HAMBURG CLAIMS DAMAGES FROM THE COUNTY
Dan Hamburg's Claim Against Mendocino County
[Attorney Barry Vogel's Letterhead]
May 28, 2013
To: Thomas Parker, Mendocino County Counsel
Re: Claim Against Mendocino County. Failure to issue a death certificate and burial permit for Carrie J. Hamburg, aka Carol Jean Hamberg who died on March 5, 2013.
Dear Mr. Parker,
I represent Daniel E. Hamburg, the widower of Carrie J. Hamburg, aka Carol Jean Hamburg who died on March 5, 2013, and the executor of her estate filed as Mendocino County Superior Court Case SC UK CVPB 13260080.
Based on the continuing refusal and failure of Mendocino County to issue a burial permit for and a death certificate certifying the fact that Carrie J. Hamburg, aka Carol Jean Hamburg, is deceased and buried, this claim is hereby made pursuant to government code Section 910. The fact that she is buried on private real property does not negate the fact that she is deceased. A death certificate and burial permit should therefore be issued. The present amount of this claim exceeds $10,000 for the legal fees incurred to date by the claimant. The amount of this claim will continue to accrue until resolution and may result in an unlimited civil action. All correspondence regarding this matter is to be sent to me at the above address.
Yours very truly, Barry Vogel, Esq.
========================================================
NINE YEARS AGO I sold my house in Boonville. It was home and office. These days the paper is produced in downtown Boonville at our luxurious office high atop the Farrer Building. Monday afternoon, David Spain, one half of the gracious couple who bought our place on Anderson Valley Way, where they are probably still performing exorcisms to expunge the bad vibes they inherited, called to say “a strange thing has happened.”
========================================================
SOON, JESSIE SPAIN appeared in our downtown office with a robust, two-foot marijuana plant and a handwritten note. The plant and the note had been left in the Spains' driveway. It said:
“Hey, Bruce: Please accept this potent, blooming marijuana plant as a gift from a fan of the old school of combative journalism, but a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. It has the potential to inseminate every outdoor female marijuana plant within the radius of ten miles, at least, depending upon the prevailing winds. I encourage you to grow it in your garden. Properly nourished and cared for, cannabis can become a perennial. In West Virginia there are stands of it that are 14-18 feet high, some stalks being over twenty inches in diameter. If the local dopester/gangsta/hats-on-backwards crowd flatten your tires, or threaten to cut your beloved male marijuana plant down, whining that you are ‘ruining’ their crops by turning their sensemilla (sic) into seed-bushes, you can fight back and inform your readers that you are doing the locals a favor — seeded weed is better for you if you put it in a blender and eat it than if you smoke it! Besides, scads of these 215-ers are — let's tell it like it is — lazy lotus eaters who should get real jobs. Hemp liberation will not be accomplished until the Eel and the Navarro and the Russian River banks are covered with hemp. GROW IT! Signed Anonymous."
========================================================
RAILROADIES at Board of Supervisors Today; Board Opts for Richard Marks Over RR Favorite Dan Hauser
by Hank Sims (Courtesy, LostCoastOutpost.com)
The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 this afternoon to appoint Humboldt Bay Harbor District Commissioner Richard Marks as one of its two representatives on the board the North Coast Railroad Authority. Supervisors Sundberg, Bass and Lovelace voted for Marks; Supervisors Bohn and Fennell voted for former State Assemblyman Dan Hauser, who wrote the legislation that created the beleaguered state-owned rail line back in the late 1980s.
It was a close vote, and a somewhat contentious one. The train believers showed out at the meeting to carry the banner for Hauser, who is a true believer in the train. Marks’ railroad faith was questionable, given that he serves on the Harbor District, which has not embraced the iron horse’s glorious return to the shores of Humboldt Bay with sufficient zeal. Hauser, they argued, had the Sacramento connections required to breathe life into the moribund and line-wrecked train, which hasn’t made a trip to Humboldt County in 15 years.
The liberal/lefty contingency, meanwhile, came to sing the praises of Marks, as did his fellow Harbor District Commissioners. They saluted his support of trail projects and his realism in relation to train issues.
Board Chair Ryan Sundberg cast the last and deciding vote on the issue. Saying that he had a hard time making up his mind — and, in fact, had not yet made up his mind — he equivocated for several moments as he had the floor, eventually deciding on Marks on the argument that the NCRA and the Harbor District needed closer ties.
Humboldt County’s other representative on the NCRA is Supervisor Estelle Fennell. She and Bohn, who joined her in supporting Hauser, expressed admiration and liking for Marks, and signaled that they would not be too disappointed if the vote went his way.
Arcata City Councilmember Alex Stillman was recently appointed to the board to represent city governments along the railroad’s right-of-way.
========================================================
RURAL AMERICA IS DYING OUT as a combination of young people leaving their home towns to work in the city and a fall in birth rates has forced the population to plummet, official data shows. While the rural population has risen and fallen along with the economy before, the rate it has fallen between 2010 to 2012 has accelerated, the US Census Bureau figures show. And, for the first time, the number of babies born in these communities has not been enough to balance the number of people moving away. John Cromartie, a geographer with the US Department of Agriculture’s Resource and Rural Economics Division, told the Financial Times the exodus of younger residents had left many rural areas with a population “aging in place.” As people in their 20s and 30s left to start families in urban areas, the birth rates of rural America has declined significantly. It is not clear if the decline is permanent, but much of rural America — which makes up 15% of the population across 72% of the country's land area — faces significant population decline. It has been nearly 100 years since those living in rural America, defined as open country and settlements with fewer than 2,500 residents, outnumbered those in urban areas. As young adults move away, and populations decline, there is less demand for businesses and teachers, which reduces available services and, in turn, deters families from moving back. Rural communities are not the only areas dying out. Researchers noted that “exurban areas” which had seen an increase for decades on the outskirts of cities, have also started to decline for the first time. Although the decline was small, it appears considerable after 2004 to 2006, when these areas grew by about 500,000. Urban areas and cities are seen as offering better opportunities to young families. Not all rural areas are suffering however. North Dakota, which is experiencing an oil boom, and other states with access to energy sources, have had a growth in population. The mid-west, and parts of the industrial northeast have had the biggest population decline, which could impact the economy as well as the politics of those states. With their appeal to urban voters it is a trend that is benefiting the Democrats. It is also easier to organize and encourage people to go out and vote in urban parts of the US. At the end of last year Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warned America's 51 million farmers, ranchers and rural residents that they were in danger of losing their voice in Washington. “Rural America, with a shrinking population, is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we better recognize that, and we had better begin to reverse it,” he said. More than 80% of lawmakers do not represent rural areas, according to USA Today. Mr. Vilsack added that despite a strong agricultural economy poverty rates remained 17% higher than in metropolitan areas. “You are competing against the world now and opportunities everywhere. Young people have all of these opportunities,” he warned the rural groups. Communities supplying renewable fuel sources, such as Storm Lake, Iowa, are seeing growth, however. The effect the population shift has on politics is increased further as the decline of white rural voters is relative to the growing minority, such as Hispanics. This shift has led to political issues such as immigration reform being pushed. Mr. Cromartie said further analysis was needed, but previous studies suggested rural America was aging faster than the rest of the nation. In 2009 data for the first half of the decade showed, for example, those aged 65 and over accounted for 15% of the rural population, but 12% of the population nationally. (Courtesy, the Daily Mail of London)
========================================================
JEFF COSTELLO WRITES: Hillary — seriously? My friends in Portland lived in Morocco for some time. While they were there, H. Clinton came for some kind of “diplomatic mission.” They brought in two jumbo jets, one for her and one for her vehicles. They did not trust Moroccan limos, apparently. While she was in the country, her security apparatus was so huge and overbearing that most of the country was shut down, paralyzed during the entire visit. Everyone was pissed off, even my otherwise PC friend who was trapped in a US consulate, not allowed to leave. Oh why oh why do they hate us?
========================================================
CAN'T WE JUST SHOOT THIS GUY?
On June 4, 2013 at about 9:30am Deputies from the Mendocino County Sherriff’s Office were detailed to the Round Valley Preschool regarding a child abuse investigation. Deputies arrived along with workers from Child Protective Services and contacted a 5-year-old child. This child had distinct bruising on her face in the shape of a hand and fingers. When asked what had happened the child advised that her father, Gulmaro Maciel, 35, of Covelo, had become angry with her and had hit her in the face. Deputies contacted the child’s mother regarding the incident. Deputies learned from the mother that the child had been asked to get her father a soda the previous day. The father became angry after the child delivered the wrong type of soda and began slapping the child across the face several times. Deputies also learned Maciel had also physically assaulted the mother on the same day because of relationship disagreements. Deputies established probable case for an arrest and attempted to locate Maciel. Deputies located Maciel and arrested him for Child abuse, and Domestic Violence battery. Maciel was booked into the Mendocino County Jail on the listed charges and was to be held on $50,000 bail. (Sheriff’s Department Press Release)
========================================================
“LET'S GET AMAZING”
Seeking Subsidized Housing
Warm spiritual greetings, Please know that the Harrison House in Berkeley, CA staff have said that I need to move on from there, and get myself subsidized housing. The staff informed me yesterday that I have no further need of them, and that at 63 years of age, willing to pay 1/3 of my income ($359 monthly social security retirement), and having an exemplary spiritual life with lots of good karma, there ought to be no problem in my finding a suitable place to live and set it up for productive creative writing. I need a writer's pad! I wish to leave Harrison House as soon as possible, and will be happy to immediately move into a short term arrangement, while continuing to seek out a suitable longer term rental. If you wish to be part of the continuing creative spiritual adventure, please leave a telephone message for me at (510) 525- 4469, and my caseworker there is Tonette Woodson who may be reached at (510) 725-8572. Obviously, it is all off for my returning to Washington DC at this time, due to a total lack of interest from my peers that I go there again for the seventh time, to participate in radical environmental and peace & justice activities. I decided not to get myself there, and then squat the sidewalk for the sake of advocating world peace. To those of you who wish to stay in association with me, let's get amazing. — Craig Louis Stehr Email: craigstehr@hushmail.com Mailing address: c/o NOSCW, P.O. Box 11406, Berkeley, CA 94712-2406 Blog: http://craiglstehr.blogspot.com
========================================================
EDITOR,
Re: CalTrans, The Movie, by Bruce McEwen, AVA, June 5, 2013
1. Should Mr. McEwen have chosen to verify his assertions The Willits News published photos of the altercation between CHP and Mr. Katz we received from CHP or CalTrans, I would have been happy to provide him with the phone number of our photographer and publisher who took TWN photos that day and the independent videographer who took the videos. We published them on our site within hours to allow people to make up their own mind. I assure you neither CalTrans nor CHP were in anyway helpful to our coverage, having threatened a number of us with arrest throughout this occupation. As best I know, neither agency has chosen to publish any photos or video of the day — even though the CHP photographer was certainly on site and many state officials had video cameras.
2. Mr. Katz pleaded guilty. CHP chose not to make a particularly big deal of either Katz or his cohort choosing to throw the content of their buckets at them, but the vile aroma was certainly smelled by all who were on scene. While many in the protest movement have spread a version of the incident underplaying this activity, it happened none-the-less. This tossing of feces happened before the CHP officers entered the specific tree Mr. Katz was in.
3. Mr. McEwen may have been in court, but he was not at the scene of the mess. We were.
— Linda Williams, Editor, The Willits News
========================================================
BRADLEY MANNING IS GUILTY of “Aiding the Enemy” — If the Enemy Is Democracy
By Norman Solomon
Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious — and revealing — is “aiding the enemy.” A blogger at The New Yorker, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and over the entire country: • “Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?” • “In that case, who is aiding the enemy — the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?” When the deceptive operation of the warfare state can’t stand the light of day, truth-tellers are a constant hazard. And culpability must stay turned on its head. That’s why accountability was upside-down when the U.S. Army prosecutor laid out the government’s case against Bradley Manning in an opening statement: “This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy — material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk.” If so, those fellow soldiers have all been notably lucky; the Pentagon has admitted that none died as a result of Manning’s leaks in 2010. But many of his fellow soldiers lost their limbs or their lives in U.S. warfare made possible by the kind of lies that the U.S. government is now prosecuting Bradley Manning for exposing. In the real world, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/10/manning-prosecution-press-freedom-woodward>, prosecution for leaks is extremely slanted. “Let’s apply the government's theory in the Manning case to one of the most revered journalists in Washington: Bob Woodward, who has become one of America’s richest reporters, if not the richest, by obtaining and publishing classified information far more sensitive than anything WikiLeaks has ever published,” Greenwald wrote in January. He noted that “one of Woodward's most enthusiastic readers was Osama bin Laden,” as a 2011 video<http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iTgYGpDKSrS2SI3HUtXqU_DdZXxA?docId=CNG.a4a97915e7a9cc058de3c52ecc2a9610.451> from al-Qaeda made clear. And Greenwald added that “the same Bob Woodward book [*Obama’s Wars*] that Osama bin Laden obviously read and urged everyone else to read disclosed numerous vital national security secrets far more sensitive than anything Bradley Manning is accused of leaking. Doesn't that necessarily mean that top-level government officials who served as Woodward’s sources, and the author himself, aided and abetted al-Qaida?” But the prosecution of Manning is about carefully limiting the information that reaches the governed. Officials who run U.S. foreign policy choose exactly what classified info to dole out to the public. They leak like self-serving sieves to mainline journalists such as Woodward, who has divulged plenty of “Top Secret” information — a category of classification higher than anything Bradley Manning is accused of leaking. While pick-and-choose secrecy is serving Washington’s top war-makers, the treatment of U.S. citizens is akin to the classic description of how to propagate mushrooms: keeping them in the dark and feeding them bullshit. In effect, for top managers of the warfare state, “the enemy” is democracy. Let’s pursue the inquiry put forward<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/01/bradley-mannings-civil-war.html> by columnist Amy Davidson early this year. If it is aiding the enemy “to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government,” then in reality “who is aiding the enemy — the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?” Candid answers to such questions are not only inadmissible in the military courtroom where Bradley Manning is on trial. Candor is also excluded from the national venues where the warfare state preens itself as virtue’s paragon. Yet ongoing actions of the U.S. government have hugely boosted the propaganda impact and recruiting momentum of forces that Washington publicly describes as “the enemy.” Policies under the Bush and Obama administrations — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and beyond, with hovering drones, missile strikes and night raids, at prisons such as Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and secret rendition torture sites — have “aided the enemy” on a scale so enormous that it makes the alleged (and fictitious) aid to named enemies from Manning’s leaks infinitesimal in comparison. Blaming the humanist PFC messenger for “aiding the enemy” is an exercise in self-exculpation by an administration that cannot face up to its own vast war crimes. While prosecuting Bradley Manning, the prosecution may name al-Qaeda, indigenous Iraqi forces, the Taliban or whoever. But the unnamed “enemy” — the real adversary that the Pentagon and the Obama White House are so eager to quash — is the incessant striving for democracy that requires informed consent of the governed. The forces that top U.S. officials routinely denounce as “the enemy” will never threaten the power of the USA’s dominant corporate-military elites. But the unnamed “enemy” aided by Bradley Manning’s courageous actions — the people at the grassroots who can bring democracy to life beyond rhetoric — are a real potential threat to that power. Accusations of aid and comfort to the enemy were profuse after Martin Luther King Jr. moved forward to expose the Johnson administration’s deceptions and the U.S. military’s atrocities. Most profoundly, with his courageous stand against the war in Vietnam, King earned his Nobel Peace Prize during the years after he won it in 1964. Bradley Manning may never win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he surely deserves it. Close to 60,000 people have already signed a petition urging the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the prize to Manning. To become a signer, click here.<http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7612> Also, you can preview a kindred project on the "I Am Bradley Manning" site<http://iam.bradleymanning.org/>, where a just-released short video — the first stage of a longer film due out soon — features Daniel Ellsberg, Oliver Stone, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Phil Donahue, Alice Walker, Peter Sarsgaard, Wallace Shawn, Russell Brand, Moby, Tom Morello, Michael Ratner, Molly Crabapple, Davey D, Tim DeChristopher, Josh Stieber, Lt. Dan Choi, Hakim Green, Matt Taibbi, Chris Hedges, Allan Nairn, Leslie Cagan, Ahdaf Soueif and Jeff Madrick. From many walks of life, our messages will become louder and clearer as Bradley Manning’s trial continues. He is guilty of “aiding the enemy” only if the enemy is democracy. (Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”)
Be First to Comment