At least one Berkeley official gets it.
After the recent embarrassment over the city council’s decision to send the Marines a letter calling their recruiters uninvited, unwelcome intruders in the city, Councilman Gordon Wozniak is seeking to put some controls on the city’s radicalism.
Wozniak, who opposed the anti-Marines measures, plans to ask his colleague to approve a resolution that all items from the city’s Peace and Justice Commission be heard twice by the city council before they are approved, similar to the way many city councils treat all new ordinances.
The commission, the most prolific and controversial of the city’s 45 council-advising panels, is the originator of the anti-Marines initiatives that got the council in trouble.
Wozniak said: “When the council makes statements in the name of the whole city, there should be more opportunity to comment before a decision is made. In terms of the Marines Corps recruiting station, some of the nasty language could have been caught so we wouldn’t have suffered this embarrassment.”
His proposal would be simple common sense for most cities, but not so much for the hippie haven that is known locally as Berserkeley. Among other proposals from the Peace and Justice Commission that have been adopted by the city are: one asking the United States to treat illegal drugs as a health issue; condemnation of Firestone Natural Rubber Co. for its Liberia labor practices; a call to withdraw California National Guard troops from Iraq; a demand to prosecute former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on war crimes charges; and a declaration naming May 15 war resistance day.
Councilwoman Dona Spring, who joined the council’s socialist majority to tell the Marines to get out of town, doesn’t want anything slowing down the town’s verbal diarrhea. “(Wozniak’s proposal) needs to be defeated,” she said. “It makes no sense at all. It’s discrimination. Don’t hold the Peace and Justice Commission responsible for the Marines item. The city council passed it. If you don’t like it, just vote ‘no.’”
A sane person would have noticed that Wozniak did just that, to no avail.
It’s also a chuckle to hear a liberal crying about a minor rules change being discrimination after what Berkeley put the Marine recruiters through.
The likelihood that Wozniak may be able to put a much-needed leash on the city of Berkeley may be no higher than the likelihood of Al Gore telling the truth, but it’s encouraging to see that there’s still somebody in Berkeley with the intelligence and guts to fight the fanatics.
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jOIN THE BOYCOTT of california products at the- bring berkeley to its knees blog. the city council ignores the thousands of emails it has been sent, as liberals do. wines, fruits and vegatables represent a multi-billion dollar industry, with much of the money going to the berkeley area.
Comment by berkeleycitycouncil — February 26, 2008 @ 8:08 am