Panic in the Streets

From former State Assembly Leader Willie Brown's column this week in the San Francisco Chronicle:

What a town. I was at Walgreens the other afternoon and was stunned by the number of people lined up to buy potassium iodide to ward off the possible effects of radiation wafting over from Japan.

Even more stunning was watching those same people, clutching their iodide protection, proceed to jaywalk across New Montgomery Street and dodge cars in their rush to get back to work.

Full column is at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/20/BAAT1IEMD4.DTL

Actually, the item in the column that you might want to panic about is Willie Brown's prediction that namesake Jerry Brown will be unable to obtain the needed GOP votes to put his tax extensions on the June ballot:

Even if Brown did come up with a deal to win over a couple of Republicans, there is no way the Democrats would go for either the hard spending cap or the pension reforms that the GOP want. The Dems' supporters in the teachers and public employees unions would never stand for it. We might just wind up with a stalemate until at least May with everyone hoping the "revise" revenue figures will somehow keep them from having to make the doomsday cuts the governor has been predicting. In that case, they will have gone from kicking the can down the road to just hoping they can find a can to kick.