Great Highway or four-lane "walkway"?

Photo: Christopher Michael

The best thing about Matt Charnock's anti-car interpretation of the Great Highway issue is the stunning picture under the title.

This hymn to the city's goofy Slow Streets policy is all you need to get Charnock's drift:

San Francisco’s Slow Street corridors continue to exist as a nearly universally applauded program that began during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Denizens of the seven-by-seven have embraced these car-free roads in glorious unison — crisscrossing the Golden Gate Park and other more concrete areas, like the Mission District and the Haight-Ashbury, atop of bicycles, scooters, skateboards, and even the odd pair of roller skates....

"Glorious unison" about closing the Great Highway to cars? 

Not surprising that Charnock doesn't mention a petition to keep it open to traffic now has more than 11,000 signatures.

See also The Slow Streets lie, Anti-car in SF: Closing the Great Highway and Bogus city traffic emergency continues.

Self-obsessed, delusional, incompetent

Nicholas Lemann provides a succinct summary of Donald Trump's presidency:

....Trump, in these pages, is self-obsessed, delusional and administratively incompetent. He has no interest in or understanding of the workings of government. He doesn’t read or listen to briefings. He spends vast amounts of time watching conservative television networks and chatting on the phone with cronies. 

The pandemic puts him at a special disadvantage; many of the people around him are either sick or afraid to come to work because that would entail complying with a regime of Covid noncompliance that Trump demands. 

If anybody tells him something he doesn’t want to hear, he marginalizes or fires that person and finds somebody else to listen to, who may or may not hold an official position. If Fox News becomes less than completely loyal, he’ll switch to Newsmax or One America News Network. 

He lives in a self-curated information environment that bears only a glancing relationship to reality.

Before the belief that the election was stolen had taken full control of Trump’s mind, the idea was already there — because he chose to regard all forms of expanded access to voting, which tend to favor the Democrats, as stealing. 

He turned down entreaties from his staff to set up a Republican get-out-the-early-vote operation, just as he also turned down entreaties to endorse masking and social distancing during the height of the pandemic: off-brand. 

He was utterly disorganized, with endless firings and reshufflings of the key players. And during his second impeachment trial, Trump was represented by a comically incompetent, squabbling team of lawyers whom he had barely met....

H.L. Mencken predicted Trump in 1920:

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

"Christian democracy" is theocracy

In today's NY Times:

To the Editor:

(Re The Ungovernable Catholic Church) 

I must say I am truly appalled. The thought that we need “a revived Christian democracy in the United States” that would “draw upon official church teaching as well as pilfer from the best of secular culture” is truly frightening.

As an American Jew, I feel that the best protection that all people have from Christian coercion is a constitutionally mandated secular state that prohibits favoring any religion.

Everyone should have the freedom to pursue religion (or no religion) within the safety of their homes and institutions, but our public square needs to be free to welcome those with any religious or nonreligious tradition.

David Jaffe

Montgomery Village, Md.

Rob's comment:

As an American atheist, I agree that everyone must be free to "pursue" any religious superstition, major or minor, they choose. 

But the best choice is "no religion," since religious belief is the worst mistake you can make about life. As the late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote, Religion Poisons Everything.

Ross Douthat has another stupid column in today's Times, opining that somehow the US left is as great a threat to freedom as our proto-fascist conservative right and the vile Republican Party. This is both sides-ism gone amok.