Conspiracy Con 9 - The Live Blog: The Worshipful Master

Dateline: Santa Clara, CA

June 6, 2009 5:30:22 P.M.

I woke up this morning under a heavy cloud of FFA (free floating anxiety). I take a few deep breaths and remind myself that I'm at home, not Conspiracy Con. Clearly I'm too close to this story.

I rolled into last night's dinner at about nine o'clock, which seems to me a civilized hour, But most people are already working on the desert buffet. Perhaps they have an early curfew on the spaceship. 

My first order of business was a drink – my third for the day – followed by a scan for an interesting place to sit. I see the guest of honor, George Noory, at a table with the conference producer, Brian Hall. I take a shot, "Is that seat open?" I ask. Bingo.

A young man named Christopher, whose day job is shredding documents for the State of Califonia, pulls out my chair for me and is a delightful dinner companion; a perfect gentleman of the sort that I thought was long extinct. In the raffle I win a copy of "The Broken Code," by Frank LoVe, a book that should be Exhibit A in any discussion of why editors are important: "This book is a bold and bazaar story....No Pope, No Saint, So Science, No Senitor, No Clery, No Ayatollah is spaired the all seeing eye of God."

I don't get an opening to talk to Noory. His eyes scan the crowd like he's looking for someone. He fidgets, glances at his watch, and speaks quietly to the man next to him, his producer. His body language says he'd rather be somewhere else. He talks to the audio-visual crew about the lighting. "Lower," "Light enough to see," he says, "but intimate."

Finally it's time for the Noory, the pro who deftly walks the crazy line without actually seeming actually crazy himself.

He begins where all conversion narratives do, the moment of insight. 

"When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated, I was 13 years old," he begins. "It was a few more years before I started to understand there's something going on here. Then I realized that this was going on long before JFK." 

Now it's my "aha" moment. Everyone I've talked to at Conspiracy Con starts their stories at exactly the same point:"When Kennedy was assassinated…"

A picture comes into focus: Baby Boomers and their world.

Children in the time of the McCarthy witch hunts and nuclear attack drills.  P.S. 107, the elementary school I had the misfortune to attend, stressed the immanent perils of communists lurking in Little League dugouts and atomic bombs screaming through the stratosphere directly on target for 13th St. and 8th Ave. in Brooklyn. Teenagers during the Viet Nam war, learned that the CIA had overthrown governments and engineered coup d'etats, and that the federal government did indeed lie – about the Gulf of Tonkin and plenty of other things. Young adults in the time of Watergate, we wrote term papers while watching the unwinding  -- under Sen. Sam Ervin's beetle eyebrows -- of criminal conspiracies at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

I tune back in to Noory. "Where there's smoke, there's fire," he says, dropping his voice on 'fire." Immediately, he makes an about face, dropping that ball of yarn and finishing on an up note. "We're all in this together. We need to keep hope in us. I hope Obama is successful. When you get negative, then they have you. This is our country and our planet. And nobody is going to take it away from us."

No indeed, I think, and head for the exit. Next: Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound.

Conspiracy Con 9 - The Live Blog: Initial Probe

Dateline: Santa Clara, California 

Saturday June 6, 2009 4:28:05 p.m. PDT

After a tour through the exhbit, where Don from St. Paul, Minn. pressed two handfuls of pamphlets on me with titles such as Orthodox Medicine is Public Enemy #1 and Why Silver is the Answer, I check in with Don VonKliest, "The Value Of Minstrels, Jesters and Entertainers In The Future." An idea that I, as a writer, can't argue with.

VonKliest – a professional TV and radio announcer talk show host – contrasts with the prevailing dreariness. He may be paranoid but at least he's entertaining. He grabs the audience right off.

"What a time it was, to be in the 60s," he says, and starts playing air guitar. She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeaaaah. He's talking my – baby boomer – language. (So many Birkenstocks. So many gray pony-tails.)

We're all in good spirits and I'm thinking this maybe isn't all brain-boiling paranoia, when it becomes clear that Don Von's topic isn't the importance of jesters, thespians, and bards. It's the Navy's swastika-shaped building in San Diego. And other than the clip of his interview with Fox News, the next 45 minutes are unmediated stream-of-VonKliest-consciousness.

Swastika building…George Bush Sr… new world order…Spike Jones and the City Slickers…1942 propaganda song, "Heil Hitler's New World Order"….Prescott Bush…2012…666…the computer in Brussels called "the beast"….the end of the age…can you imagine what the world would be like with no money…it's the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

Time for another drink. Next: At the Foot of the Worshipful Master

Conspiracy Con 9 - The Live Blog: First Contact

Dateline: Santa Clara, California

Saturday June 6, 2009 1:57:14 p.m. PDT

After wresting my car from my 18 year-old, I hit the road for the Marriott, which for the next two days is ground zero of world conspiracy theory. This is the ninth -- and we know that 9 is inverted 6 and three of them are the number of the beast---

Where was I?

This is the ninth time this potpourri of High Weirdness has been held in our fair city, and that alone is worthy of note. That George Noory, host of Coast to Coast a.m. -- the nighttime radio talk show focused on all things conspiratorial, paranormal and extraterrestrial -- was the keynote speaker at Saturday's banquet sealed the deal.

When I asked the event's producer, Brian Hall, why he chose the Santa Clara venue, the answer wasn't that Santa Clara was home to a vortex of cosmic power, or the Trilateral Commission's home away from from home. The reason was pretty much the same as why the 49ers are interested in building a new stadium here: Prices are better than San Francisco, it's easy to get to -- close to the airport, easy freeway access -- and it's easy to park.

I was vaguely disappointed. I'd expected something more...conspiratorial.

When I pulled in to the Marriott, for a minute I wondered if I was in the wrong place because the parking lot was so empty. Then I saw an "Income Tax is Illegal" bumper sticker and I knew I wasn't. At the conference registration desk my announcement that I was press got a chilly reception. "Are you pre-registered?" When I replied that I was, and further that I had spoken to Brian personally, the temperature rose a few degrees. Taking out a credit card to pay for the dinner (not included in the press pass), I was told, "We don't take credit cards. Cash or check only."

I should have guessed. "People don't want to use plastic at an event like this," the woman at the desk explained, emphasizing the this. I felt like a conspirator already.

As a I forked over three portraits of Andrew Jackson, an old man wearing a Greek fisherman's cap and holding an open Bible in which every syllable was annotated with runes, leaned over and asked me if I believed in God Almighty. "I do, but I don't have time to talk now." I was on a mission, and taking a deep dive into the Annunaki messages coded in Deuteronomy -- or whatever -- would occupy the day. He graciously didn't pursue it further.

Saving the delights of the exhibit hall for later, I stopped by Webster Tarpley's talk, "How To Defeat The Wall Street Oligarchs, Shred The Derivatives, And Get Out Of The Depression." What lefty progressive can resist that? However, the front screen read:

Trilateral Commission

Coup d'etat

Obama

Genocide

No oligarchs. No derivatives. Just my old pals, the Trilateral Commission. I decided that before I ventured further I needed to lay in some foundational work with lunch and a drink. At the Marriott Sports bar, I asked the bartender if the Conspiracy Con folks were good tippers. "They don't come in here much," he answered.

Next: Initial probe

Mike Honda Blogs On the Issues

Santa Clara's fighting fireplug of a Congressman, Mike Honda, has a  new blog,  Congressman Mike Honda on the Issues, where you can engage with him on the issues of the day. There are plenty of podcasts and audio briefings as well as reading.  Check it out. 

22nd Assembly District Race: Plot Thickens with 11th Hour Slate Mailer

Like most Democrats in the 22nd Assembly district, my mailbox has been so crammed with campaign ads the past few weeks that I just toss them without even looking. Saturday was not different. 

I was about to send an Anna Song flier to join Caserta's and Fong's more elegant efforts -- sorry guys, putting it in an envelope still won't make me read it -- when something caught my eye on the cheesy slate mailer (one endorsing a 'slate' of candidates). It was not the portraits of Great Democratic Presidents that appeared to have been taken with the same camera that Brady used at Antietam. No, it was the following statement:

"Anna Song for State Assembly: Endorsed by Santa Clara Mayor Patricia Mahan...."

Say what?

Last time I heard Pat Mahan had endorsed Dominc Caserta. I have calls in to both Mahan and Song to clarify this for me. In the meantime, I did some research.

The mailer came from an outfit in Burbank called Democratic Voters Choice, which, in 2005, drew the attention of reporters at the Daily Kos political blog for a deceptive mailer about ballot propositions. 

Turns out that Democratic Voters Choice is a slate mailer house apparently run by "campaign finance consultants" Durkee & Associates, which sells space on campaign mailers to anyone ready to pay --including special interest groups in sheep's clothing. What makes these pieces insidious is that they appear to be official party communications. 

Another thing about them is that candidates don't have to give permission for their names to used on them. So the one I got on Saturday listed all the Democratic candidates from Mike Honda down. But who paid for the piece is a different story -- and it ain't the Democratic party. 

The big money behind this piece is No on 98/Yes on 99 (the ballot measures on eminent domain -- 98 has the hidden rent control abolition provision) . You can learn more about this confab here. The other two candidates who paid to be on this piece are Lane Liroff (running for judge) and Anna Song.

Liroff spent about $6,700 to be on this mailer. However, I couldn't find any campaign finance filings for Anna Song in the CalAccess database -- no contributions, no expenditures. In fact Song's campaign doesn't appear to have filed anything.

So stay tuned as we try to find out if Pat Mahan's name is being taken in vain, and, how a campaign with no contributions and no expenditures on record buys a presence on space-for-hire political mailer.

Giving Tech its Due

Am I the only person who sometimes feels like Santa Clara has multiple personality disorder?

I saw this headline this morning in FierceCIO:TechWatch: AMD scoffs at Nvidia’s 'huge, monolithic' approach.

(Hang on, I'm getting to the MPD;)

Here are two tech giants that will decide how we see the next generation of computer graphics -- that means games, online video -- who both are headquartered in Santa Clara. But how often does this reality about Santa Clara enter into our community conversation? I don't ever get asked when the Santa Clara Weekly is going to add a tech news column. But at least once a month someone asks me when the paper is going to bring back to society column.

Now I have nothing against society news. But I think our public conversation needs to be informed by the fact that world-changing technology makes its home here -- especially as the General Plan update is getting under way. It's not just enough to pay lip service to tech businesses. We need to start acting like what they do is at least as important as the price of real estate.

Santa Clara – A Livable Town

About four years ago, when I interviewed Gary Gillmor for the Weekly, the former mayor described Santa Clara's character this way:

"The personality of Santa Clara is a true middle class community. We cut our city up with the transportation -- Central expressway, Lawrence expressway… We created jobs, we created a tax base. [By contrast] the personality of Los Altos, Saratoga -- they don’t want any industry."

(Cue apoplectic blasts from those who see Gillmor as the evil genie who popped the lid on Pandora's box and let out a swarm of developers.)

Having grown up in one – Brooklyn, NY in the 1950s and 60s -- I'm a big fan of comfortable-for-ordinary-folks communities. And in 2008, what it takes to create or preserve one is different than what it took in 1958.

I've had many conversations on the middle-class-ness of Santa Clara. It comes up whenever you're talking about development – high density or otherwise -- "affordable" housing, or urban planning.

Lots of people pay lip service to this idea, but the pious jaw music is often just a lead in for objecting to whatever project or plan is at hand. I can't help but observe that many who are most hostile to policies and projects that might retain Santa Clara's middle-class quality, wouldn't be here in the first place if it hadn't been that kind of city.

Let me tell you how I came to Santa Clara 25 years ago. (I recognize that some will rest their case against development on this alone.)

It was the tech boom of the 1980s and my new employer, a now-defunct software company, had just moved from pricier real estate in Sunnyvale to brand new – and cheaper -- digs on Mission College Blvd. I rented an apartment 15 minutes away on San Tomas – even in rush hour – and a stone's throw from the Acapulco. My husband and I lived there for three pleasantly affordable years and only moved when we bought our townhouse.

The townhouse was in a new development and within our budget -- unlike the single family detached houses we had looked at. Now, we were hardly struggling at the lower rungs of the Valley economy. My husband was an HR manager for a national retailer and I was a software product manager.

I'm sure there were people then who didn’t want us moving in, as there are people who would prefer not to have my new neighbors moving in. But my new neighbors are the people who make Silicon Valley an exceptionally interesting place.

You know, the kind of place where you might have Dave Packard or the Steves Wozniak and Jobs tinkering in the garage next door, inventing new industries in the process. Way back when ordinary people could still afford to live in Palo Alto and Cupertino.

For example, right next door to me lives Lasandra Brill, author of the Marketing in a Web 2.0 World blog. Brill is not only an evangelist for these new generation ways of bringing things to market, she likely invented some of them, too.

Down the street a bit lives Ivaylo Lenkov, another "Web 2.0" pioneer. You haven't heard his name, but Lenkov is changing the equation for building and operating your website. Lenkov's start-up SiteKreator – also based in Santa Clara -- lets anybody create a professional-looking website by clicking-and-pointing, without any technical knowledge. The price is right, too – the entry level is free.

Another guy you might have found yourself sharing a lunch time walk to the roach coach with is serial entrepreneur Jon Fisher, whose third startup, Internet security company Bharosa, was right next door to the Santa Clara Weekly office. Last year Oracle bought Bharosa and Fisher has gone on to, among other things, teaching the secrets of his success to aspiring entrepreneurs.

They all chose Santa Clara for the same reasons I did – it was a comfortable, affordable town, plus it's easy to do business here.

When I'm having this conversation about livability, I often ask people, "Would you want Santa Clara to be like Los Altos or Woodside?" And sometimes they answer, "What's wrong with Los Altos and Woodside."

Now, I have friends living in both those towns and I don't hold it against them. They made their beds and now they have to lie in them, not to mention paying PG&E and driving 30, 45 minutes to work somewhere else. But by my middle-class barometer, there's plenty wrong with those towns.

First, your neighbors have so much free floating anxiety about the value of their real estate that they will torment you ceaselessly about the color you paint your window frames, the height of your fence or your magnolia tree, your nocturnal escapades in the hot tub, or your kid's friends.

One Los Altos couple I know practically had to put blackout shades on the front of their house to keep the neighbors across the street from spying on their social life to see if they were entertaining "undesirables" -- if you know what I mean and I think you do. My friends, you see, had moved there from San Jose, and you never know about those people.

The deed to their house still has archaic covenants specifying that blacks, Asians and Mexicans will only go to the back door. Santa Clara, on the other hand, was home to one of the county's first black community leaders, William James, and elected him sergeant-at-arms for the volunteer fire department.

Second, those towns are like living in a museum.

Sure your next-door neighbor could be some guy (and it will almost certainly be a guy, and often a shiny new trophy wife) who changed the semiconductor industry, developed the first commercially successful database software or wrote the first online shopping cart program. But these triumphs happened 10, 20, 30 years ago or longer. Learn about it at the Tech or Computer History Museum – it's cheaper.

Right here in Santa Clara I'm next door to people who are doing things today that are changing business and the world now. And that makes it an exceptionally interesting place to be. So my view is, let's make sure that future Brills, Fishers and Lenkovs will always be attracted to this comfortable-for-ordinary-people town.

And for those who disagree? Well there's always Woodside.

I Got Them Old Convention Center Blues

This past week I spent some time in the San Jose Convention Center, giving me a refreshed appreciation of our hometown's facilities. The occasion was the VON -- voice on the 'Net -- conference.

Unlike the Santa Clara Convention Center, San Jose's operation has all the convivial charm of, well, the set of a low-budget slasher flick. It's big, barn-like, frigidly cold -- literally -- and eerily empty.

But the piece de resistance is that parking costs you $1 every 20 minutes. So if you spend an afternoon at a trade show, the tab is $20 or more. Adding insult to injury, half the time the clever little machines that take your money (don't expect to find a human being on the premises) spit out your credit card with a cheery message that your credit card is unreadable. Ditto for the $20 bill you try as an alternative.

By the end of the day -- and this may sound corny, I know -- I was homesick for Santa Clara's Convention Center with its bright, sunlit spaces and ample free parking. The irony is that the VON show started in Santa Clara but outgrew our exhibition space.

I can't wait for the expansion to be completed.

Carmelite Convent - Santa Clara's Oasis of Tranquility

A few days ago, someone told our Weekly photographer Christy Kinney that he was delighted to read this week's cover story about the Carmelite Monastery on Benton St. The reason was that he had just visited it for the first time and found a wonderful tranquility in the grounds and the church.

That's what makes our efforts worthwhile.

The convent is one of my favorite spots around Santa Clara. I discovered it shortly after moving here in 1983 and often went there on Sunday afternoon for vespers. It was very healing for me at a time when I often felt disoriented after moving from upstate New York to work for a now long-defunct Silicon Valley startup.

The Carmelite convent was also a favorite of my mother's. When she visited, we often walked in the olive orchard and sat by the shady, secluded shrine of Virgin Mary. Afterwards we would ride out to Alviso for a light supper at Val's and a walk past the now "high and dry" early 20th century yacht club.

As soon as we crossed the border into Alviso, my mother would announce, "Well now we're in John Steinbeck's California." She liked that California better than Silicon Valley. She would be sad to see relentless gentrification pushing ever deeper into the faded, sleepy little town at the tip of the Bay.

Alviso has a close connection with Santa Clara history.

Santa Clara pioneer Harry Wade built a wharf in Alviso to accommodate freight shipping from South Bay locations to San Francisco. Harry's son Charles married Estafina Alviso, daughter of Ygnacio Alviso, majordomo fo the Santa Clara Mission and grantee of the Rancho Rincon de los Estros — where today's Alviso stands.

We don't do the best job in Santa Clara of promoting the historic charms of our city. One of the few times they get in the spotlight is the Historic Home Tour in December. I'd love to see a Santa Clara history and neighborhood tour. What are your favorite spots around town? Maybe we can talk it over some time over a cup of coffee at Val's.

Getting Connected

Let's face it -- City Council meetings are pretty dull most of the time.

You've got to hand it to Council Members, whatever you think of them or their politics. It takes a special dedication to plough through those meetings every two weeks -- not to mention enduring verbal rotten tomatos thrown on a regular basis by Santa Clara's unhinged and perennially malcontent. Like I once read about the Queen of England: She attends more boring events in a month than most people do in a lifetime.

However, for those of us who find it necessary on occasion to be physically present at a meeting -- instead of watching it on TV -- things have gotten better recently.

I'm referring to the free WiFI Internet access that the City provides as a courtesy in the Chambers. Now while you're waiting for your agenda item to come up, you can handle your email, IM your buddies, post to your blog, do your Christmas shopping or Google your ex-husband.

Also worthy of mention is that the City recently added an electrical outlet for the press table so members of the fourth estate can charge up their laptops during marathon meetings.

Now if we could just click "close" on some people's mouths....

I got an email this morning urging SaveBAREC supporters to turn out for tonight's City Council meeting, where Council Members will have to vote to either rescind the zoning changes that enable the Santa Clara Gardens project to go forward or refer the question to voters in a special February election.

My first thought, was Not another marathon. I mean, give it a rest, guys. At this juncture, either way SaveBAREC has won this battle. Save your breath for the election.

Then I happened to scan the distribution list. Among the familiar local media names there was this one: Cavuto@foxnews.com.

Neil Cavuto?

The guy who said last week that Karl Rove's departure from Washington was going to be a "loss for Wall Street" despite the evidence of ongoing panic from some of the administration's financial policy highlights like the unfolding mortgage loan catastrophe? That Cavuto?

It's said that politics makes strange bedfellows. But what could SaveBAREC possibly hope to gain from attention from Fox News' "premier business reporter" and Bush administration water carrier? If anything, I would expect Cavuto to come out strong for blanketing the BAREC site with $2 million zero-lot McMansions -- the hell with granny -- and skipping the cleanup -- after all, a little arsenic never hurt anyone.

Santa Clara Politics Deja Vu

I was amused to hear the Santa Clara Gardens [BAREC] project described as "the Summerhill Gillmor development project" by an opponent at Tuesday night's City Council meeting.

That's what a large footprint Gary Gillmor, mayor in the 1960s, has in Santa Clara. People blame him for everything, things that happened a decade before he was mayor and things that happened long after he left office.

When I interviewed Gillmor in 2005, when I asked about the downtown redevelopment debacle, he told me," I get blamed for the urban renewal – or the wrecking of the downtown. I hate to tell them that was in 1958, I wasn’t even in office then. But people still think that I did it. [they say] 'Look what he did to the downtown.' "

Sort of a local pro-development boogeyman: You better behave or Gary Gillmor will develop the backyard.

It's a reflection of his importance to the City's history.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the City very likely wouldn't be the place it is today without Gillmor, who was Santa Clara's first elected mayor. Certainly, Santa Clara's municipal power company owes a significant part of its enormous success to his personal charisma and outsize confidence in his own vision.

"We were in a constant struggle with PG&E," he told me in our 2005 interview. "I was elected chairman of the Northern California Power Agency, which was the benefit of having a mayor with continuity because.. our power agency was a new agency at the time. We were in a constant struggle with PG&E who wanted us not to be successful. I would go all the time, representing 15 cities. I was their chairperson for five, six, seven years. And Donald Von Raesfield was key to our successes. We were a team.

"In government you have to have knowledge. Knowledge is power. We went into geothermal power, hydro plants. It wasn’t a new utility, but we expanded it.

At one point Gillmor had the audacity to advise the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should create a municipal power company. No doubt today they regret not listening to the brash young mayor from the cow town to the south.

"Another thing was the planning. We had a lot of pressure on us for north of the Bayshore at that time to allow housing. All the housing developers were after us, but we said ‘no’ and we kept that area for our industrial base. Why even during one of my years in office we lowered taxes, which was unheard of."

He's an interesting guy to talk to, with a kind of free-wheeling style that you don't see in politicians any more – for good or bad.

In 2004 there was a lot of talk about contributions from Gillmor and his family to candidates in local races. The Mercury News weighed in with a highly critical editorial. I asked him if he thought his political contributions have influenced races in Santa Clara.

"Well, sure. Your paper influences it. The unions influence it, environmental groups influence it. All these things influence. Does money talk in politics? Sure."

When was the last time you heard a politician speak that directly? Compared to today's focus-group-tested, homogenized politicians, talking to Gillmor is refreshing.

"I know what the Mercury calls me – old guard, kingmaker, whatever they want to call me. I can’t remember the last time I asked anything from the city council. I probably haven’t talked to them in a decade but I’m blamed."

No doubt Gillmor did things in his time that might not pass muster these days. But I don't know that today's politicians could do what he did. His bold opposition to the trends of his time — refusing to sell utility assets to PG&E and develop housing on the north side — took a larger-than-life personality.

"This is great city. You can’t find a better run city. I think Santa Clara is one of the finest cities around. Every city has its own personality. The personality of Santa Clara is a true middle class community. [We created] the transportation, Central Expressway. Lawrence expressway. We created jobs. We created a tax base."

It’s something to think about it the next time you turn the lights on.

BAREC Grows Legs

Far from being old news after last week's Council vote, the BAREC story has legs.

Save BAREC appears to be looking to hire the lawyer that represented the groups behind last year's binding arbitration ballot initiative. A blizzard of emails has been flying through cyberspace about the proposed ballot initiative and various lines of attack.

But even more interesting is the survey that's being taken in Santa Clara.

I got called at about 6:30 this evening by some outfit called Parker Consulting out of Tucson, AZ asking me if I would participate in a political survey. After a few general questions about how likely I was to vote in a special election (very, in case you were wondering) we got down to business.

Did I know about the City Council's unanimous vote to develop the former UC Agricultural station, BAREC. (My interviewer had a pleasant German accent and pronounced it to rhyme with the German city of Beyreuth.) I told him that not only did I, but I was a journalist and had written at length about the subject. Further, I suggested that this might disqualify me for purposes of the survey.

It seems no one had any objections. So we forged ahead.

It was a very sophisticated survey. No leading questions like If you knew that Mr. Smith molested children and murdered his mother would you vote for him?

The questions — the appetizer, so to speak — first asked me to rate which information was more or less likely to make me approve or disapprove the development.

Then we got to the main course, which was apparently to market test a variety of angles of persuasion.

First I was asked to rate the amount of trust I would put in the decisions of each Council Member. Then I was asked to rate how persuasive or unpersuasive I found statements made by both the opponents and proponents of the Santa Clara Gardens project.

I tried to be objective — really. But it's kind of hard to evaluate the persuasiveness of something you know to be utterly untrue. I guess you could say it's "extremely unpersuasive."

So who was behind this survey? My interviewer couldn't tell me that. He had his job to do and at this point the lady reporter was keeping him from meeting — or beating — his survey quota. So I didn't learn much.

But I do know a couple of things. Surveys like this don't spring full-blown from the forehead of God. It takes time and very expensive professionals to design them. And it takes even more money to deploy the crew making all those phone calls.

Who has this kind of money and sophisitication? Summerhill Homes comes to mind. Was Summerhill getting ready to fight a ballot initiative all along?

Save BAREC has been talking about a ballot initiative but they appear to be just mobillizing for it. Do they have some deep-pocketed allies that we haven't seen yet?

Stay tuned.

Postscript: BTW, the most persuasive statement in the survey was "Affordable senior housing is good, but why not affordable family housing? Why not indeed? Could it have something to do with the required number of bedrooms and parking spots (fewer) that lets everybody get credit for more affordable housing units on the same footprint?

Just the Facts

When someone says "we report - you decide" most of us are naturally suspicious that the speaker is anything but impartial. If I'm truly impartial, I don't have to tell you. It'll be evident.

In the 25 years I've lived here, I've always thought that the San Jose Mercury News was professional in its news coverage. Not, for example, the New York Post or Fox News. They didn't have to say so - it was evident. Or so I thought.

The Merc's headline last Wednesday about the BAREC vote last Tuesday was surprising given my prior understanding: "Santa Clara council approves housing project for its last farmland." That's not a news report. It's an editorial. They might as well have said, "Santa Clara council proves once again that it's in developer's pocket."

Now an editorial can construe the facts any way the writer wants. And we know that it's the opinion of the Merc's editorial board that Santa Clara Council Members are tools of development interests. But regardless, a news story should have the facts correct.

And the fact is, regardless of the merits of the decision, BAREC isn't and never was farmland. It was a place where among other types of research, insecticides were studied in the 1950s when a cornucopia of new synthetic pesticides were called modern miracles for fighting pests and weeds.

Funny, I didn't notice any such headlines about the new Kaiser Hospital development on another "last" piece of farmland on Lawrence Expressway. Could that be because Kaiser is a rich potential source of advertising?