East Bay Conservative

My foray today into the cloudy Oakland afternoon was punctuated by two articles regarding the future of Oakland. So, when I arrived home — after a brief stint tickling the ivories on my Steinway B — I sat down to write this entry.

The first article was a column by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor in the Berkeley Daily Planet which spent a significant amount of time dissecting my views on local politics. The second was the cover story regarding Oakland’s low homicide clearance rate published in my favorite local publication, East Bay Express.

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I picked up the Tribune this morning at the Bart station — something I rarely do since I canceled my subscription some five years ago. I canceled because of their failure to deliver papers to my house in any sort of reasonable fashion. I’d say I received the paper three or four days out of the week.

Now I know that the Tribune has been largely decimated by the ongoing difficulties in the newspaper industry. But I opened today’s issue to find a statistic that seemed hardly believable. And sure enough, when I did a minimal amount of research I determined that the writer or editors had redacted key words from the story, causing its content to be false in important ways.

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Today, my family faced the not-so-unusual dilemma of how to check in for our flight tomorrow on Southwest exactly 24 hours before the flight. Since we were planning to be eating at Phil’s, a great barbecue restaurant in San Diego, at that exact moment, we concluded we would need to use our cellphones.

I was concerned that we didn’t have data access on our Verizon plans, so I went to their website and pulled up a copy of our bill to check things out. It turned out that we did have enough of a data plan to check in using mobile.southwest.com — very convenient.

But along the way, I happened to page down to the taxes and fees for our cellphone plan, and I noticed something strange:

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