Lots of items to talk about this week. The only local thing is the great pot shop bust. Actually, it wasn’t even a bust; it was just a threat. The old Cherry Creek Market down on Highway 49 south of Grass Valley has been sitting vacant for years now, and some people decided it would be a good place to distribute marijuana to people who have physicians recommendations to use it. Last week, the county Sheriff’s office caught wind of this plan, and advised the people doing it that, if they actually did it, they’d be busted.

Then on Monday, there was a letter in The Union describing some provisions of Prop 215 and accusing law enforcement of taking an unnecessarily adversarial approach to the subject. Everything in the letter was true, but it didn’t mention that the county DA has been somewhat cooperative in his attitude about implementing Prop 215. The Sheriff could have waited until the store was open for business, then moved in for a bust. That would have been the high profile approach. Maybe the Sheriff was just being a low key guy, but maybe he had an idea that if he made a bust, the DA wouldn’t prosecute the charges. If so, it’s an example of the cops making law instead of just enforcing it.

It’s preposterous, of course, that a plant is illegal in the first place, but Prop 215 has created some interesting social and political situations. In some places, like Santa Cruz, the cops, the prosecutors, the elected officials and the voters are pretty comfortable with distributing the weed. In other places, however, not everyone is on the same page. Most people don’t mind the idea of medically prescribed marijuana, but the idea of a storefront makes some of those people uncomfortable. Maybe it’s legal, but they still want to keep it underground. Maybe their kids are going to smoke dope. Maybe THEY’re going to smoke dope, but it’s supposed to be a secret transaction in an underground economy. It’s been that way for so long, even dope smokers can’t accept it as a retail business.

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I see that the city of Salinas, hometown of John Steinbeck, has decided to do away with public libraries. The voters in Salinas didn’t specifically vote to do that, you understand; they just said they refused to be taxed anymore. Libraries have been the carrot on the stick in local government for years. Give us more money or we’ll close your libraries. If the voters had the opportunity to decide what had to be cut, I’m pretty sure the libraries wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the list. Maybe libraries are dinosaurs, though. After all, there’s nothing you can get in a library that isn’t on the Internet, nothing except the feel of holding it in your hands and turning a page instead of pushing some buttons and squinting at a video screen. I’ll take the screen for writing, but never for reading.

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That incident last week where an unarmed, wounded Iraqi prisoner was blown away in a mosque by an American soldier was widely reported, probably only because it was captured on video tape by a journalist. It was graphic and disturbing, but surprisingly, it didn’t create too many born again pacifists. People on both sides of the war issue came to the defense of the guy who did the shooting. A couple of letters published in last Thursday’s Chronicle illustrate the irony. The anti-war person wrote, "Don’t blame the soldier; blame the administration." The pro-war person wrote that observing rules in war is "like having rules in a street knife fight." These two people think they’re on opposite sides, and they are, but not on this question. Both are recognizing that the soldier didn’t create the situation; he just responded to it. I can say with certainty that I wouldn’t have placed myself in that situation, but I’m not holy enough to say I wouldn’t have done the same thing had I been there. There are no politics, nor even any morals in a war zone.

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I have to apologize to Howard Stern. Yes, you heard that right. I said a while back that his decision to abandon commercial radio for satellite radio probably was a bad omen for satellite radio. That may yet prove to be true, but I saw Stern interviewed by David Letterman last week, and he was articulate and compelling on the subject of free speech. He discussed the rather obvious growth of censorship over the past few years. One of the examples he mentioned was that network broadcasters were afraid to show the film Saving Private Ryan on Veterans’ Day, because of its anti-war message. Right here on this radio station, your bastion of independent free speech, I’m hearing pieces of recorded music which used to be played as recorded now being tarnished by bleeps. Sometimes these bleeps are covering words that are in common use on network television. I have to agree with Stern that these are dangerous times. Don’t let your mass media, the FCC, OR your community radio station tell you what you should see, hear or read.

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