We already know the editorial board of the Union-Tribune is a bit, shall we say, disoriented. But after this weekend, the staff here at Scott Lewis on Politics, or SLOP™, is speechless.
And that’s not just because we’ve been staying up late working on this new Web site (by the way, you like it? We’re pretty stoked even though we’ve been getting on each other’s nerves. We’ve worked so much on this damn thing we can hardly remember what we’re trying to do.)
No, we’re speechless because what can you possibly say about a group of people who must simply be out of their minds?
What do I mean?
This was the start of their unsigned editorial Saturday:
Three years into San Diego’s debilitating pension fund crisis, the City Council is poised to approve a truly reckless budget that continues to underfund the retirement system by tens of millions of dollars and depletes the city’s already perilously thin reserves. Have Mayor Jerry Sanders and the council learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the financial upheaval of the last three years?
Just to be clear, the council did approve this “truly reckless budget” Tuesday night.
It may or may not be so reckless. You can probably already guess that I agree with the U-T more than I disagree but does the editorial board have no shame at all? Just more than six weeks ago the board said that there was “much to like” in Sanders’ budget and a few days later, the paper pronounced the mayor’s budget “sound and sensible.”
Wait a second, why paraphrase? These are classic quotes:
…[the budget] takes several worthwhile steps that could yield a soft landing for a city that some experts warn is at risk of bankruptcy.
Six weeks later, the City Council approved Mayor Jerry Sanders’ budget. Yet now, it’s “reckless.”
They’re right, of course, that the budget is reckless. It continues a dangerous history of underfunding the pension system at the same time the mayor has only offered a risky borrowing plan as an alternative.
I’ve said it before: I’m all for people changing their minds, but you can’t pronounce a budget “sound and sensible” one day and “truly reckless” six weeks later when absolutely nothing about it has changed. Nothing.
Six weeks ago, the U-T ended it’s “sound and sensible” piece with this phrase: “Here’s hoping that sanity prevails…”
No kidding.