. Instead, let’s take a good look at who King is, and what we might do from here to make sure the people in his district are suitably embarrassed by him. First, he’s been quoted speaking admiringly of old Joe McCarthy (dean of the Congressional witchhunters in the ‘50s, for those young readers who were shortchanged in their U.S. history class.) His website does a candid job of describing his other politics: -more-