FOUL AIR… Squid loves Squid some KUSP Public Radio. The only moments of Squid’s weekend better than Sunday’s caviar-and-anchovy-schmeared bagel are “Talk of the Bay” and “Ask Dr. Dawn.”

That’s what makes the board’s recent editorial decision to can Gary Patton’s “Land Use Report,” the piquant 90-second commentaries inserted like Monterey Jack slices into the “Morning Edition” sandwich, more painful.

Patton says a station staffer informed him the report was canceled because a “preponderance of discussion of land use policy is not appropriate throughout so much of our schedule.”

That doesn’t feel flush to Patton, or to Squid. A few minutes a day of critical commentary on local decisions affecting the Central Coast’s environment and economy are suddenly too much? After running for nearly a decade?

There’s another explanation. After Patton weighed in on the contentious Monterey County Wildfire Protection Plan, word has it the proposal’s cheerleaders showed up at a KUSP board meeting and called for Patton’s show to be axed. Did Squid mention the Monterey County Fire Safe Council president is the board’s VP?

Patton never got a chance to defend his case. He made “transparency” statements disclosing his relationships with controversial topics, and agreed to stay on through the end of November, at which point the station plans to replace his program with discussion in a less prominent slot. But Squid’s tuning out – seems KUSP has lost some of its editorial credibility.

WHAT WOULD JESUS PLEAD?… The Weekly’s bleeding-heart cephalopod just got an e-mail from local Unitarian-Universalist pastor Greg Ward, who did 27 hours in an Arizona for protesting the state’s new send – ‘em-back-where-they-came-from immigration law.

The good rev wonders how to answer that perennial judicial question, “How do you plead, sir?” He could show up in Maricopa County, ‘fess up and hightail it back to the Peninsula. But, wait a minute, the rev muses, wasn’t Jesus himself sort of an undocumented worker, a stranger in a strange land?

He writes of his come-to-Jesus moment marching with his fellow ministers and a sea of brown protesters, who, along with the media, asked: “You’re white, what are you doing?” His answer: To give others courage to stand up, so those who fear discrimination don’t stand alone. That added up to a decision by this man of the cloth to make another risky protest: a not-guilty plea – “to continue the conversation.” Squid hopes he’ll squeeze in a mention that the ancestors of anti-immigrant Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer might’ve faced deportation 150 years or so ago, when her home state belonged to, ahem, Mexico.