I love living in Berkeley, but sometimes I can understand why it’s the object of Fox News outrage. Take tonight’s city council meeting. One of the agenda items is a proposal from the city’s Peace and Justice Commission (what, your city doesn’t have a Peace and Justice Commission?) to have Berkeley comply with UN treaties on torture, racial discrimination and human rights.

I’ve written about this absurdity on InBerkeley, but I thought it deserved a non-Berkeley audience as well. It’s astounding to me that in hard economic times, when there are plenty of real city problems to deal with, there is still a constituency for gesture politics.