POLITICAL PLAY of the WEEK: Helene Schneider Calls their Blue Line Bluff

Now that Silly Season is upon us with the deadline last Friday for the 11 Santa Barbara City Council candidates who filed their papers, this Citizen Stringer will strive each week (posted sometime Friday through Sunday) to declare a Political Play of the Week up through the upcoming local election in November. A Political Play of the Week was a regular feature by CNN up through a couple of years ago, so Blogabarbara now can feel free to emulate that catchy title.

Like the CNN tradition, and the Time magazine Person of the Year, the Political Play of the Week can be a brilliant move to score points, or it can be a fumble, by either heroes or villains. The Play also can be a cultural or social outcome for Santa Barbara, and not purely political.

This first Political Play of the Week was a move that surprised the chorus of whiners --believed to be Travis Armstrong and his three friends-- who throughout most of July and early August had been just soooo concerned about the $12,000 budgetary item for City of Santa Barbara to support the blogubiquitous Light Blue Line project. The City pisses away money barely tracked to the nearest $120,000 to know what good was gained by the spending, so all that righteous indignation about the mere 12 Grand was becoming a curious hyperventilation that unfortunately was not also reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Schneider’s Play of the Week simply was to get the $12,000 of original City funds replaced by private donor(s) giving directly to the Blue Line project as a nonprofit organization. It was a simple, elegant, stealthy move that broke as news as the top banner headline in the Tuesday issue of Santa Barbara Daily Sound, and then was news chased by KEYT. News released on Tuesday also fits perfectly with the weekly news cycle for the Independent, and the Angry Poodle ran with it, Big Time, highlighting the hypocrisy of this fabricated controversy.

In her original statement published at Edhat news, Helene concluded: “the debate about the lightblueline project should be about climate change, not whether City funds are being used. So now that topic is off the table.”

And that actually has fell off the table since Schneider’s announcement last Tuesday. Only a small fraction of the choruses of Anonymity still have jabbed as late as Saturday that the city should have other spending priorities even though that spending no longer is necessary. However, the Cheneyesque naysayers --such as Dale Francisco, who just filed his candidacy and who wants Schneiders office-- now have been exposed and are resorting to a basic denial that global warming is the modern reality, all in their quest to keep arguing against whatever the City Council is doing that week or month.

Francisco had an exceedingly long opinion piece about all that published, of course, in the News-Press the prior Sunday, August 8. He wrote mis- or dis-information about the scientific estimates for the rate of the Greenland ice melt and its effect, coincidently the same week that Newsweek (no liberal rag) made its cover article an analysis of the well-funded Denial Machine that has been operating for many years about global warming.

This may be Silly Season, and a lot more of the frothy schtick of climate denial undoubtedly still will be spewed about the Light Blue Line project during the next few weeks. For all this silliness, though, it all seems like Helene Schneider will be getting the last laugh as she cruises --with admittedly a few days of choppy seas-- to reelection for a second term on City Council, and with the highest number of votes as well.

And that’s the Political Play of the Week.