Columnists

Your neighbor has built her heavily chlorinated hot tub eight feet closer to your kitchen window than allowed by her use permit? Food is being served by the religious organization down the block earlier and later than its permit specifies? A developer is hosting riots downtown instead of the cultural uses commanded by his permit? Good luck in getting the City of Berkeley to enforce any of these use permit conditions, which were put in place, after all, to protect the citizenry’s quality of life. It doesn’t have to. And it probably won’t. -more-

California’s recent marathon budget crisis provides our latest and best example of the state’s growing ungovernability. It is not so much that our Republican/conservative friends were willing to risk taking the state into economic collapse in order to force some ideologically driven concessions. It is that for the longest time, there appeared to be no practical, rational, sensible way for the rest of us to stop them. -more-

The meeting at Richmond’s Baxter Creek convened at the scene of the crime. -more-