Blown away

“My weapon is a sleek and beautiful instrument. But God help anyone looming in my unforgiving sights.” That’s from a Marcos Breton column in The Sacramento Bee several months back. Breton is talking about an actual gun. It’s a gun-control column. But he could also be talking about his keyboard.

The homeless and their advocates (apologists, he might say) have been sitting ducks in Breton’s unforgiving sights for years. And lately, he’s been shooting them in the face. Metaphorically. There was a nasty little flourish at the end of one recent column, where he wrote that “it’s only a matter of time” before some homeless camper abducts a child. Pow!

He must have gotten more than the usual amount of blowback, because he wrote a whole other column defending the first one, complete with cherry-picked evidence that he scrambled to find after the fact. “I’m still getting all the numbers,” he wrote, explaining that some homeless people have criminal records, and some are registered sex offenders. Pop, pop, pop!

Here’s another scoop: “There is nothing wrong with being gay.” That sleek and beautiful sentence was sufficiently mind-blowing to earn its own line, all by itself, in the middle of another of Breton’s columns.

There’s especially nothing wrong with being gay, per Breton, when the subject of your column is Kevin McClatchy. McClatchy is chairman of the board of The McClatchy Co., which owns the Bee. He just came out. He’s also rich and used to own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Is it newsworthy? Sure, why not. Is it a little smarmy to use your column to pat the boss on the back? You bet. But it is one way to do journalism, Bites supposes, afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable.

You used to get a bigger variety of local columnists in your daily newspaper. Hell, you used to get a bigger variety of local daily newspapers. Which is why Bites sure hopes the Bee’s new online pay wall is successful. Bites assumes that the Bee wants it to work, too. Why, then, is it going out of its way to lose paying readers?

For example, why not bundle the iPad version with other products? San Francisco Chronicle readers get the iPad version included free with their print or digital subscriptions. Bee customers have to pay $6-a-month extra. Bites initially ditched the paper paper, but now the iPad version just doesn’t pencil out, either, once you add in the costs for Web access. So, it’s back to dead trees and higher bills and a little resentment. Yes, people who talk about their iPads are lame. Still, why alienate people who are otherwise willing to give you money? Also, those pop-up ads are going to be a deal breaker. It is one thing to put up with constant in-your-face advertising when you are getting free content online, but it’s intolerable when you’re paying for it. And really, it’s not that hard to get around the pay wall.

Three well-known businesses announced plans to leave town or shut down last week: Comcast, Campbell Soup Company and Ford’s Real Hamburgers. Ford’s is a loss. Bites feels bad for the Comcast employees but has nothing nice to say about the company.

Likewise, Bites is ambivalent about the Campbell news. The sudden closure of the plant on Franklin Boulevard and 47th Avenue will cost Sacramento anywhere from 400 to 500 jobs. Just as bad is the potential for the plant and property being left to rot.

“Dependent upon their plans, it could be an opportunity for transit-oriented development,” said Kathy Tescher, executive director of the North Franklin District Business Association. But that’s dependent on Campbell’s plans, which haven’t always been the best plans for the neighborhood.

At its height, the Campbell plant provided nearly 3,000 jobs and anchored a solid working-class community. But decades ago, the company moved most of its work to more modern and efficient plants elsewhere. The only reason it stuck around at all was because of a sweetheart deal offered by the city that allowed the company to keep its property taxes and invest them back in the plant. That meant Campbell didn’t contribute anything to the Franklin redevelopment area, either.

At some point, the plant just didn’t pencil out anymore, even with the big subsidy.

Some say Campbell’s closure shows Sacramento doesn’t do enough for business. It might also show that no matter how much you do for business, business will eventually take the money and walk away. That’s just business.