The California State Supreme Court made a rare ceremonial and working visit to the Santa Barbara Courthouse this week, operating out of the picture-perfect Mural Room. Justices started the day taking questions from county high school students-most from Santa Ynez and Santa Maria-before they got down to the serious business of dissecting legal arguments.
PUNK’T: Poor Lois. She never had a clue. By Lois, I mean Lois Capps, our Congressional representative in Washington, D.C. What Lois was clueless about is more precisely a “who”-in this case Duncan Hunter, the raging Congressional right-winger who represents the good people of El Cajon and others living east of San Diego, an inland empire where hot desert winds snuff out errant ocean breezes.
It’s true I take everything personally. But this time I think I might be entitled. By the time you read this, the News-Press will have held its union election, and I’m betting the farm that by about 5:20 this Wednesday evening, the world will know the Teamsters were overwhelmingly elected to represent that paper’s unhappy newsroom workers in their dealings with Wendy McCaw, the daily’s gratuitously grim owner and co-publisher.
There was much hand-wringing and chest-thumping by the Santa Barbara County Supervisors early Tuesday morning, but at the end of the day, they concluded they lacked the legal authority to provide the relief sought by the 55 low-income, Spanish-speaking families now being evicted from the Cedarwood Apartments in Isla Vista.
About two months ago, the Santa Barbara City Council approved the demolition of a worn-out 10-unit apartment complex on North La Cumbre Road-over the tearful objections of the tenants-to make way for a cluster of well-designed new condos. Most of the councilmembers were convinced they had no other choice. And many haven’t stopped feeling bad about it since. In hopes of securing a wider range of policy choices for the next time they confront an apartment tear-down, on Tuesday the City Council, along with members of the city’s Planning Commission, convened a special three-hour meeting.
Barring the mass abduction by space aliens of Santa Barbara’s planning commission this Thursday afternoon, Cottage Health System will get a green light for its plans to build the biggest and most affordable housing development downtown Santa Barbara has seen in decades.
Gregarious and solidly built, Joe Mathews-a reporter for the Los Angeles Times-has spent the past three-and-a-half years as a fly on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wall. With California’s gubernatorial election just seven weeks away, Mathews’s book-The People’s Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy-is just now hitting bookstores. Mathews gives readers an enormously engaging blow-by-blow account of the recall campaign that propelled Schwarzenegger to political power and what he’s done with it in the years since.
HOPE YOU GOT KISSED: When I pick up the morning newspaper, I like the jokes to stay where they belong-on the funny pages. But now that even the comic strips have become an ideological minefield, I suppose everything’s fair game.
DO AS I SAY : A decidedly morbid sense of solidarity compelled me to attend Tuesday evening’s gathering in response to the death of Jake Boysel, the 12-year-old La Colina Junior High School student who was knocked off his bike, out of his shoes, and into the next world by a sun-blinded SUV driver last week.
About 40 parents, four Santa Barbara city councilmembers, one county supervisor, one supervisorial candidate, two police officers, and two high-ranking traffic engineers gathered Tuesday night at La Colina Junior High School to discuss the violent death of Jake Boysel, the 12-year-old fatally injured while bicycling to school last week by a motorist driving an SUV.
