Mike Fitzgerald begins his Stockton Record column this weekend with an invocation of the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens.

To live in the Valley is to live with the din of the old leaders’ bones. Pick your issue, the old ideas are beating a fierce tattoo, often drowning out wise new voices

 

While Fitzgerald gives three great examples of that phenomenon in Stockton: Water, the state’s drive to site three more prison facilities outside Stockton and blight in downtown Stockton, his message could apply almost anywhere, not just to Stockton or the San Joaquin Valley.  In particular, there is maybe something else to glean from his conclusions.

An essential part of the Valley experience is the battle to admit new ideas, and to separate the valid conservative ideas from the dead ones propping up the status quo.

It wouldn’t be a problem if the dead ideas stayed dead. But, like zombies, they always come back to bite us.

Replace the word conservative in that quote with the word progressive and recognize that we must continually challenge and re-think our own assumptions of how the world works.  Case in point, laurastrand’s comments on Free Breakfasts for yesterday’s open thread.  

While it is great fun to label the Republicans as the Yacht Party, and frankly all to easy to do with playboys like Nevada Senator John Ensign continually in the news.  However, most Republicans are not like that.  They are carpenters, small business owners, farmers. Most of them don’t even own a row boat, let alone a yacht.

I don’t think that I have ever seen any party so out of touch with it’s constituents and so dependent on the Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Savage, etc. media to keep things energized.

Speaking of Hannity, Mike Fitzgerald did a real number on him in the Stockton Record.  Score one for a real journalist… not like the other names I mentioned.  

I was please to read Mike Fitzgerald’s column in the Stockton Record today.  He rather showed Hannity for what we know him to be, a blithering idiot who will say anything that he gets paid to say. Here is a taste:

Where to begin? Hannity’s show was set in a cotton farm outside Huron. The farm is fallow for lack of water. The Grapes of Wrath, Part II: The Joads of Huron.

Only those ignorant of the oceanic amounts of water needed to farm cotton are oblivious to the irony. If water’s scarce, cotton shouldn’t even be farmed.

“Turn the water back on!” Hannity intoned over and over, sounding like Moses crying “Let my people go!”

In fact, the water has been “turned on” since June 30. Last Sunday – to cite a typical day – the state and federal pumps exported 13,626 acre-feet of water from the Delta.

The pumps sucked hard enough to make Old River, Middle River and the San Joaquin River at Stockton flow backwards.

Read it yourself.  It is much better in a San Joaquin Valley paper.