Instead of approaching the county, developers have been looking to the city of Grass Valley, and a lot is happening there. Everyone who follows this kind of news knows that four substantial development proposals are now before the city, all of them considerably more dense than the general plan calls for. What’s most interesting is that none of them actually are in the city. The proposals all come with the expectation that Grass Valley will annex the properties being developed. It appears that getting the proposal through the city government process AND getting LAFCO to approve the annexation is a better bet than approaching the county, even with a B of S that walks and talks like it’s development friendly.

The effect is the same, however, for everyone in the region. If Grass Valley grows to the extent that these proposals envision, you can’t expect all those people and cars to just stay in Grass Valley all the time. Businesses will sprout and grow in the surrounding areas, and the county will be forced to make accommodations. So if the slow growth people want to have influence, even if they don’t live in Grass Valley, that’s where they should be making some noise.

What is happening at the county level are a bunch of road improvement proposals obviously designed to handle the traffic better. Most people would say we need that anyway, although it only takes a trip to Sacramento to realize that a little gridlock in the Glenbrook Basin is small change compared to what goes on down there.

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The rest of the news consists of things where I just don’t feel like I’m getting all the information. How about West Nile disease? On one hand, we’re told that its symptoms range from severe to none, and that if you get it, the chances are overwhelming that you won’t die. Also, ag agencies already are spraying poison to kill mosquitoes almost everywhere in California, but they’re all saying they have to do more of the same to prevent West Nile, even though they’ll never kill all the mosquitoes, and it only takes one. I get that familiar feeling that someone’s trying to sell me something I don’t need.

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And what about the Israelis abandoning the Gaza strip. Many of the people who are being forced to leave that area have been there for 30 years. The children who are being moved out never have lived anywhere else. Sharon says it’s appeasement. He thinks that if the Israelis leave Gaza to the Palestinians, maybe Israel can maintain control of Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel might maintain control, but I don’t think any Palestinians in the West Bank are going to feel like they’ve been appeased. The fact that a small number of Jews have lived so long among so many Palestinians in Gaza sounds a lot more hopeful for peace than a political tradeoff, but what do I know? And that’s the point. I don’t think we’re hearing the whole story.

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I guess Cindy Sheehan is the story of the week in this country. It is, at least, the story that’s getting the most attention from the mainstream media, and that’s probably a good sign. It’s a story that has some relationship to what’s really important in the world, as opposed to stories about celebrities or even stories about who’s suspected of being an al Qaida operative. But the media is playing it like, because of her passionate feelings, she accidentally stumbled into the role of a catalyst for opposition to the perpetual war. I suspect she’s actually a skilled media manipulator with expert advisors and organizers in her camp.

Whichever it is, she’s accomplished what no one else has been able to do before. She’s inspired the corporate media to actually report in a substantial way that there really are a lot of people in this country who are ashamed of the US role as the playground bully of the Middle East.