been waiting for for a long time. He will be a true leader who has the ability and experience to plan, manage, and make tough decisions.
We also recommend Karen Woblesky and Connie Thomasser or Phil Baer, all of whom will bring a new and sane energy as council members.
And for supervisor, Mark Primack.
And finally, a few words to Mike Rotkin and Cynthia Matthews: If you win this time, please work for ALL of us, and not just the politically correct. Please work to create a robust business community, and help Santa Cruz to regain its self respect in the entire nation.
23
(October 2008) They say “Words have meaning.” I believe it!
They say, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” I believe that, too!
Imagine then, the millions of words that came to mind when I first gazed upon the cover illustration of the October 22nd edition of Metro Santa Cruz.
This cover featured an illustration of Barack Obama sporting a toothy, wining grin and a colorful Superman-like costume. The Obama caricature stood astride a black and white line drawing of Santa Cruz in the foreground, America in the background, and everyone locally and nationally crying out, “Help!”
Fair enough. Our candidate is here to help with “Hope for change” as the campaign touts.
Now, what captured the attention of all those who called our attention to this picture is that Superman Obama is standing hands on hips with one colorful boot squashing the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the other colorful boot squashing your local radio station, KSCO.
But wait. There, firmly affixed to the squashed KSCO is a Nazi swastika, and therein lies the reason a million words flooded my mind at the site of that cover graphic.
You see, as a Jewess who lost family members to Nazi concentration camps, I am all too aware of the significance of jackbooted caricatures bearing swastikas. To cope, I close my mind off to the millions of words that want to cry out and turn instead to our friends at Metro Santa Cruz to ask “Why?”
“Why did you affix a swastika to the squashed KSCO on the cover of your newspaper?”
Is Metro Santa Cruz telling us that a victorious Obama is going to squash all political dissent like the Nazis squashed the Jews?
If this is what Metro Santa Cruz is telling us, we ask, “What happened to the liberal ideals of inclusiveness, non-judgmentalism, and diversity?”
Words do have meaning. Pictures are worth a thousand words. And I am Kay Zwerling.
24
(October 26, 2001) Some months ago, we installed a separate comment line for listeners who chose to ventilate concerns or offer kudos regarding programming. On September the 11th, that fateful day when the unthinkable happened, our country lost its innocence when it was brutally attacked and thousands of innocent and brave people perished.
Their family’s lives have changed forever. We have all changed forever.
Now we face a war, possibly a very long and costly war, to find and punish the cowardly monsters of this dastardly act to make certain that what they did to our country will never happen again.
President Bush and his advisors carefully and thoughtfully took three weeks to prepare what needed to be done and to identify the culprits.
Most Americans and most countries of the world are in support of his actions. However, there are some people who vigorously disagree. As pacifists, they want us to think about this issue very carefully, assume the dead roach position, study and understand why part of the world hates us - these pacifists believe that love and patient understanding will get us through this.
I see it as a recipe for annihilation. If, in our efforts to be humanitarian and help other nations, we may have harmed them —well, let’s deal with that and fix it later, after we destroy the animals who are committed to destroying us. Now back to the station’s comment line…Until about a year ago, we had Jim Hightower, a reasonable Democrat, on KOMY. Suddenly, Hightower was replaced by Peter Werbe, probably by the syndicator of both.
We had no contract with Werbe. But we kept him on for a year, and businesses did NOT want to sponsor him. Werbe is an extreme leftist whose mission is to tear down the opposition, and President Bush has been his favorite target for ridicule. In fact, many regular listeners complained about him and stopped tuning in to our station.
Well, Werbe’s comments may have played well with some and may have been fair game in normal times, but these are NOT normal times. We’re now engaged in a war.
So as of several weeks ago, Werbe is no longer on KOMY. Now he goes on the internet, states his case, in third person — is that cowardly or what? — spins it and screams foul and claims that his free speech rights are violated! Is this nuts? Now a number of angry listeners are using the station comment line to say some very ugly and menacing things. Others are sending angry e-mails and few have signed their names.
Please understand that we, the owners, have been the sponsors for Werbe’s show for a year, and we no longer choose to subsidize him. Bottom line: Werbe has a right to his free speech and we have the right not to have him on our station.
Maybe these listeners could find a place for Werbe on public-supported radio. His kind of rhetoric is welcomed by some in peacetime, but now we are in a battle for the very survival of our way of life. And we do not wish to be an active party for political divisiveness which will give aid to the enemy and weaken our country’s resolve! Our men and women in the armed forces, who are fighting this war for us and may be dying for us, must know that we are with them. We cannot withstand another Vietnam War fiasco, when the country was bitterly divided and torn apart.
The chilling truth is, this may be our only chance to get it right — we destroy the enemy or they destroy us. And make no mistake —this is their agenda! I believe our mission is clear. We must, as a country, come together.
To paraphrase the words of Benjamin Franklin, spoken at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We had better all hang together or we will surely hang separately.”
Dear God, please bless America!
25
(October 31, 2001) A Lying Opportunist Peter Werbe, leftist talk host on KOMY, was dropped from our schedule several weeks ago. As a result of that action, he never did lose his right to “free speech,” despite his rantings on the subject. In addition to public radio, there are about thirty-five stations in this market, most with more powerful signals than our little one thousand watt station. Surely one of those stations would have carried his program.
BUT…..that was not Werbe’s plan … he chose to use his departure from KOMY to go online, present himself as a victim, obtain worldwide FREE publicity, and claim that his first amendment right of free speech was denied. (Pretty smart, actually, if he wasn’t so dishonest…) He deliberately fomented hate against us, the owners of KOMY, under a false premise simply to promote himself. The first amendment has nothing to do with a person’s right of free speech, and Werbe has known that all along.
As owners of a commercial radio station, it is our legal right to offer programming that we believe a majority of our listeners would enjoy. Werbe certainly did not fit that description. Many listeners used the station comment line to characterize him as arrogant, rude, mean-spirited, and other various expletives. There wasn’t one advertiser willing to sponsor him.
Even if this were not wartime, we were about to let him go … too many listeners were tuning us out.
Last Saturday, 10/28, Werbe agreed to be a guest on the two-hour weekly Saturday Special. Unable to handle the criticisms of several callers, he walked out of the show after the first hour. As a result if this incident, we received an astounding number of emails full of hate and indignation because we “deprived” Werbe of his free speech rights.
If you are one of those gullible