Quick Links for April 23rd

Is it really Thursday and we still haven't done a Quick Links? Wow, that's kind of amazing. Well, let's see what nuggets of awesome we can mine from this week. Quick Links!

I told you these guys were evil!

Fuck, we made it to Thursday without mentioning this? Really? Media whore Alan Pettet responded to Don Blount's Klan kolumn from the previous week by claiming that the militia will be a rainbow coalition of men and women. If that didn't convince you the guy's a little bit off, he really cranks up the crazy in his next claim. He claims that an anonymous federal judge will swear the militia in on July 1st and then "Five minutes after we're sworn in, we oust the mayor and City Council and then we can declare martial law."

Ladies and gentlemen, the decent into cartoonish supervillan is almost complete. By this time next year we assume he will have pumped some poor cop full of lead so badly that the police department will take what's left of the body and turn him into some sort of crime fighting cyborg. That's right, Stockton's very own Robocop. It's going to happen dammit!

"Where do you live?" "I represent this distric.." "No, where do you live?" "I live on.." "Are you from the SOUTH!?" "No, I..." "That's all I wanted to know"

So yeah, that town hall meeting the mayor had in south Stockton was hilarious. I decided to attend because the mayor directly interacting with the residents of south Stockton sounded like a recipe for comedy gold. It was, for about 30 minutes. Then it became pretty repetitive. For a while most questions (a term I use loosely) seemed to start with "I moved to/was born in Stockton in 19(insert year before the 70s) and have lived here for over (insert number over 40 here) years. Things have changed a lot." Yes, for the most part it was a meeting about how south Stockton has changed due to growth. It's not like things were "back in my day". And then from there it devolved into one giant race debate. And by "race debate" I mean people accused the city of being prejudiced, even when talking about things the city had little-to-no control over. I came with the intention of asking a question but ended up not doing so. Partially because getting a word in edge-wise was nearly impossible for just Johnston and Eggman, and I wasn't nearly as passionate about my question as others were. And partially because I just felt bad for Johnston and Eggman. No answer they gave was good enough for that crowd.

One man asked why the General Fund is so depleted (because tax and permit revenues were down) and then 20 minutes later another guy complained that taxes and permits were too high. One guy even asked what the city was going to do about the racism in his union hall as if the city could just swoop in and be the racism police. (Although my favorite question was when somebody old enough to be my grandpa asked who owns all the foreclosed homes. That made me feel 10 times smarter.)

In the end it was clear that, if you weren't from south Stockton (which apparently is south of Charter Way, but does not include Charter Way), then your opinion didn't matter (hence the "Are you from the SOUTH" exchange one man had with Eggman). Which is a counterproductive line of thinking at best. The main problem is Stockton and south Stockton are like two completely different cities. Enforcing that by saying people from north of Charter couldn't possibly understand what goes on down south only hinders the progress south Stockton could make. It's about uniting communities, not enforcing petty separations. Hopefully both sides of Stockton eventually realize this and work together to lessen the discrepancies between the 2 areas.

Have we mentioned how horrible the City Council's timing is?

Speaking of the Council, we haven't seen any examples of their infamous horrible timing lately. Luckily Christian Burkin found an example in an American soldier in Iraq who also works for the Stockton PD. Can you guess where this is going? Yes, he's probably getting laid off. I'm kind of disappointed I didn't read this before going to that town hall meeting last night. Of course somebody probably would have asked what part of Stockton he was from as if it matters