Mayor Hints at Possible Compromise -more-

Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Bill Huyett said Wednesday that the district will not be holding in-house H1N1 immunization camps at schools, contrary to reports that have been circulating in the press in the last few weeks. -more-

When LeConte Elementary School students come back to school Sept. 2, they will have a brand new garden—one that is drought resistant, saves water and attracts plenty of butterflies. -more-

Firefighters waged a two-hour battle against heavy flames in the predawn hours Wednesday, battling to save a South Berkeley home after a neighbor had rescued one of its two occupants. -more-

Though his hair has turned white, John Curl’s passion burns undiminished by the passage of nearly seven decades. -more-

The fate of civilian oversight of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Department is being decided—for this year, at least—in a contest of wills and purpose between two San Francisco officeholders with longtime credentials in progressive politics. -more-

AC Transit will begin its community outreach in Berkeley to publicize and explain the bus district’s planned December line cuts and adjustments, but long-promised maps outlining the extent of the changes have yet to be released to the public. -more-

Budget cuts, furloughs, layoffs and course reductions dominated the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Back-to-School briefing Wednesday, as students trooped back to school for the first day of fall classes. -more-

Daylight snatch -more-

Hopelessly addicted to chocolate since early childhood, I take comfort in the knowledge that I’m not alone in this addiction. Au contraire! There are millions and millions of people out there afflicted with the same—shall we say, neurotic—obsession. Recognizing this as a serious mental health problem, I’ve come up with what I consider to be a brilliant proposal: that there be a Chocoholics Anonymous organization, similar to the effective and time honored Alcoholics Anonymous program. -more-

URBAN DENSITY -more-

The downtown plan could have moved Berkeley toward a more cooperative approach to planning. Instead, it has stirred up antagonisms that will poison the debate about smart growth for many years to come. -more-

The referendum of the Berkeley Downtown Area Plan will go down in history for the assistance it received from the most unlikely of sources—its opponents.  -more-

A bad characteristic of the Bush-Cheney Administration, one of many, was the reliance on fear as a weapon to manipulate the American people. One would think that, now they are out of office, this would stop. However, Dick Cheney has other ideas. -more-

An important objective of meaningful health care reform is cost control. President Obama’s sweetheart deal with the drug companies and the dropping of a public option to provide meaningful competition to for-profit health insurance companies will not provide needed cost control. Given the way health care reform is heading, is it any wonder the drug and health insurance companies are smiling? -more-

For 12 years, beginning in 1970, I was director of studies for international educational programs sponsored by UC Berkeley Extension at Oxford, Leningrad, Venice and elsewhere. On several occasions both in England and the Soviet Union, persons in my programs got sick. -more-

Why aren’t reporters asking the following questions of those they choose to interview? This in-cludes the predictable “public television” (e.g., News Hour, Bill Moyers’ Journal) programs.   -more-

If television cameras had focused on the urban poor in New Orleans…before Katrina, I believe that the initial reaction to descriptions of poverty and poverty concentration would have been unsympathetic.” So writes Harvard scholar William Julius Wilson in More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. As we approach the fourth commemoration of the storm and flood, the nation has reverted to its pre-Katrina blindness to the poverty endemic to New Orleans—and to local Bay Area communities, whose conditions are ripe for just such wide scale disaster given our proximity to the ticking Hayward fault. -more-

Kéllia Ramares’ Commentary in the Planet Aug. 20 calls KPFA’s elections “silly” because “a tiny minority of listeners get totally worked up about” them but notes they “do not yield democratic results.” -more-

KPFA listeners remember 1999 as the year of the Lockout and the massive response. 10,000 people marched through the streets of Berkeley chanting “Save KPFA!” “Save Pacifica!” That dramatic moment was followed by a decade of board meetings, mostly held inside the dark chambers of the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse. And yet, basic issues are still not settled, their resolution still up for grabs. -more-

Was Donald Goldmacher’s commentary on the KPFA election fair, truthful and unbiased? Or did he conveniently leave out many crucial facts? You decide. -more-

It’s 2009, and the first community radio station in the country, KPFA, born right here in Berkeley in 1949, is entering its election cycle once again. And I feel sick.  -more-

Behind the uproar over a U.S.–Co-lombia base deal is a growing disquiet throughout South America that Washington is trying to counter that continent’s leftward tack, directly intervene in Bogotá’s long-running civil war, and reassert itself in a part of the globe that it formerly dominated. -more-

If you’re interested in a textbook example of how public opinion gets swayed and massaged in a political campaign, you don’t have to go any further than the opening item in Sunday’s (Phil) Matier & (Andy) Ross column in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Perata Had Hand In Oakland’s Police Chief Pick”). -more-

Dragonflies enliven the doldrums of August. Wherever there’s still or slowly flowing water, you can see them and their smaller relatives, the damselflies, patrolling for food or mates. (Dragonflies spread their wings out when at rest, while most damselflies fold them over their backs). -more-

Lifelong Learning” is the slogan, the motto of Berkeley Adult School, which starts up anew with enrollment on Sept. 8. Its teachers can bring an astonishing wealth of life experience to their courses, and not always what their academic or professional background might indicate. Perhaps this is something fundamental to a program aimed at students looking to renew old interests, refresh longtime preoccupations—or discover new pursuits—during or after their own vocational commitments. -more-

Everyone’s different. Now, isn’t that a novel comment? OK, so it isn’t a fresh idea but it’s true. My wife and I are different. I’ll bet you and your partner, spouse or closest friend are pretty different too, but, by the grace of some deity, alien influence or, maybe, the Constitution, we manage to get along or at least act out some version of concord in our daily affairs. -more-