There’s no shortage of important things to talk about this week, but maybe a shortage of anything important to say about them. I guess the indictment and resignation of Scooter Libby tops the list. The cliche is that the coverup is always more scandalous than the crime. Ironically, Libby probably didn’t do either. According to what I read in the papers, he just passed along some information which came from his boss, Dick Cheney. Why his confidante, Judy Miller had to sit in jail for three months as a result, I still don’t know, but the real story in this is that Libby fell on the sword, not Cheney. Time will tell if that’s enough, but the Bush gang seems to think that throwing Libby to the sharks will keep the rest of them out of the bloody waters. Maybe it will. There are no Woodward and Bernstein here, no Sirica to throw the book at the low level functionaries like Libby and Rove, but the court of public opinion is taking its toll. If there’s a prosecutor in Texas willing to go after Tom DeLay, there must be one somewhere willing to take on Dick Cheney.

Whatever shakes out of this, we should remember the act of revealing that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent is not the real issue any more than the burglary of an office in the Watergate was the real issue. We don’t really know who said what to who and when, and we don’t really care. This is about the people who claim to be the U.S. government lying to justify making war for profit. For that, a guy named Scooter loses his job. Sounds like a fair trade to me.

The presence of a criminal indictment makes it a little more interesting. If Libby actually went to trial and testified, a lot of mud could be tracked around. Despite all the tough talk now, don’t expect that to happen. If Libby has to take a conviction to protect Cheney and Bush, he’ll do it. That’s his job, and he knows he’ll never do a day of time.

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I have to admit, I was a little surprised that Harriet Miers went down as quickly and quietly as she did. Even though she wasn’t especially qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, the Democrats obviously didn’t have the hair or the votes to stop her confirmation. It was the skepticism of the right wing that took her out. That’s a clue about the degree to which that right wing Protestant constituency interacts with the Bush administration’s agenda. Not to say that the Christian right actually runs the show, but the administration is keenly aware of making gestures toward keeping those folks happy, and those folks are tuned in to the Supreme Court. They know exactly what they want; they want someone who’s a lead pipe cinch to vote against abortion rights, and that’s all they want.

Looks like they got it. With Sam Alito, Dub found the nominee I thought he’d find in the first place, a certified anti-abortion conservative with the complete resume for the job. Everybody’s happy except the so-called liberals, and they can’t touch him. Is Roe vs. Wade history? Maybe. But even for the pro-choice people, it’s not the end of the world. Even the Supreme Court can be trumped legislatively. That old cliche about, "If you don’t vote, you can’t complain," comes into play here. Let’s say you’re pro-choice and the Supremes decide to dump Roe. Your job, then is to elect people in your own state who will create a pro-choice legal environment. It’s a big job, but entirely doable. The fly in that ointment is the possibility that the Supremes would go so far as to say that abortion is unconstitutional, unconditionally. That seems unlikely, but the right wing Protestants are extreme moralists, and if they’re driving the car, any turn and any crash is possible.

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Okay, a little bit of growth and development stuff. Fifty-0ne new homes approved by the Grass Valley City Council on Brunswick Road, property which isn’t even in the City of Grass Valley. "How is that possible?" you might ask. Well, technically it isn’t, but it works and it’s seems to be the strategy du jour for developers. As backwards as it might seem, the developer decides to build something on the fringe of the city, then asks the city to approve the plan. After the city says, "Yes," the city asks LAFCO to approve annexing the property to the city, making the city’s approval of the project valid. Based on the progress of recent development proposals, I’d conclude that this process is friendlier that applying to the county for approval to develop in unincorporated areas. It doesn’t work out in what the Navahos call the boonies, but if you’re anywhere near Grass Valley, it’s the way to go.

Grass Valley also approved that redevelopment plan for South Auburn Street which we discussed a few weeks ago. It’ll probably look prettier when it’s over, but it’ll probably put a few people out of business, too.

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A couple of oddball items from other places which may give us some insight into our own growth and development issues. Let me put this first one into context. We’ve had a couple of squabbles in our part of the world about single house proposals which the neighbors protested were too large, out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood. In the town of Alamo, at the foot of Mt. Diablo, a very rich guy named David Duffield bought the biggest house in town–8000 square feet, but he doesn’t plan to live in it; he wants to tear it down and build a 72,000 square foot building which he calls a home. That’s not counting the assorted other buildings and facilities that go with a rich cat’s home, like garages, stables, gate houses and guest houses and sports facilities. Imagine someone moving into your neighborhood and building a professional sports arena and surrounding it with an amusement park. I’m not suggesting that scale isn’t an issue in land use, but it’s a much bigger issue in Alamo than in Nevada City. The county supervisor who represents Alamo says that if everything else is up to code, there’s nothing to prevent Duffield from building his palace.

The other item is fromOxford, New Hampshire, where the local assessor has decided that the view has value which can be taxed. That’s right. A view tax. You folks who live in Big Oak Valley with a view of the Sutter Buttes, or you folks on Cement Hill with a look across the Yuba River Canyon, all your taxes just went up.