The nutty SF Board of Supervisors took time out from passing bills proclaiming solidarity with head-chopping terrorists to fight a true enemy: Plastic bags!
Legislation to require the use of compostable or recyclable bags by grocery stores in San Francisco was expanded Thursday to cover large pharmacy chains operating in the city.
Extending the reach of a grocery bag ordinance introduced by one of her colleagues, District 2 Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier won approval of an amendment Thursday to cover drugstores as well, saying she wanted to eliminate most of the 180 million plastic bags distributed annually in the city by markets, pharmacies and other businesses.
Awful! But wait:
At the meeting Thursday, District 4 Supervisor Ed Jew said he opposes the legislation because any added costs it imposes on grocers and drugstores would be passed along to consumers.
“Many people in my district can’t believe we are spending so much time talking about plastic bags,” he added.
Stop the presses! There are rational human beings in SF!
And in other Bay Area news of moonbattery:
Last year, the University of California announced that it was going to build a new athletic training facility next to Memorial Stadium at the eastern edge of the Berkeley campus. Unfortunately, in order to build the facility as planned, the University must remove several oak trees that are currently growing on the site.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, local activists have seized on the fate of the “Memorial Oak Grove” as the cause du jour, and a vigorous campaign has been launched to stop the project and save the trees. To that end, protesters have been actually living in the trees since December of 2006, alternating in shifts every few days or weeks. The controversy has received an inordinate amount of media coverage.
Having spent many years in Bloomington, I am quite familiar with moonbattus treesquattus, commonly known as the tree-sitting varietal of envirowackjob moonbat. They usually take moonbatty names, like Tracy “Dolphin” McNeely, who was one of the Bloomington nutjobs’ heroes after perching in a tree to stop low-income housing from being built (trees are so much more important than people, particularly in Bloomington, where there are so damned many trees you could cut every other one down and nobody would notice). However, as far as I know, they never decided to hug trees naked in Bloomington.
They did at Berkeley (and no, the link isn’t work safe). And if you think this is a joke, the TreeSpirit Project website is here.
I’m starting to think maybe there should be a law against going to college before you turn thirty.
Peggy U says:
Had to share this with you. My son created the term “urban tumbleweed” to describe empty plastic grocery bags that blow by. It’s all in how you look at it. Save the urban tumbleweed!
March 27, 2007, 2:12 pmrightwingprof says:
Maybe they’ll end up having to put it on the endangered species list.
March 27, 2007, 2:59 pmFred says:
Er — I don’t get it — What’s wrong with putting the kabosh on 1,400 tons of landfill waste and reducing dependence on foreign oil?
March 28, 2007, 5:08 amXopher says:
The tree-squatters provided one eye-opening image. My, my, my. I had always assumed that the Venus of Willendorf was anatomically impossible exaggeration. Gracious. The Earth Mother herself showed up for that protest in all her glory.
March 28, 2007, 7:38 amDarren says:
1400 tons? Who cares how much the weight of the stuff we put in landfills is? It’s not going to cause the earth to warp or anything.
The point here is that this is stupidity passing itself off as environmental consciousness. What’s next, plastic containers? Guess we’ll be going back to milk and ketchup and everything else in *glass* bottles.
March 29, 2007, 2:10 pmrightwingprof says:
Well sure. And the total foreign oil used to make plastic bags used in SF is at the very most one-billionth of one percent, so this nonsense will have no effect whatsoever on foreign oil dependence.
But it’s not important if it actually does anything or works or not (just like all those entitlement programs), because all of this legislation has only one purpose: to make liberals feel good about themselves. And that would be fine, if they were just talking about doing things in their own lives, but it’s not fine because they’re forcing other people to do what they think they should be doing. It’s mindless, feel-good, elitist liberalism at its silliest.
March 29, 2007, 2:17 pm