Tuesday, July 18, 2006

stupid arena

Goddamnit, are you sick of hearing about the arena yet? I know I am. OK, here's the rundown today. News 10 published a bogus new poll with stupid questions like, "Do you want the opportunity to vote to determine if a publicly funded new entertainment venue should be built?" Surprise, most people said yes. Well fucking duh. If it's publicly funded (with tax money) then we do get a chance to vote. It's not up for debate, so what exactly is the point of that question? Here are the results. News 10 is subtly doing this branding thing where whenever they talk about the arena they use the phrase "the future of the arena". They picked up that trick from the republicans. That way, it looks like it's for sure that a new arena is in our future. It may sound dumb, but I'm sure they focus group crap like that. The headline on their homepage right now is "voters want a say on future of the arena". So the executive producer guy thought I'd be surprised by those results? They just framed that bullshit question as if there has been some positive surge in the voting public. Clever. At least they replaced that biased poll on futureofthearena.com with the one from last night.

Here's the front page story in the Bee today. The specter of the Maloof's outstanding 70 million dollar loan is raised for the first time in a while. Some grass-roots group called People United (they must be new, because their website is under construction, just like SRD) is holding a press conference today at 10 (see the end of the article). Good for them.

Like I said, I'm sick of thinking about the arena, so can someone else read this Marcos Breton column more carefully and tell me what the point of it is? I didn't glean it from skimming over it.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought the guy nailed it. As my submitted comment said, it was neat to see something by a sportswriter which wasn't an obvious rah rah cheerleader piece.

His contention that the truth will come out come election time is way optimistic. Can you imagine Sacramento voters voting for something really short-sighted and foolish?

Me neither.

Ed

werenotdeep said...

I don't know about that "dirty hippy" connotation going so invariably with the term "Grassroots". I've seen the term "Grassroots" thrown at any kind of man-in-the-street organization, including pretty conservative ones. I heard the term once self-applied to a group of conservative christians who were trying to fight back at the media for allowing it too get too risque back in the 90's. Ya know, like they dared to air a show where people were openly gay.

The same term was used in the paper about a group of Elk Grove citizens, all of whom were pretty typical Elk Grove suburbanites, who bitched like hell to keep from getting a Wal-Mart super center built in the middle of their entirely residential neighborhood. It worked, too. The developer pulled out. One of the anti-walmart-ers in that story was a co-worker of mine who would have been living one block away from it if it had gone through.

Interesting side note to that story, they had planned to have a parking lot that had less than one half as many parking spaces as what the projected fire saftey capacity was for the interior of the building, taking displays and aisles into considerations.

But anyway, folks, yes, you can fight the man and win sometimes.

beckler said...

I think of grassroots as just meaning coming from the common man, rather than an established political organization of corporate interest or something. I've never heard anyone use it negatively.

Anonymous said...

I could easily imagine a corporate interest applying the phrase "grass roots" to describe their own efforts so they can appear to be the "little guy." In fact a lot of ballot measures are put together by "grass roots" organizations such as Coors, the NBA, the Maloofs and so on.

Nothing but a little shuck and jive to go with the morning coffee.

Ed

beckler said...

Nope. I can't imagine that. Maybe if they were in a corporate meeting where they knew everyone thought the same way and they didn't have to hold back their "mwah ha ha" style of evil laughter.

werenotdeep said...

Well, in the wacked-out christian group instance, they're wacked-out christians. In my second anecdote, however, the WalMart story, the grassroots group were average, non-descript suburbanite joes whose only other unifying charachteristic was their being against having a WalMart at that location. Their being labelled as a grassroots group was not used to make them sound undesireable or subversiave at all.