Ray Baumgardner is not only lazy, but he's making fun of the South Central Community Farm!

I'm waiting for The Onion to write their fake news story about celebrity activists camping out in a Wal-Mart to prevent it from being torn down to make way for a community garden or solar-powered day care center for undocumented immigrants. I would write the article myself, but I am a very lazy man.

(Well, not quite to the point of lying down in front of the bulldozers like Rachel Corrie. But think of their agents! And fans! America cannot allow things to go quite that far. . .)

The LA Times' Steve Lopez, (not a right wing icon as far as I know) thought he was being funny when he suggested that celebrities offer their own land:

Call me a cynic, but I've got to wonder why she, Baez, Laura Dern, Martin Sheen, Danny Glover and other Hollywood supporters couldn't help raise the dough to back up their principles.

And if they believe poor folk ought to do their farming on private property, I'm wondering when they'll ask some of their Hollywood pals to open the security gates to their sprawling compounds. I'm just guessing, but there must be thousands of acres of fertile soil out there, ripe for planting.

But for ridiculing celebrities, Steve Lopez was called a "right wing radio wacko" and compared to Rush Limbaugh by Indymedia. He also drew the wrath of the South Central community farm activists:

Making fun of the South Central farm and its "celebrity advocates" doesn't seem the way to go in a discussion of this important community issue. Some of the facts of this issue you seem unaware of...like the fact that millions of dollars have been raised by those in support of the farm. Over 10 million in fact. Horowitz bought the farm back for merely 5 million in a deal that was struck privately at city hall in a closed meeting. The farmers and the Food Bank who with permission were using the land were not given the opportunity to buy the land or told that the land was being offered for sale before the city began meeting with Horowitz. Wouldn't you see that as a problem? Like no bid contracts perhaps? Selling the land to the farmers to serve a community need you'd think would gain a government more points than selling it to a developer who wants the land for flipping for a profit.

I don't know the details, but I'm just wondering. . . Would the activists be happy had the city gotten more money from Mr. Horowitz?

Frankly, I think the idea that the best way to "feed the poor" is by providing them with free land worth millions of dollars, and never sell the land -- all so that a few privileged "poor" can grow some vegetables and thus avoid starvation in America -- sounds like satire in and of itself. Even if the Onion reported this as straight news, I think it would still be funny.

But let's assume the celebrities raise enough money to make it worth the owner's while to sell and he does just that. What will have been accomplished? A multimillion dollar property will be dedicated to permanent use as a small farm? To save the poor? If we look at the economics, it's debatable whether a parcel of land that size is big enough to use even as a family subsistence farm.

If the Hollywood celebrities were really concerned with feeding the poor, might there not be better ways to spend the ten million? I suspect so.

But it wouldn't be nearly as funny as real life imitating satire, so I think Ray can rest up and be as lazy as he wants.

As to the Onion, I don't think they're quite a match for Aztlan.net, which sees the sale of the community farm as a sinister Jewish plot:

This effective project which has provided economic self-sufficiency for marginalized people of color is today threaten by a greedy Jewish Mogul from the super-rich LA. community of Brentwood. The City of Los Angeles, unbeknown to the families that farm the collective, secretly sold the 14 acre parcel, from underneath the families, to a well known land developer by the name of Ralph Horowitz. Horowitz now wants and is demanding through court proceedings that the families that farm the land be evicted by the brutal Los Angeles County Sheriffs. "We have to throw them off," said Horowitz, who runs his own real estate investment company. "They're not going to walk off voluntarily. They have to be thrown off by the sheriffs." he added. These comments are no different than those made by the Jewish Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy of France that added fuel to the fire there. This may be a recipe for another major rebellion that may eclipse the one in 1992. The Los Angeles city government and its city council today, as is the Los Angeles School Board, take orders from extremely wealthy Jews that reside in the west side of the city.

(Now I know why the Hollywood celebrities won't lie down in front of the bulldozers . . .)