Oakland city government is incompetent even when there’s a functioning mayor at the helm, but now that Thao is MIA by the FBI raid, our city is like a ghost ship, with the engine running but no one in the captain’s cabin.
Johnson v. Grants Pass: What it means for Oakland
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Johnson v. Grants Pass, Oakland no longer has any excuse for not immediately clearing our parks and other public spaces of all illegal encampments.
BREAKING NEWS: SCOTUS rules on Grants Pass!
It’s early Friday morning and the details aren’t fully clear, but apparently the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that homeless people can be rousted from squatting in public places even if the city has no shelters for them.
This is exactly what we’ve been demanding for years. It’s a huge victory.
I’ll have plenty more to say about this next week. For now, let me just say that Oakland no longer has any legal excuse whatsoever to refuse to clean up our parks and other public spaces. Thao, Bas, Fife & Co. have hidden behind this excuse for years, but SCOTUS has now ripped off the fig leaf. We’ll be demanding the city get rid of every tent in every park in the city!!!
Steve Heimoff
My advice to the City Council: Quit
The more I think about it, the more unhinged Thao’s Monday performance seems. She was insane during those moments—let us hope, only temporarily deranged, for she’s still mayor and has a lot on her plate. But her paranoia, self-pity, hysteria and vengeful anger were really unseemly, and more: frightening. This is the leader of Oakland?
DEI, RIP
It’s interesting that corporations that used to brag about their commitment to diversity “are now tiptoeing away” from woke DEI practices, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal last week. Two, three, four years ago DEI was all the rage. Almost every business in the country was embracing it, including some of the most marquis brands in America: Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, Cisco and Marriott. The latter’s mission statement was typical: “At Marriott, we create an inclusive environment that supports the recruitment, retention, and advancement of all employees, and actively engage in efforts to develop a diverse and inclusive workforce, owner, guest, and supplier base.”