July

On Diablo's Best of the East Bay

We love your magazine and have also advertised in it. We found the Best Of issue to be very fun, and it had great info. However, it seems that most of the amazing locations were in Walnut Creek. We love Walnut Creek, but come on ... spread your wings a bit more.

Sheesh! Certainly Diablo Mag should be able to find a handful of conservative or moderate individuals of interest here in the East Bay to balance the leftist views of Rachel Maddow and Robert Hass. It would have been great and balanced for you to have interviewed Amani Toomer, perhaps he would have commented on his respect for the President in giving him one of his NY Giants jerseys after the Giants won the Super Bowl. Certainly they are more interesting people than those who learned to think and speak one way at Berkeley and think they are open-minded...

Reading about Rachel Maddow in the July issue (“Left-wing Talker”) was interesting in that such a seemingly intelligent young person’s mind could be so completely hijacked by the unadulterated nonsense and cockamamie rubbish venomously spewed by the execrably hate-mongering liberal media. After reading Peter Crooks’ sycophantic article, I happened to see Maddow sitting in for her hero, Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC and was not surprised to hear her vituperatively berating the Fox News Channel and Bill O’Reilly, which the loathsomely nauseating Olbermann makes part of every broadcast. Maddow makes a couple of statements that reveal how out of touch with reality she really is. She asserts that there are a lot of people in the Bay Area who listen to Michael Savage’s talk show “who can’t possibly share his politics.” Why not? Perhaps those “lot of people” are open minded enough to want to hear the truth once in a while, which they certainly don’t get with the putrid bilge spit out by Air America Radio and other leftist media sources. Maddow fatuously states that John McCain has the “incredible affectionate relationship with the national media that seems impermeable.” What? One has to wonder where Maddow has been the past few months to be ignorant of the unarguable fact that the “national media” is so unabashedly and shamelessly supportive of Barack Obama that it has lost any shred of objectivity it may have ever had. Hopefully, with age, Maddow will lose her childlike naivete and acquire some degree of wisdom and sense of reality.

Reader Response

Lanny Middings needs to check the spittle at the corners of his own mouth before crying about "cockamamie rubbish venomously spewed" by the "liberal" media. We all would do well to do our research on media coverage of the two presidential candidates at the Project for Excellence in Journalism (http://journalism.org/node/12200), which shows nearly identical coverage of McCain and Obama, with in fact more negative coverage of Obama.

I was very happy to see that Richard Lee's East West Kung Fu School was voted best for martial arts classes for kids!  My sons have been attending the school for 11 and 9 years, respectively, and the discipline and mental/physical aspects of what Richard Lee's East West teaches has helped them develop into wonderful young men.  But you failed to mention that Richard Lee's provides classes for adults as well.  They have world class instructors and a family atmosphere that can be appreciated by young and not so young alike.   

I always enjoy reading the "results" of the Best of the East Bay reader's vote, and I was annoyed how many "editor picks" were inserted among all the reader's picks. In fact it seemed to me that the editor's picks were made a bigger deal about than the reader's picks. The idea is that many people are polled on what is the best, not a single opinion. If you want to do an Editor's Pick section after the reader's pick, fine, but intermixing it was deceptive.

I also have to say the whole layout of the article was confusing, the main categories did not stand out, whether it was the font or the color.