When In Doubt, Blame The Rich

LATimes lets anti-success whackos rant about this house

Any remaining doubt that the LATimes is written by socialists can be put to rest. Oh, you say there's no remaining doubts? Nevertheless, I press on ...

Looking for a Laguna landslide follow-up story to splash across the top of its front page, the LAT came up with this:

To Many in Laguna Beach, That Mansion Was Too Much

Some blame the home for the slide, but experts doubt that. Still, it's seen as building excess.

Let's put the headline another way:

Many in Laguna Beach Think Rich People Suck
Some know-nothing fools blame the home for the slide, and we're going to give these idiots valuable column inches because even though we know they're idiots, they're our kind of idiots.

The big white house was built on spec by investors and has never sold. The LAT wants us to think that to Laguna no-growthers, it is symbolic of the new, richer people who live in the town, so why not blame it for causing the slide?

Why not? Well, for starters, it's at the bottom of the slide. What did it do, drag the other ones behind it? Add to that the fact that we just suffered through the second wettest winter in recorded history, and wet winters always bring slides.

The no-growthers, who the LAT says, "lament that Laguna is not the same place where civic leaders and residents once stood arm-in-arm to protect open space from large-scale development," are ignoring a simple fact: By being so radically no-growth, they have contributed to the increase of land and home costs in Laguna; they have made it so only the very wealthy can afford to live there.

Who did the reporters find to quote? Two flaming radicals; that's the basis of the story. Roger von Butow, a crazed stormwater activist, who once called me Satan and whose only links to geology are the rocks in his head. Wayne Baglin, quoted as a real estate agent, but also the rabidly anti-growth former chairman of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, who has worked to stop new subdivisions by trying to declare raindrops that run off the subdivisions' streets toxic.

In other words, LAT reporters interviewed LAT readers.