Free Republic

Ever since George W. Bush rode off into the Dallas sunset, there’s been a void on the national scene. Even Dick Cheney has largely faded from sight. The other Republicans, the ones still in Congress are annoying, but predictably so. But just in time, there’s a replacement in Bush’s old slot of The Man You Love to Hate. Based on his behavior in the last three months or so, not to mention in the last several years, Joe Lieberman is the winner and new champ for that title. The web sites are all over him. MoveOn used his name as...

An attack on UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s house and conflicting reports as to why students were arrested at Wheeler Hall Friday, Dec. 11, have added a new twist to ongoing protests against university budget cuts. Student organizers of Live Week—a week-long “open occupation” of Wheeler Hall where students tried to create an open university by holding talks, forums and music shows all day—condemned the 4:30 a.m. arrests during which UC police locked in 66 protesters, cited them for trespassing and later took them to Santa Rita jail. Almost all were reportedly released later. Although campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof said...

The Berkeley City Council postponed discussion of the most controversial item on its Dec. 15 agenda. Councilmember Jesse Arre-guin’s request that City Manager Phil Kamlarz report on the city’s involvement in approving an amendment to state Senate Bill 113, the Local Government Omnibus Act, signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger Oct. 11, was tabled on a 5–2 vote. The council will not get a chance to vote on it until January. The state omnibus bill traditionally includes only non-controversial provisions. This year, however, the bill included an amendment, requested by the University of California, that would exempt UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium and...

Weekend vandalism at the UC Berkeley chancellor's home has complicated a philosophical battle over the best way to protest student-fee hikes and budget cuts. UC police arrested eight people Friday night after demonstrators broke windows and other property at the campus home of Chancellor Robert Birgeneau while he and his wife were inside. At least six of those people are expected to be charged with multiple felonies for what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called "terrorism." The incident has further roiled an already uneasy campus that has been hit by budget cuts and tuition hikes this year. The arrests were the latest...

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger described Friday's attack on the home of the University of California at Berkeley's chancellor as a "type of terrorism" that will not be tolerated. Protesters angry about budget cuts and fee hikes vandalized Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's home on campus at about 11 p.m. Friday night, according to the university. "California will not tolerate any type of terrorism against any leaders, including educators," Schwarzenegger said in a statement released Saturday. He added that the incident was a criminal act, and participants will be prosecuted under the fullest extent of the law. . . . At about 11 p.m....

BERKELEY -- UC police arrested 65 protesters from a campus building early today, ending a weeklong occupation designed to draw attention to fee hikes and budget cuts throughout the University of California system. UC Berkeley police, joined by officers from other UC campuses, began arresting the protesters at Wheeler Hall at 4:40 a.m., said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof. "There was no force, no confrontation, nobody resisted," Mogulof said. "At most, it was a wake-up call: They were sleeping." The demonstrators had intended to stay through at least tonight, but police decided to move in early today because of a widely-publicized...

BERKELEY -- The city of Berkeley mailed coat hangers to 20 members of Congress today in protest of the anti-abortion amendment in version of the federal health care bill.

The Free Speech Movement lives on at UC Berkeley - 45 years to the day after a barefoot, 21-year-old student named Mario Savio energized thousands from atop a police car by exhorting them to do all they could to stop the administration's restrictive policies. Today the issue is less about freedom of speech than about freedom of access to a quality education, as thousands of students have protested rising tuition, employee layoffs and course cutbacks in recent weeks. "We're the ones fighting for this to be a public university that everyone can afford!" Ronald Cruz, a Berkeley activist, told a...

BERKELEY — Calling UC Berkeley's 1960s turmoil "a dead movement," protesters on Wednesday knocked a tribute to the Free Speech Movement off the steps of Sproul Hall and voiced their own concerns about student-fee hikes and other issues. Exactly 45 years after the face of the movement, Mario Savio, spoke to thousands on the same steps, a few dozen demonstrators forced student-government leaders to cancel their commemoration. The same protesters later read a line from Savio's Dec. 2, 1964, speech in unison. Organizers of the invading demonstration said it was time to focus on "a living, breathing movement" rather than...

The Nov. 28 New York Times article about the efforts of a few pro-Israel activists to shut down the Daily Planet for its publication of reader contributions critical of that nation's policies provided a fair introduction to the story but failed to fully elucidate the nature of the campaign. Though the first stirrings of this censorship campaign began several years ago, it did not begin in earnest until this year, when PR professional Jim Sinkinson began a more organized and deliberate campaign to intimidate advertisers. The Planet first alerted its readership to Sinkinson's efforts in a March 19 editorial. The...

BERKELEY -- Berkeley activists can sue federal agents for their role in a 2008 raid in which officers seized their computers and records in search of alleged threats by animal-rights advocates, a federal judge ruled Monday. The activist group Long Haul Inc. can try to prove that the search of its Berkeley offices exceeded legal boundaries, that agents misled the judge who issued a search warrant, and that it was targeted because of its left-wing views, said U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. An unaffiliated group with offices in the same Berkeley building, East Bay Prisoner Support, also won the right...

A student group at UC Berkeley’s school of law Tuesday called on the U.S. Justice Department, the Pennsylvania Bar and the University of California to “conduct full and thorough investigations” of former government lawyers who crafted the Bush torture memos, including John Yoo, a tenured faculty member at their school. Comprised of a coalition of student groups and individuals, the Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture (B.A.A.T.) has gathered over 275 signatures which call for investigations into “potential violations of professional and ethical duties, as well as possible criminal conduct.” Both the Pennsylvania Bar Association where John Yoo is registered and...

The UC strike reached its peak at 3 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 19, when students and custodians dumped days-old trash from the different campus buildings outside California Hall, where UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau works, to protest recent custodian layoffs. Although California Hall was locked and looked deserted, a couple of people could be seen peaking out from behind the blinds. “Tell me what democracy looks like, this is what democracy looks like!” shouted Kathryn Lybarger, an organizer for the workers union, as students threw used paper cups, apple cores and banana peels at the front door. “What does a regents’...

Amid complaints of police brutality and heavy criticism about the university's handling of a massive protest and takeover of a campus building Friday, the university announced it will ask for an independent investigation of police actions that could bring about changes to the way officers handle protest crowds. The announcement came on a day when about 75 protesters, a few of them wearing casts and splints on their arms and fingers, gathered outside an Oakland courthouse to denounce what many say was abusive behavior by police at a UC Berkeley protest Friday. "The police broke my hand Friday," organizer and...

As part of the ongoing protest over the University of California's 32 percent fee increase, UC Berkeley students marched to UC President Mark Yudof’s office in Oakland Monday afternoon and staged a sit-in, demanding to meet with him. The students went to Yudof’s office after finding out at the Alameda County Superior court that burglary charges against three Wheeler Hall occupiers had been reduced to a misdemeanor. UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof confirmed that there were students in Yudof’s office “who were engaged in peaceful conversation with officials there.” Mogulof said Yudof was not present. An employee at the UC...

BERKELEY -- UC Berkeley students took over a campus building in protest this morning, a day after the University of California regents voted to raise tuition by 32 percent.An undetermined number of protesters have barricaded themselves inside Wheeler Hall, which houses the English department. Several demonstrators wearing bandannas opened a window and used a bullhorn to denounce the regents' decision.

OAKLAND -- The Alameda County judge who presided over the dispute between UC Berkeley and tree-sitters seeking to block a construction project, Barbara J. Miller, was found dead Friday at her home in Oakland. She was 58. Judge Miller was found a little after 6 p.m., Oakland police said. The cause of her death has not been determined. Judge Miller was elected to the Superior Court for Alameda County in 1996 after having been a commissioner of the court since 1987. She served as presiding judge in 2004 and 2005. During her years on the bench, Judge Miller's best-known case...

Berkeley once again dipped into U.S. foreign policy Tuesday when its City Council unanimously passed a resolution asking the Obama administration to withdraw troops and private armed contractors from Afghanistan and cease drone attacks on Afghanistan and Pakistan. The issue proved to be the liveliest of the evening, with members of the public protesting when councilmembers Susan Wengraf and Linda Maio suggested postponing the item to correct ambiguous wording in the resolution. Code Pink, CopWatch and Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission, which recommended the resolution to the council, voiced their support for immediate troop withdrawal. Melody Ermachild Chavis, author of...

A group of UC Berkeley law students will launch a torture accountability initiative next week dedicated to holding the authors of the infamous torture memos accountable, reinstating respect for the prohibition against torture and ending executive abuse of power and impunity. Called the Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture (B.A.A.T.), at their kick-off Oct. 13 the group will host a panel of lawyers and legal academics to discuss the memos crafted by the Bush administration’s legal counsels at the Department of Justice, including Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo. Yoo, who spent the previous semester at Chapman University, returned to the UC...

John Yoo is back teaching at the University of California Berkeley Law School this semester and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it. A few UC faculty members have pronounced that they consider this to be disgraceful, and some of the more colorful citizen protest groups have trained their sights on Yoo’s public appearances and even hounded him at home, but the Law School itself seems to be paralyzed. One would think that being an obviously incompetent or dishonest practitioner of the legal trade would be enough to disqualify him from teaching impressionable students, but law...

Berkeley would become the first city in the United States to independently try to comply with U.N. treaties on torture, civil rights and racial discrimination, if the City Council passes a measure on the issue tonight. The measure would require the city to file biennial reports to the United Nations on how - or whether - the city meets international human rights standards. In Berkeley, that could include its record on homelessness, the achievement gap among different racial groups at Berkeley High and the presence of John Yoo, a UC Berkeley School of Law professor and Berkeley resident who authored...

Berkeley has finally come up with an answer to the question posed by the annual parade: How Berkeley Can You Be? The answer is: Very Berkeley - as long as you don't sell beer off the back of floats, toss candy to kids or walk naked down University Avenue. Those restrictions, plus some unexpected permit fees, ended the 13-year run of the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade and festival, a bacchanalian romp through downtown that featured everything from flame throwers to Nobel laureates to motorized couches. Daunted by the new restrictions, organizers have decided to cancel the event, slated...

A couple of weeks before Van Jones resigned his Washington job, I happened to have a casual conversation with an old friend about a media organization we’d both been instrumental in founding in the distant last millennium. He was complaining that the group had, rather soon after it began, turned into an arena for ambitious self-promoters instead of being the advocacy organization which its founders intended. Most of this happened in the 15 or so years when I was too preoccupied with earning a living to pay attention, but I believed my friend’s annoyed recital of pointless power struggles within...

BERKELEY — Six months after Tristan Anderson, a former UC Berkeley tree sitter and Bay Area activist, nearly died after being struck in the head with a tear-gas canister fired by Israeli troops, friends are holding a benefit Sunday to raise money for his recovery costs. Anderson, 38, remains at a rehabilitation hospital near Tel Aviv and continues to have setbacks and infections after skull surgery last month, supporters said. The operation came after doctors learned Anderson was suffering from post-traumatic hydrocephalus, a blockage of the ventricles — open spaces in the brain — that causes poor circulation of cerebral...

Opponents of a downtown Berkeley development plan were still on the streets Wednesday gathering the 5,558 signatures needed by Thursday to put the plan to a citywide vote. City Councilman Jesse Arreguin, 25, who is behind the campaign to overturn the Downtown Area Plan, which allows for taller buildings, more housing density, more open space and which imposes green building requirements, said he is "cautiously optimistic" his group has enough signatures to go forward. Arreguin was at the Downtown Berkeley BART station Wednesday gathering signatures. Shadowing Arreguin and holding a sign that said "Don't Sign The Petition," was 27-year-old Salvan...

Four generations of UC Berkeley law school alumni joined activists, community members and lawyers on the Boalt Hall steps to protest former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo’s return to campus Monday. The group called for Yoo to be prosecuted and fired from his position as professor of law at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law for writing memorandums which were used to justify extensive policies on detention and interrogation, even torture. The Obama administration has so far showed little interest in prosecuting those who worked for the Bush administration. Despite criticism from protesters and from the National Lawyers’ Guild...

Berkeley is scrambling to line up state tax cuts and credits for Bayer, which is considering moving some or all of its 1,700 jobs out of town. The pharmaceutical giant, which manufactures a hemophilia drug called Kogenate from its Seventh Street plant, will decide in a couple of months whether it will eventually move some or all of its manufacturing of the drug elsewhere, spokeswoman Trina Ostrander said. Bayer will soon produce a new version of the drug, called Kogenate-ph, that will require retooling its plant and retraining workers, Ostrander confirmed. The company is deciding whether that could take place...

Susan B. Jordan, a prominent attorney known for her work defending women charged with violent crimes, and who is credited with the creation of the battered spouse defense, was killed Friday in a plane crash in Utah. She was 67. Jordan, who split her time between homes in Berkeley and Ukiah in Mendocino County, formerly had a law office in Berkeley, and since 1972 had run a law practice in Ukiah. Jordan had been a licensed pilot since 1981, but longtime friend and professional colleague Ann Moorman said she was not flying the plane when it went down. Health care...

They were feasting on organic endive and popping open the herb tea Wednesday at Berkeley City Hall, as staff celebrated the City Council's unanimous approval of an ambitious, painstakingly researched plan to fight global warming. "After two years pouring your soul into something, to see it passed 9-0 is just intoxicating," said the city's planning director, Dan Marks. "This plan is a model for cities everywhere. As usual, Berkeley is a leader." The City Council on Tuesday night voted to move ahead with its 145-page Climate Action Plan, approving a host of last-minute amendments and striking mandates from most of...

Berkeley's City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to eliminate homeowner mandates from its climate action plan, in part because of an uproar from infuriated residents. The plan required owners to upgrade their homes' energy efficiency, based on an independent audit of a home's windows, roof, appliances and insulation. The goal was for all of Berkeley's 23,000 homes and 25,000 duplexes and apartment units to reduce energy use by 35 percent by 2020. Many homeowners vehemently protested the mandates, saying the cost to upgrade a typical drafty prewar Berkeley home would be astronomical. Hills residents particularly fought the portion requiring white...

This space doesn’t usually take requests, but when my 94-year-old mother calls up and insists, it’s hard to say no. What she wanted when she called last week is not hard to come up with, after all: a forthright denunciation of the Obama administration’s apparent plan to let the torturers and their instigators off the hook. Thinking people everywhere (I’m one of them) have rushed to their keyboards to do their best to make sure the current government doesn’t get away with letting their predecessors get off scot free. MoveOn is on their case to make sure they don’t forget....

Berkeley property owners may soon be asked to approve a 20 percent increase in city refuse fees in a somewhat controversial “majority protest” mail-in voting procedure. The unusual ballot process automatically counts votes not received as “yes” votes. The Berkeley City Council is scheduled to consider sending the rate increase proposal to property owners at the council’s next regular meeting, Tuesday, April 21, following a March 23 Zero Waste Commission decision recommending the increase. If approved by property owners, residential refuse collection rates for the average 32-gallon can would rise $4.52 per month, from $22.58 to $27.10. Commer-cial rates would...

BERKELEY — The U.S Marine Corps Recruiting Center, which has been the target of protests for the past 18 months, was badly damaged by vandals Wednesday night, the eve of the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war. Today, broken windows are boarded up with sheets of plywood at the recruitment center in downtown Berkeley. CodePink and other anti-war groups picketed in front of the Marine recruiting center at 64 Shattuck Square in downtown Berkeley since the fall of 2007. The groups say the Marines do not belong in liberal Berkeley and they should find a new spot for their center....

When Tristan Anderson, now 38, was living illegally in the trees at UC Berkeley to protest the administration's ultimately successful bid to cut down the trees to build a sports training center, life was good. For 21 months, Berkeley's tree sitters happily fouled their nests with little interference from the authorities. Their biggest fear was falling. When Berkeley finally erected barbed-wire fences and began to shine spotlights on the canopy campers, the tree huggers complained that UC had turned their grove into "Guantanamo." UC retaliated by giving the tree sitters energy bars. In June 2008, Anderson, who went by the...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A state appeals court breathed new life Tuesday into campus integration efforts, ruling that Berkeley does not violate California's ban on racial preferences when it considers the makeup of students' neighborhoods in deciding where they will go to school. Berkeley's policy "does not show partiality, prejudice or preference to any student on the basis of that student's race," said the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco. "All students in a given residential area are treated equally." The ruling is the first by an appellate court on a school district's voluntary integration plan since California voters...

Friends of a Bay Area activist who was critically injured while demonstrating in a village on Palestine's West Bank have organized their own demonstration in downtown San Francisco today as a show of solidarity. Friends of Tristan Anderson, a former tree-sitter at the UC Berkeley's Memorial Stadium oak grove, and supporters of Palestine will gather at 4 p.m. Monday outside the Israeli Consulate at 456 Montgomery St. in San Francisco, said Kate Raphael, a fellow activist and friend of Anderson's. "Our intent is to give people a chance to talk about Tristan, to focus on the people who have been...

AT A TIME WHEN the nation has turned to the left, one of the more liberal universities in the nation will be studying right-wing movements. Although the timing is odd, investigation of the right is a welcome academic pursuit. Thanks to an anonymous $777,000 donation a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-wing Movements will be established at UC Berkeley. Researchers will analyze right-wing groups in the United States and abroad and compare them. Larry Rosenthal, a sociologist who will oversee the center, is on target in saying that conservative movements have been overlooked in academia, which tends to be...

Whole Foods Market, the national natural food supermarket chain that represents itself as supporting local communities, found itself under attack Wednesday when a large group of East Bay residents gathered outside its Emeryville headquarters vociferously protesting the company’s decision not to renew the lease of Ashby Flowers, a family-owned business that rents a small building in the corner of the parking lot at the company’s 3000 Telegraph Ave. location in Berkeley. In an interview with the Planet at his company’s regional headquarters Wednesday, Whole Foods Regional President David Lannon said that the company was not renewing the lease since it...

A man was unconscious at Highland Hospital on Tuesday evening after he was beaten with a tire iron and a metal pipe in a dispute over burritos at Juan's Place restaurant in west Berkeley, police said. Berkeley Police spokeswoman Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said two Juan's Place employees were arrested for assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the 4:30 p.m. incident. Police did not release the name of the victim or those suspected of beating him. Kusmiss said the incident started when three men who had been drinking entered Juan's Place and inquired about free food, which they often...

A moratorium on new fast food restaurants and convenience stores along a portion of University Avenue in downtown Berkeley may soon be lifted. The Berkeley City Council is scheduled to consider a Planning Commission recommendation to lift the ban Tuesday night, Feb. 24. The ban on new fast food restaurants and carry-out food stores on University Avenue between Oxford Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way was first adopted by the council in 1999 at the request of the Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA) and with the support of then-Councilmember Dona Spring, who represented the downtown area on the council. In...

Dogs do what dogs do - and in Berkeley, "dog do" is now part of some very public art. Decorative medallions depicting dogs sniffing, dumping and humping each other have recently been added to the base of one of a pair of sculptures commissioned by the city on either end of the pedestrian and bike bridge over Interstate 80. At first glance, one might think the scatological series of bronzes - at the base of the west side sculpture celebrating the waterfront park - is a joke. It's not. "I am showing dogs doing what dogs do at the dog...

Berkeley -- Berkeley's city council voted early today to let the public library override the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act in order to get its checkout machines serviced.After a heated debate, the council voted 6-2, with one abstention, to grant a waiver for the library to contract with 3M, a multinational technology company, even though the firm refused to sign a form promising it does not engage in nuclear research or development.The library asked permission to sign a 5-year, $63,000 contract with 3M to maintain five self-checkout scanning machines at the main library and four branches. The Peace and Justice Commission...

Berkeley's public library will face a showdown with the city's Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city's nuclear-free ordinance. The dispute centers on a five-year, $63,000 contract the library wants to sign with 3M, an international technology company based in Minnesota, to service five scanner machines library patrons use to check out books.But 3M, a company with operations in 60 countries, refused to sign Berkeley's nuclear-free disclosure form as required by the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act passed by voters in 1986.As a result, the library's self-checkout machines have not...

Some cities urge residents to go on citywide exercise kicks. Others promote municipal book clubs. Berkeley wants its citizens to go on a collective low-carbon diet. To meet its ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Berkeley is encouraging all 100,000 residents to join support groups to help individuals fight global warming. Like Alcoholics Anonymous and Weight Watchers, the groups are part social, part confessional and partly about accountability. "It does sound like AA," said Timothy Burroughs, Berkeley's climate action coordinator, who is helping to start the program. "But it's in the context of a policy goal of the city's....

“No prehistoric cultural deposits or materials” were found during an archaeological survey of the site once occupied by an oak grove west of Memorial Stadium. The report, released by UC Berkeley, was prepared by private archaeological consultants in anticipation of construction of a new high-tech gym and office complex at the site. But the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, as the report makes clear, declaring that “the entire project site should be considered an archaeologically sensitive area based on its proximity to Strawberry Creek and the fact that prehistoric archaeological deposits and features have been found along the...

Berkeley’s latest tree-sit ended almost before it began when the lone remaining branch-percher descended to earth Tuesday morning, followed by two acacias a few hours later. Campus community relations director Irene Hegarty said that only one of the two tree-sitters who took to the branches was still aloft when community members talked him down. “He walked away, though he was cited and released for trespassing by university police a couple of blocks away,” she said. Arborists made short work of the trees, leaving five or six five-foot logs and a pile of wood chips for use at the park. “They...

The treesitters are back on UC Berkeley’s turf, this time occupying the branches of an acacia at People’s Park. Two protesters declared their occupation Monday morning of one of two People’s Park acacias that the university plans to chop down. Unlike the Memorial Stadium treesit, which ended in September with the demolition of a venerable oak grove, the People’s Park protest wasn’t sparked by construction. While the university wanted to clear the stadium grove to make way for a four-level high tech gym and office complex, UC Berkeley spokesperson Irene Hegarty says safety concerns have prompted plans to remove the...

Berkeley’s latest tree-sit ended the same day it began last week when campus police signed a Christmas truce that spares—for the moment—two acacias in People’s Park. Zachary RunningWolf, the same arboreal ascender who began the lengthy occupation of the oak grove at Memorial Stadium on Dec. 2, 2006, was the lone occupant of one of the People’s Park acacias, which share space with a children’s playground. The grove tree-sit ended Sept. 9, the same day the last of the trees there was leveled by a chainsaw-wielding contract crew. RunningWolf’s ascent at People’s Park on Dec. 18 came after campus officials...

Anti-war activists from the group Code Pink gathered at a Marine recruiting station in Berkeley this morning to show solidarity with an Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush on Sunday. Members of the group and others marched around the recruiting station holding shoes in the air to show support for Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi, who hurled two shoes at Bush during a news conference in Baghdad. In many Arab countries, showing the sole of one's shoes, much less throwing shoes at another person, is considered extremely disrespectful. Organizers said their demonstration was to show support for the...

Berkeley -- After an emotional, fiery debate over academic freedom and torture, Berkeley's city council passed a measure late Monday night imploring the U.S. to prosecute Berkeley resident and former White House official John Yoo for war crimes. Yoo, a tenured professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, wrote the legal memos justifying torture while interrogating terrorism suspects while he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney general for the Bush administration in 2001-03."John Yoo took a material involvement in the deaths and torture of untold numbers of people," said city councilman Max Anderson, choking back tears during the council's...