Free Republic

People are back in the streets because of Pacific Steel Casting Company. In the past, it has been the issue of pollution. The workers have struck over the issue of health and safety (the same issue, as seen from inside). And now, some 200 workers are protesting unjust job termination, owing to intervention by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), in violation of the spirit of Berkeley as a sanctuary city. This factory remains a problem. There will be a march to publicize this problem on Friday, Feb. 17. Here's a bit of the story (aka history). The factory is a...

UC Berkeley, in an apparent attempt to stave off any association with, well, sexy co-eds doing naughty things on camera has bought a handful of .xxx domain names that could link to the school. In other words, domains like goldenbears.xxx, uc-berkeley.xxx and calbears.xxx won’t offer any titillating bits, just a dark screen that says “this domain has been reserved from registration.” “We wouldn’t want to be associated with the kind of industries that would use that domain name,” . . .

BERKELEY -- A longtime Berkeley tree sitter has been convicted of illegal lodging and pointing a laser at a police officer. Fifty-five-year-old Matthew Dodt received a 60-day suspended sentence and three years of probation . . .

Berkeley considers closing its multimillion dollar Wells Fargo account over bank's handling of foreclosure crisis Berkeley is considering closing its Wells Fargo account worth $350 million and entrusting the money to a community bank or credit union, saying the bank is partly to blame for the financial crisis of the last four years.The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to study cutting ties with the bank and rewarding "responsible financial institutions" with its business. The city manager will return with a report in May on the feasibility of ending the 8-year-old contract, which is up for renewal at the end...

BERKELEY -- Why in the world does the University of California employ an armed police force on its campuses? That question, and the anger implied in its wording, was asked repeatedly Wednesday night by UC Berkeley students and faculty of top UC brass. Berkeley was a whistlestop on their tour of campuses before they prepare UC's official response to the use of batons and pepper-spray against peaceful protesters last November. ... Everyone sat in concentric circles waiting for the chance to influence recommendations being prepared on behalf of the university system by Charles Robinson, UC's general counsel, and Chris Edley,...

“The Bay Area Occupy Movement has got to stop using Oakland as their playground,” said Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking at a press conference Saturday evening after a day of demonstrations called by Occupy Oakland that saw approximately 400 arrests, multiple injuries and numerous confrontations with police. She ticked off the damage that had been done when a group of protesters broke into City Hall, overturning a scale model of the building, vandalizing a children's art exhibit, and burning an American flag. The next day in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, she returned to her talking point: "It's...

Progressive observers treat the Tea Party’s forays into land use planning as the work of paranoid reactionaries. The March-April 2011 issue of Mother Jones ran an article by Stephanie Mencimer that portrayed Tea Partiers as “nutters” whose opposition to increased density and mass transit is rooted in “a hostility to what it sees as elites” and a pro-sprawl, suburban lifestyle. Last December, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Anthony Flint riffed off of Mencimer’s piece in a post on the Atlantic magazine’s “Urban Wonk” blog that decried Tea Party disruption of planning efforts from California to Maine to Florida. The...

I miss Robin of Berkeley. She hasn't posted anything since October. No articles on American Thinker or on her site. She was publishing quite steadily for a good long time and then - nothing. I truly hope she is OK. There are people who would make her life miserable if they could figure out her real identity. I sent an email to the editor of AT yesterday and this is the reply I received: "She is busy with other matters. We share your feelings, and are hoping she will return to writing." - editor@americanthinker.com That's all I've been able to...

After Rick Santorum’s surprising showing in the January 3rd Iowa caucuses, many observers asked, “Why didn’t Mitt Romney win? What explains Santorum’s late surge?” The answer lies at the core of contemporary Republican politics: they don’t have one candidate that appeals to their fractured base. A recent Pew Research poll revealed the remarkable diversity in the US electorate. In 2012, Pew projects that 10 percent of potential voters, mostly young people, will not vote; Pew allocates the remaining 90 percent to three groups: “Mostly Republican,” 25 percent, “Mostly Independent,” 35 percent, and “Mostly Democratic,” 40 percent. (This reflects ideology not...

Sitting at the bar in Paolo’s Restaurant at 92nd Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan Saturday afternoon, December 10th, I was shocked by the tone the conversation with my old ABC News colleague Lowell Bergman had taken. He was heading to London and had urgently requested that we get together before his afternoon flight from JFK. I remembered Lowell as a brave, competent, but hugely self-righteous old school investigative reporter, who famously produced the Mike Wallace expose of the major tobacco companies for ’60 Minutes.’ Al Pacino played him in the movie version of the saga, ‘The Insider.’ Although I...

Imagine opening up your copy of the Constitution one day and finding these words: Federal, State and local government shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own contributions and expenditures, for the purpose of influencing in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure. Federal, State and local government shall require that any permissible contributions and expenditures be publicly disclosed.  On January 7th, Occupy Berkeley's ruling authority, its General Assembly, somehow came to endorse an upcoming protest called "Occupy the Courts". The protest is in response to the Citizens United...

In November, Berkeley City Manager Phil Kamlarz traded his $250,000-a-year job for retirement with a starting pension of about $266,000 annually. The deal highlights the city's generous pension program, which is one of the better plans in the state but by no means unique. The costly program is also $420 million underfunded, a shortfall equal to more than three years of city payroll, according to the city's latest actuarial reports. Kamlarz's hefty retirement pay was predictable. Three years ago, Mayor Tom Bates successfully persuaded his City Council colleagues to grant the city manager a series of raises to keep him...

The University's recent bulldozer "maintenance" in the Park is problematic in several ways. First, it is a violation of trust and respect. The University snuck into the Park in the early hours with no notice to the community and long time Park volunteers. The Pergola, or trellis in the West End, which UC rather mysteriously decapitated, was designed and agreed upon during almost a year of meetings with University architects and the volunteers who built it. And the information that the University is providing for their recent attack is misleading, if not outright falsehood. I'll eat my hat if the...

Berkeley, the leftist city whose University of California campus erupted in protest this week as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, has the widest gap between rich and poor in the Bay Area, according to recently released data from the Census Bureau. The city that features famous restaurants like Chez Panisse and hilltop mansions with breathtaking views of San Francisco Bay is also one where 10 percent of households subsist on less than...

Bulldozers ploughed through the west end of People’s Park today turning decades of community garden into rubble. Dozens of police watched as crews tossed mountains of healthy plants and a community-built arbor into dumpsters, leaving behind stripped earth. A young student who claimed to be volunteering as a police assistant handed out university fliers which stated, “In response to park users and neighbor concerns, we are doing maintenance work to address the rat infestation and safety issues in People’s Park.” A UC press release described the activity as "an effort to provide students and the broader community with safer, more...

BERKELEY, Calif. — A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley filed by two Jewish students who claimed the school fostered an atmosphere of anti-Semitism by not doing enough to curb harassment during pro-Palestinian protests that included mock checkpoints. Plaintiff Jessica Felber claimed in the lawsuit that a leader of a pro-Palestinian campus group rammed her with a shopping cart as she staged a counterprotest to “Apartheid Week,” an annual event that compares Israel’s policies to the institutionalized racism of South Africa’s former white government. Ms. Felber, who graduated last year, and current undergraduate Brian...

Being out and about in Berkeley in the week before Christmas provides a good window on the world in 2011. A lot of fuss has been made, rightly so, about the major divide between the 1% super-rich and the 99% others, but the old distinction of the haves versus the have-nots is still valid. Berkeley has recently been certified as the center of this split. We have the biggest gap between the rich and the poor of any city in the Bay Area. Of course, the simple explanation is that we’re the rich city most tolerant of also including some...

olice said they'd enforce no-camping restrictions in Civic Center Park, but they didn't say when. When has since come and gone—and so has the encampment. Goodbye, and good riddance? Twenty-five Occupy addicts, and some curiosity-seekers showed up at Thursday's general assembly, in Civic Center Park, to debate responses to the city's take-down of the camp. Many denounced the troubled camp, but some supported it. One Occupier tried to rally the GA to march across the street to the Berkeley police station, but had to do so, himself. After 10 minutes, he returned—a man without a crowd. The GA was disrupted...

Occupy Berkeley holds ground despite police actionUpdated at 05:15 AM today BERKELEY, Calif. -- After members of the "Occupy Berkeley" camp were served with a notice that police planned to evict people lodging at Civic Center Park after 10 p.m. Wednesday night, a group has remained in the area despite small bouts of police action this morning. Occupy Berkeley is the last of the large scale Occupy encampments in the Bay Area and Berkeley city officials are confronting the same problems that shut down the camps in Oakland and San Francisco. Berkeley police delivered their third warning, prompting some Occupy...

I don't know about you, but I'm getting fed up with these self-important gangs of masked, black-clad agitators running roughshod over our city streets. They've occupied parks, shut down roadways, vandalized private property, assaulted law-abiding citizens and left entire communities afraid to venture into financially struggling downtown business districts. They've wielded spray cans and left behind eyesores that have incensed the community. I am speaking, of course, about the police.

As'ad AbuKahlil—a political science professor at California State University, Stanislaus—spoke last month at a day-long "teach-in" at the University of California, Berkeley titled, "Building Solidarity with the Arab Spring." It consisted of a number of "workshop sessions" at the Valley Life Sciences Building, followed by a "plenary session" at the Multicultural Center, and was co-sponsored by the Arab Resource Organizing Committee, the Berkeley Muslim Students Association PAC, the International Socialist Organization, and the Syrian American Council. AbuKhalil's workshop on "The U.S. and the Arab Uprising" was held in a tiny, hot, windowless room filled with students wearing hijabs and keffiyehs....

An Open Letter to UC Berkeley Students, Faculty, Administration & Regents from the UC Berkeley Police Officers’ Association It is our hope that this letter will help open the door to a better understanding between UC Berkeley police and the University community. The UC Berkeley Police Officers’ Association, representing approximately 64 campus police officers, understands your frustration over massive tuition hikes and budget cuts, and we fully support your right to peacefully protest to bring about change.  It was not our decision to engage campus protesters on November 9th. We are now faced with “managing” the results of years of poor...

Flash: U.C. Berkeley Faculty Senate Registers 10-1 Vote Condemning Administration Response to Occupy Berkeley ProtestersThe Berkeley Division of the University of California Faculty Senate endorsed, by a 10-1 margin (336-34), a group of four resolutions expressing, with varying degrees of specificity, their lack of confidence in the way Berkeley administrators have handled student protests. Three U.C. Berkeley executives, Chancellor Robert Birgenau and two of his subordinates, attempted an explanation of their actions on November 9, when students and faculty were clubbed by police. They were greeted with stony silence by the faculty members in the front of the International House...

Man throws aluminum water bottle at UC Berkeley student’s face A man threw an aluminum water bottle at a UC Berkeley student Thursday evening on campus, causing minor injuries to the victim’s face. At about 5:09 p.m., the female student was approached by a man at “the northeast exterior of the Haas Pavilion,” according to a UCPD crime alert. The man asked the student if she was going to the protest on Sproul Plaza, and when the victim answered “no,” the suspect yelled at her. “People like you are the reason that California is in debt,” he said, according to...

Occupy Encampment At UC Berkeley Torn DownPOSTED: 7:38 am PST November 17, 2011 BERKELEY, Calif. -- Authorities have cleared an encampment set up by Occupy protesters on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Police in riot gear conducted a raid on the encampment around 3:30 a.m. Thursday, removing about 20 tents and arresting two protesters. Television footage showed a bulldozer moving into the area after the raid.

The privileged Occupy kiddies of U.C. Berkeley were back in action again yesterday, play-acting at revolution to entertain their professors. The purported thesis of this particular Occupation is “more money for secondary education,” but that’s just a veneer (a very very thin veneer, as the above photo shows) for a more radical agenda....

BERKELEY, Calif. (KGO) -- A man was shot by UC police officers inside the Haas School of Business on the UC Berkeley campus Tuesday afternoon. UC police responded to a report of a man with a gun inside the Haas School of Business. Police responded and shot and wounded one suspect, who is now in custody. There are unconfirmed reports that the suspect was a white male in his 30s.

Then appear on MSNBC's Rachel Madcow. I find it ironic that one of the PRIMARY ARCHITECTS of the Financial Meltdown is going to lecture these mush-filled skulls on the evilness of banks, when he made 100's of millions of dollars writing the legislation that enabled this mess. (Remember Clinton's 'Finance Reform"?) Stumbled across this on Twitter.

The Bay Area has come down with a serious case of Protest Fatigue. The 99 percent of Northern Californians who want to go about their business are being jammed with protests and forced to pay for shutdowns imposed by the 1 percent of activists who don't know the difference between free speech and free camping. There are so many protests here that the group No Justice No BART had to call off a planned demonstration on Nov. 2 in order to accommodate activists planning to take public transit to the Occupy Oakland general strike. When President Obama came to San...

A clique of privileged U.C. Berkeley students, upset that they’re the top 1% of elite students in the state and thus disqualified from participating in the Occupy movement, could no longer contain their frustration on Wednesday and threw an Occutantrum, attempting to “occupy” a few square yards of the 1,200-acre campus. The police dutifully played their roles in the street theater performance, showing up in riot gear and looking scary so the privileged students could shout at them and feel properly revolutionary, as instructed by their professors. Following the script, the police repeatedly removed the handful of occupation tents so...

Occupy Cal: Police Use Batons to Beat Up Students in Berkeley [VIDEO]By Amrutha Gayathri | November 10, 2011 5:34 AM EST University of California police used batons to beat up unarmed "Occupy Cal" protestors in Berkeley Wednesday night in an attempt to expel the students from their makeshift encampments, triggering a mass rally and sit-in. Thousands of UC Berkeley students and Occupy Oakland activists clashed with university police in historic Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, which has witnessed protests against Vietnam War and many other causes.

Forty two years ago, Oakland mayor-to-be Jean Quan was a U.C. Berkeley student-activist rallying for a movement dubbed the Third World Liberation Front of 1969. That movement would later give birth to the university's Ethnic Studies Department and influence universities across the country to integrate such a unique discipline. The department studies represent the history and experiences of marginalized people, especially people of color. Quan went on to become many things: union organizer, Oakland Board of Education member, Oakland City Council member, Chabot Space & Science Center board chair. As she tells on her own website jeanquan.org, in the beginning...

A face-off on the UC Berkeley campus this morning pitted Democrats vs. Republicans, pro-affirmative-action students vs. those favoring race-blind policies, and, ultimately, cupcakes vs. brownies. None other than former UC Regent and affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly, showed up on Sproul Plaza today to sell frosted cupcakes priced according to the race of the buyer. Connerly, who wrote Proposition 209, the state's voter-approved ban on race preferences in government programs, sat at a table with the Berkeley College Republicans to hawk their baked goods. The group's stunt, which some students have called racist and insensitive, was touted as a satirical...

I don't know about the political ethics or math skills of the UC Berkeley students who came up with the idea for an Increase Diversity Bake Sale, but they certainly know how to draw a crowd. The student Republican group that sponsored a race-based bake sale set to be held on the campus today must have been counting on raising more than just the cookie dough. There are few places in America more reactionary than a college campus, and among them, UC Berkeley is a leader. A bake sale flyer posted on Facebook last week linked the price of pastries...

Berkeley student senators voted Sunday to condemn discriminatory behavior on campus - even if done in satire - in response to a Republican student group's plans for an "Increase Diversity Bake Sale," with pastries labeled according to race and gender. The 19-0 vote, with one absence, came during a special meeting of the Associated Students of the University of California, as the debate over affirmative action reignited in Berkeley. "Sure, it came off as discrimination," said Francisco Loayza IV, the treasurer of the Republican group, at Sunday's meeting. "People are being judged by their skin color (in affirmative action policies)....

A Facebook post announcing plans by a UC Berkeley Republican group to sell baked goods priced according to race, gender and ethnicity - "White/Caucasian" pastries for $2 and "Black/African American pastries for 75 cents, for example - has drawn outrage on campus. "I'm ashamed to know that I go to the same school with people who would say stuff like this," responded student Skyler Hogan-Van Sickle on Facebook. "I'm really trying to figure out how someone can be this hateful." The campus Republicans, who expect to go forward with their "Increase Diversity Bake Sale" on Tuesday, say the event is...

BERKELEY -- The protest season began with a near bang at UC Berkeley this afternoon as hundreds of chanting, fist-pumping students angry about tuition hikes charged into Tolman Hall after a raucous noon rally. They filled the ground-floor hallways and jostled police officers. One student grabbed an officer's .40-caliber magazine, sending the ammunition clip flying. Officer Donna Chapman, who had been trying to order students to clear the building entrance, ran to pick up the clip before protesters could grab it. Around her, students shouted "No cuts, no fees, education must be free" as they flooded into the building. Classrooms...

President Obama upset a lot of supporters soon after taking office when he declared that it was time to look forward, not backward, so there would be no investigation of Bush administration officials who allegedly approved illegal wiretapping, kidnapping and torture. Now a former member of Obama's transition team has told a Bay Area audience that one reason for the decision was concern that a wide-ranging probe could infuriate leaders of the military and the CIA. Christopher Edley, now the law school dean at UC Berkeley, was speaking at a panel at the school Sept. 2 when someone brought up...

<p>First she was buoyantly up in a "dangerous" People's Park tree protesting "Everything," but now she's at Highland Hospital with a broken back, ending an eight-day protest which was a protest-in-progress.</p> <p>Her last fall from the tree was her second. She fell in her second day in the tree and was caught in the arms of a friend before she hit the ground. "Moon Shadow," who was first up, last Monday, reportedly took a plunge when—out on a limb—he helped attach a protest banner.</p>

A bizarre showdown between well-known indie journalist Josh Wolf and an optometry professor is set to reach its dramatic conclusion Friday in Berkeley Small Claims Court. Cal Prof. Robert DiMartino wants Wolf to reimburse him $1,066, and a judge will decide if he has to. But this dispute is about cash like "Bleak House" is about a will. To Wolf, it's a question of democratic principles. A known First Amendment-hugger, the June graduate of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism first gained notoriety in 2007 after serving 226 days in federal prison for refusing to give police the video he'd...

Do you want to build the movement to defend public education and fight racism, and you’re serious about winning? Do you want to increase underrepresented minority enrollment, restore affirmative action and overturn prop. 209 and pass CA DREAM Act 131 and a UC-Wide DREAM Act? Then this class is for you! “Fighting to Learn, Learning to Fight: Building the Movement for Public Education and Equality” is a class designed for participants to learn the theory and method behind the leading organization in the fight for public education at UC Berkeley and around the country: BAMN (The Coalition to Defend Affirmative...

Back in the day, if students wanted easy credits, they signed up for underwater basket-weaving. Now they just need a political cause. The University of California, Berkeley is offering students college credit to work for an expressly political organization fighting for affirmative action and immigrant rights. This semester, the African Studies department at Berkeley is offering a two-credit class called “Fighting to Learn, Learning to Fight: Building the Movement for Public Education and Equality.” The class is sponsored by BAMN — The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrants Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary —...

BERKELEY -- UC Berkeley is asking some of the country's largest foundations to help undocumented immigrants afford college. Buoyed by a new state law that allows public colleges and universities to offer private scholarships to students who came to the United States illegally, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said Wednesday he has spoken to major organizations such as the Carnegie and Ford foundations about helping the university. "One was nervous about the political impact," he said in an interview after his annual back-to-school media briefing. "The other said, 'This is fantastic.' " Birgeneau has been a vocal supporter of undocumented...

Two American hikers who were detained in Iran have been sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of "illegal entry" and "espionage," the state TV website says.

... CAIR and CRG-IRDP assert that heightened approval for Islam is the only solution to a problem they have defined over-broadly.That very dissonance from American principles has made CAIR, and its constituency of American Muslims indoctrinated in fear, perfect prey for the ideological operators who have guided identity politics on the West Coast for two generations. In a phrase that CAIR might have thought would delight a Berkeley audience, the organization has designated its "vision" as "utopian." On the West Coast, academic Islamist argument gives way to demagogic Islamist propaganda, which will, if history is our guide, soon be employed...

ATHENS, Greece - 235 years after the American colonies declared independence from Britain, the passenegers on the U.S. Boat to Gaza call for a new American Declaration of Independence, this time from Israel. The passengers issued their call from the decks of the U.S.-flagged boat, The Audacity of Hope, which is currently confined to a Greek military pier near Athens, while its captain sits in jail. Like the Founders in Philadelphia, the passengers in Athens recognize that "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them to another, a...

Since they don’t really want to encounter any, academics keep striking out when they attempt to figure out conservatives. Berkeley’s George Lakoff is the latest scholar to miss the boat, and the dock is getting crowded. “Conservatives don’t dislike science or expertise inherently, Lakoff says—but for them, these are not the chief source of authority,” Chris Mooney, who interviewed the professor, writes in the July/August 2011 issue of The American Prospect. “Instead, conservatives have a moral system based on a ‘strict father’ model of the family, which is then exported to various other realms of society—the market, the government.” Lakoff...

Islamophobia is back on the rise in the U.S. despite cautious optimism in 2008 that post-Sept. 11 anti-Muslim sentiments had begun to decline, according to a report released today by the University of California at Berkeley and a national Islamic rights group. The authors of "Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States 2009-10" found that Americans' favorable rating of Islam is only 30 percent -- down 10 percentage points from November 2001, according to a Pew Research Center study. "Same Hate, New Target," which was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender and...

An East Bay lawmaker said Monday she'll introduce a bill which, if passed and then approved by voters, would abolish California's death penalty. The forthcoming bill from state Senate Public Safety Committee Chairwoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, would convert already-condemned inmates' sentences to life in prison without possibility of parole. "Capital punishment is an expensive failure and an example of the dysfunction of our prisons," Hancock, who also chairs the budget subcommittee that oversees prison spending, said in a news release. "California's death row is the largest and most costly in the United States. It is not helping to protect our...

The American Civil Liberties Union have filed a lawsuit so that prisoners at a South Carolina jail can have access to pornographic-type material. Lawyers defending the religious freedom lawsuit against the Berkeley County Jail in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, said that the inmates were not allowed to have any reading materials apart from the bible.