by Mark Scaramella
Wednesday night’s Community Services District meeting at the Boonville Firehouse was uncharacteristically testy, and grew testier as the evening wore on as trustees traded verbal jabs with each other and aimed a couple of body blows at Fire Chief Colin Wilson. The first skirmish arose when the Recreation Committee proposed a “playgroup” at the preschool [...]
by Alexander Cockburn
The last American combat brigade in Iraq has left the country, so the Pentagon announced this week. The 40,000 personnel from 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division began crossing into Kuwait August 19. The US combat mission in Iraq — Operation Iraqi Freedom – is scheduled to end on August 31. The least credible human [...]
by Laurel Krause
On August 7 and 8, the Kent State Truth Tribunal (KSTT) traveled to San Francisco to record and preserve narratives from west coast-based original witnesses to and participants in the 1970 Kent State shootings. My sister Allison Krause was one of the four students killed at Kent State and our tribunal has provided an opportunity [...]
by Don Morris
Skuntown/Willits — Mark Scaramella’s report on the County Supervisors August 3 meeting in Covelo was right on target — a reality-based, bullshit detecting analysis in a few concise paragraphs. The Mendocino National Forest has been “occupied” from the get-go by the locals: logging, livestock grazing, poaching, joyriding, and, more recently, pot growing. Since the current [...]
by Alexander Cockburn
I went to get my hair cut the other day in the town of Fortuna and waited ten minutes while the elderly barber finished buzz-cutting a young Mexican American. After the young man had exited under his thin skullcap of black stubble, Don the barber sighed and said, “That’s the third boy I’ve cut today [...]
by Robert Tashbook
One of Barack Obama’s campaign slogans as he ran for President two years ago was, “The change we need.” Unfortunately, for those in the Federal Criminal Justice System, this change has proven to be the opposite of the what they needed. To date, President Obama has not pardoned anyone, has not reduced a single Federal [...]
by Ralph Nader
The Obama Administration’s treatment of its current majority ownership of bailed out General Motors and its standoffishness toward the pioneering but troubled ShoreBank, a community bank based in Chicago, are lessons in how the Big/Bad fare in Washington, D.C., as compared with the Good/Small. Having shed its bad assets and abandoned its common shareholders, the [...]
by Daniel Mintz
More than a year in the making, an advisory plan for using the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District’s water surplus includes an option that was torpedoed when it was proposed a few years ago — shipping water out of the county, to another municipality. A report by a 15-member Water Resource Planning Advisory Committee was [...]
by Alexander Cockburn
It took a gay Republican judge with libertarian leanings to issue from the bench, in a US District courthouse in San Francisco, one of the warmest testimonials to the married state since Erasmus. Last Wednesday Vaughan R. Walker, struck down California’s ban on gay marriage, prompting ecstatic rejoicing among a mostly gay crowd outside the [...]
by Mark Scaramella
Philo’s Daniel Myers, representing Friends of the Navarro Watershed and the Mendocino Chapter of the Sierra Club, took the podium at last Wednesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting to tell the Board that the Navarro River flow gauging station was “in jeopardy due to lack of funding.”Subscribe now to access our entire site—only $25 for 1 [...]