MCT: Friday, August 7, 2020

• Building Heat
• Cop Fest
• 363 Cases
• Lucas Story
• Log Train
• Big Bust
• Elderberry Balsamic
• Grape Harvest
• Hendy Free
• Russian Gulch
• Botts' Dots
• Trout Farm
• Ma Sentenced
• Union Lumber
• Playtime Over
• Noyo Salmon
• Ag Challenge
• Correction
• Ed Notes
• DNC Platform
• Redwood Avenue
• Rental Assistance
• Sexter Stung
• Yesterday's Catch
• Solo Barhopping
• Redstone Rocket
• Bay Moon
• Elect Reject
• Failing Us
• Pandemic Reporting
• Some Herstory
• Tampering
• Socialist Future
• What It Is
• Lefty Telesis
• Found Object

BUILDING HEAT is expected over the weekend and early next week throughout inland areas, with mild but sunnier conditions along the coast as well. Slight chances for thunderstorms exist across interior mountains Monday. (NWS)

EARLY MORNING COP FEST IN CLEONE

Dear Editor,

Twas 6am August 6th out here on sleepy Little Valley Road just north of Cleone when my faithful and ever vigilant doggies alerted me to a supreme disturbance in the neighborhood. Stumbling outside I could hear a massively amplified message being broadcast throughout the land: "Come out with your hands in the air we have the house surrounded!" My guess is you could have heard this in town 5 miles away so needless to say my heart was pumping big time. Upon further inspection as I walked down the lane in the direction of the cacophony I could see many police vehicles (Perhaps 15) including a huge military surplus tactical vehicle. This was a very large operation which came with a very large price tag all based on a rumor apparently of a dangerous cache of weapons, FBI search warrant etc. The residence of interest is a rental occupied by a neighbor who is possibly in law enforcement themselves so why the fuss?

By 8am it was all over and a sense of calm had returned to the neighborhood. Will there be a press release forthcoming to explain these events? I wonder!

Tim McClure

COVID-19 Daily Update – 8/6/2020

7 additional cases of COVID-19 have been identified in Mendocino County, bringing the total to 363.

STANDOFF ON ALBION RIDGE

by Andrew Scully, AVA Special Correspondent

A traffic stop attempted by a Mendocino County Deputy Sheriff on the morning of July 17 in Point Arena ended 15 days later in dramatic fashion with more than a dozen police cruisers and an armored personnel carrier deployed against a local man barricaded inside his truck and threatening to light himself on fire on Albion Ridge Saturday night, August 1, 2020.

Marc Lucas, an Albion resident, was taken into custody after a five-hour standoff with police on the Ridge, who had mounted a heavy response to the scene after an intensive 15 day manhunt in which Lucas had eluded officers in two separate high-speed pursuits over mountainous coastal terrain. Finally cornered, he barricaded himself inside the cab of his pickup truck, and in full view of more than 20 emergency responders, Lucas drenched his body and clothing with the contents of a five-gallon can of gasoline. Law officers and firefighters stood by helpless to intervene as Lucas threatened to ignite himself and everything around him if officers did not back off. 

It was at that point – after hours of tense negotiations had failed, and taser and police-dog take-down attempts proved unsuccessful – that Albion Firefighters developed another plan of attack. 

After staging equipment into position, a rear window was smashed on Lucas' truck and a fire hose inserted into the cab, whereupon hundreds of gallons of water were used to flush both the suspect and the flammable gasoline vapor out of the truck. This action was successful in forcing Lucas out, and he was taken into custody, but not before additional intervention by the police attack dog and its handler. It appears from jail booking photos that Lucas sustained major facial injuries during the arrest. No injuries were reported to emergency responders. 

Lucas was transported to a local hospital where he was “medically cleared” for booking into Mendocino County Jail. He faces a long list of charges on multiple felony counts, including reckless evasion, assault on a police officer and parole violations, and is being held on a no-bail basis due to his parole status. 

In an extensive interview with this writer at the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall said the incident was a “sign of the times,” a reference to the challenges posed to his deputies and other first responders in communities where substance abuse and mental illness issues have boiled over with additional pressure brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Kendall said that Lucas was well known to his deputy on-duty the morning of July 17 in Point Arena. He said that Lucas failed to pull over when the deputy initiated a traffic stop for an unspecified “vehicle code violation.” Instead, Lucas took off and led the deputy on a wild car chase over eight miles of winding coastal roads for more than two hours before escaping near Ten Mile Road and Iverson Drive.

Thus began an intensive manhunt for Lucas that involved multiple law enforcement agencies over the next 15 days. While actively searching for Lucas on Saturday, deputies and a CHP officer watched as he drove right past them at about 2pm. This sighting led to another attempt to pull him over, and another high-speed chase that finally ended two miles later on Albion Ridge.

At one point in the six hour standoff that ensued, Lucas rammed his truck into the front of a blocking police car in a break-out attempt that prompted one deputy on-scene to unleash a police K9 Dog against him. Lucas fought this off by getting back into the cab of his pickup and attempting to close the truck door on the head of the police dog. Yet another deputy then deployed and fired a Taser at Lucas, also without success.

It was at that point that Lucas got out and retrieved a 5 gallon can of gasoline from the bed of the truck and proceeded to pour the contents that can over himself, drenching his clothing and the interior of the truck, and threatened to ignite himself and blow everything around him to smithereens.

Law enforcement officers, hostage negotiators and firefighters then huddled and formed the plan which eventually led to the deployment of the water hose, and hundreds of gallons of water proved successful where tasers, dogs, deputies and drones had failed.

David Gurney, a Mendocino coast resident, told the ICO that Lucas was well known in the area, and that he was a working man, an urchin fisherman in the '90's, a man who he said may have faced substance abuse issues. He said he had not known Lucas to be a violent man, and he questioned the use of the police dog against Lucas after he had apparently surrendered.

For his part, Sheriff Kendall laid responsibility for the escalation of the incident on society in general for failing to provide any safety net in the form of mental health or substance abuse treatment for this type of suspect. He said Lucas “appeared to be on a meth or crack run.” Kendall, who has been a vocal advocate for additional mental health resources and crisis response capabilities, said there is little if any medical or mental health intervention possible for a suspect like Lucas. He said there is a wide gap between these preventative health services and the armed and forceful response that his deputies are trained to bring to a situation.

Attempts to interview elected civilian leadership in the County were unsuccessful, as none of the County supervisors contacted returned calls from the AVA seeking comment.

Mendocino County CEO Carmen Angelo did however respond, and in an exclusive telephone interview with the AVA, she said she had not been aware of the incident until Wednesday morning, August 5. She said that the County had at its disposal two fully equipped mental health crisis-response vans, funded by Measure “B” revenues. She could not answer why these units were not deployed in the Lucas incident, but that she planned on speaking with the Sheriff about it later. She praised the work of the Sheriff and his deputies, but said that as an elected official with his own budget and authority, Sheriff Kendall and his deputies “do what they do” with little if any civilian oversight at his point. 

UNION LUMBER LOG TRAIN

STOLEN ASSAULT WEAPONS AND 5,000 PLANTS FOUND IN EARLY MORNING ROUND VALLEY RAID

In the early morning of August 5, 2020, Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office conducted a raid on a marijuana growing operation in Round Valley, California. According to Sheriff Matt Kendall, several stolen assault weapons were confiscated, roughly 5,000 marijuana plants were eradicated, and ten individuals were interviewed at the scene.

kymkemp.com/2020/08/05/stolen-assault-weapons-and-5000-plants-found-in-early-morning-round-valley-raid/

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7000 POT PLANTS & 21 GROWERS IN COVELO

Crime/Incident:

• 182 PC [Conspiracy]
• 30605 PC [Possession of Assault Weapon]
• 496 PC [Possession of stolen Property]
• 529 PC [Give ID of a real person to avoid prosecution]
• 11377(a) H&S [possess methamphetamine]
• 11358 H&S [Cultivation of Marijuana]
• 11359 H&S [Possession of Marijuana for Sale]

Location: 22100 Block of Airport Road in Covelo, CA

Date of Incident: August 5, 2020

Time: 7:30 AM

 Suspect(s):

• Fox Hoaglin, 44 years of age, Covelo CA
• Shelly Leggett, 38 years of age, Covelo CA
• Rolinda Want, 46 years of age, Covelo CA
• Shelly Hoaglin, 45 years of age, Covelo CA
• Michelle Downy, 51 years of age, Covelo CA
• Shawn Want Sr., 52 years of age, Covelo CA
• Lourdes Downey, 19 years of age, Covelo CA
• Ryan Roy-Downey, 31 years of age, Covelo CA
• Raul Molina Garcia, 26 years of age, Michoacan Mexico
• Anthony Amante, 45 years of age, Covelo, CA
• Manuel Troncoso Escareno, 40 years of age, Zacatecas, Mexico
• Christain Cardenas Mendoza, 40 years of age, Jalisco, Mexico
• Ivan Arceo, 31 years of age, San Jose, CA
• Rolando Gomez Ruiz, 37 years of age, Chiapas, Mexico
• Alberto Robles Carrillo, 27 years of age, San Jose, CA
• Oracio Lucas Tznucx, 45 years of age, Shutipcic, Guatemala
• Raul Alexander Cortez-Barrera, 27 years of age, El Salvador
• Julio Cesar Ramos Magana, 31 years of age, Apatzingan, Mexico
• Eliseo Vazquez Aguilar, 36 years of age, Chiapas, Mexico
• Baldemar Morales Morales, 40 years of age, Chiapas, Mexico
• Alberto Robles Carrillo, 27 years of age, San Jose CA

On Wednesday August 5, 2020 around 7:30 AM the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office, assisted by the Mendocino County Major Crimes Task Force, Marin County Major Crimes Task Force, Lake County Sheriff's Office, Cal FIRE, California Highway Patrol and the California National Guard Counter Drug Team executed a search warrant in the 22100 Block of Airport Road in Covelo. The warrant was served on a property where 32 "hoop" style green houses and 13 outdoor marijuana gardens were being cultivated on one parcel. None of the gardens were registered legal growing operations within the state guidance regulating the commercial growing of marijuana. 21 adults (above listed suspects) were detained at the scene as well as two female juveniles (17 years of age and 5 years of age). The juveniles were released to a relative who responded to pick them up.

A total of 6970 marijuana plants, ranging in height from 1 foot to 7 feet, were eradicated from the 45 gardens. 1860 pounds of dried marijuana bud was located and destroyed. In one building on the property deputies located a false wall behind which they found 4 assault rifles, one bolt action rifle, and three handguns hidden in the wall (pictured below). One of the handguns was reported stolen out of the Stockton area.

One subject, Ryan Roy-Downey, was located hiding in the trunk of vehicle that was attempting to leave the area. Downey lied about his name and gave the name of a real person. He was found in possession of suspected methamphetamine and had a felony warrant for his arrest for violation of probation. Downey was arrested on the warrant, assuming the name of another to avoid prosecution, and possession of methamphetamine. He was later booked in jail and held on $50,000 bail.

A female, Shelly Leggett, was also found to have an active felony arrest warrant for 32 PC (accessory). She too was transported and booked into the County Jail but was released on the zero bail policy initiated by the state during the COVID 19 Pandemic.

The case remains under investigation and a report will be completed and submitted to the DA's Office for review of the listed charges. Anyone with information about this investigation is encouraged to contact the Sheriff's Office tip line at 707-234-2100.

(Sheriff’s Presser)

THE BRAMBLES have a new product to go with their olive oil: white balsamic vinegar! I tried the elderberry balsamic - it was amazing ? Find it at the Boonville Farmers' Market this Friday from 4-6 at Disco Ranch. 

Scott Miller will be there offering knife and tool sharpening. Strawberries are still on and sweeter than ever. Cinnamon Bear Farms has quite the array of tomatoes as well as greens, sprouts, eggplant, etc.. Inland ranch will have a god selection of produce (maybe corn!) as well as meat and eggs. Lion's Mane, grown by Natural Products of Boonville, will be available too!

Come see what summer has to offer!

See you there!

NORTH COAST 2020 GRAPE HARVEST KICKS OFF AMID CORONAVIRUS CONCERNS

On a temperate summer night, about 30 men on Wednesday picked pinot noir grapes from Schellville’s Sasaki Vineyards, ushering in the 2020 Sonoma County wine grape harvest amid the coronavirus pandemic that has fundamentally changed the North Coast wine industry.

pressdemocrat.com/article/business/grape-harvest-kicks-on-north-coast/

HENDY WOODS STATE PARK: Resuming the Free Days

On the Second Sunday of every month in 2020, the Hendy Woods Community is covering the Hendy Woods State Park’s Day Use fee ($8) for local residents from the following communities: Yorkville, Boonville, Philo, Navarro, Comptche and Elk - Know your zip code. Enjoy a free visit to the park on us and stroll the old growth redwood groves and beautiful meadows, hike the trails, and unwind along the river! 

Note: Day use is from sun up to 1 hour after sunset

Want to join our great team and support your wonderful park? We are always looking for motivated Volunteers to staff the Hendy Woods Visitor Center, remove invasive plant species and lead forest walks! Interested? Contact: Nancy - NancyLIppolito@gmail.com

RUSSIAN GULCH BRIDGE just outside the town of Mendocino on the coast. 

It is about a 40 minute drive from Boonville. I didn't start out to go to this park but it was too windy to Kayak so we picnicked here and it saved the day because by this time blue sky appeared. We closed the day at the MacCallum house where I got a parking spot right in front. You can have a glass of wine or a meal on this porch overlooking the town and the ocean or in their garden. Everyone followed the rules and it was most pleasant.

— Bill Kimberlin

KRUMHOLTZ BUMPS!

Editor,

How to slow traffic in downtown Boonville:

What about those speed bumps that are maybe four inches across and less than an inch high, circular made of something like fiberglass? Not the speed bumps made of pavement three or four inches high that cross the street in certain residential neighborhoods.

On freeways in California you feel and hear them when you make a lane change. I've encountered them in some places were they’re clustered across the road to try to force the driver to slow down. You can ask Caltrans about them since Highway 128 is a state highway.

Keith Bramstedt

San Anselmo

PS. I think the bumps that are lane dividers on California freeways have a name like Krumholtz bumps, named after the inventor.

---

ED NOTE: Barbara Lamb of Yorkville tells us that there are removable small speed bump strips on Marshall Street in Ukiah that are put out during weekdays and removed at night which seem to help a little. And indeed, we found some for sale on line. But who’s responsible? And would Caltrans allow them on Highway 128.

TROUT FARM, FORT BRAGG

CHINATOWN GANGSTER who bribed Oakland cop gets life for double murder

Wing Wo Ma gunned down victims at point blank range in execution-style shooting, says prosecution

by David Debolt

OAKLAND — Once a small-time criminal who for years enjoyed protection from a corrupt Oakland police officer he bribed, Wing Wo Ma was sentenced Wednesday to life in federal prison for murdering a husband and wife in Mendocino County.

Ma, of Oakland, shot and killed suspected Chinese underworld gangster Jim Tat Kong and Cindy Bao Feng Chen execution style in Fort Bragg in October 2013. Ma had borrowed money from Kong for a failed marijuana grow and a real estate scheme and his various scams were catching up with him.

Kong was known to be a rival of Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, the infamous leader of the Ghee Kung Tong criminal organization who was convicted in a separate trial of being part of a conspiracy to murder Kong. Chen was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was asleep when Ma attacked them, according to prosecutors.

Ma rode with the couple to a secluded, wooded area near Fort Bragg, promising to show off his fictional marijuana operation. From the back seat of a minivan, he shot the unsuspecting couple, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI.

“Ma killed Cindy Chen, the mother of a young child, on her birthday. Ma fired the killing shots just feet away from the child’s car seat,” federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “According to the Medical Examiner, the gunshot to Jim Tat Kong likely awoke Cindy Chen who only had time to turn her head and raise her hand in a defensive posture before Ma shot her in the side of the head as well.”

After the killings, he called his longtime law enforcement handler: former Alameda County District Attorney inspector, Oakland lieutenant and Chinatown gang expert, Harry Hu, in an attempt to learn what investigators knew about the murders.

On Nov. 7, 2017, a jury convicted Ma, also known as Mark or “Fat Mark,” of the murders, firearms charges, conspiring to distribute drugs and conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and bribery.

Ma was born in Hong Kong and raised in a “cramped apartment in a public housing project” there. He first got in trouble with the law at 15, when he unwittingly delivered a box of drugs at the request of his neighbors. He identified his neighbors to authorities, then fled to the United States on a tourist visa because he feared reprisal, his attorney wrote in a sentencing memo.

In California, Ma lived a double life: as a marijuana cultivator with ties to organized crime in the Bay Area, but also as a confidential informant, his attorney wrote. The defense argued for a 30-year sentence, saying it could be an “incentive to use his years in custody for positive pursuits.”

Ma was not only a confidential informant for Hu. A FBI investigation later uncovered Ma and Hu were friends, and Ma was bribing Hu and another Oakland officer with trips to Las Vegas and Reno, picking up tabs for drinks, hotel suites and “company of hostesses” in Vegas bars. Ma also leased a $46,000 car to Hu, and sought protection from the veteran officer when he sensed that the feds were closing in on him.

Hu would later tell investigators he suspected Ma was involved in the murders but did not come forward because he was compromised for taking the bribes. Over the years, Hu had helped Ma avoid arrest, including after a fire of an illegal marijuana grow in Oakland, and wrote a letter to an immigration judge in 2002 to stop the court from deporting Ma, after a felony pimping arrest in San Rafael ended in a conviction of misdemeanor running a house of prostitution and a 45-day jail sentence.

The shocking allegations tarnished the reputation of Hu, who during his years at the Oakland Police Department was considered an early bridge between the Chinatown community and the police, and was a mentor to younger Asian Oakland officers. They called him “dai lo” or big brother. Hu joined OPD in 1988, retired in 2007 and went to work for the DA’s office.

Hu took a plea deal in late 2018, agreeing to take the stand in Ma’s trial and is scheduled to be sentenced later this month, facing a one-year federal prison term. Hu’s testimony in October revealed former Oakland police Sgt. Warren Young partook in the trips Ma paid for, and Hu and Young each invested $40,000 in a hotel project, another one of Ma’s bogus business ventures. Once they realized it was a sham, Ma paid them back — in cash, Hu testified.

At the time of Hu’s testimony, Young was working as an Alameda County welfare fraud investigator, having retired from the OPD. He is expected to be named as an unindicted, co-consipirator when Hu is sentenced.

(Courtesy, SF Chronicle)

---

Previously:

• https://www.theava.com/archives/68464
• https://www.theava.com/archives/68018
• https://www.theava.com/archives/48505

UNION LUMBER STORE, FORT BRAGG

PLAYTIME IS OVER

Mckinleyville, Calif. — The Coast Guard rescued two people after their sailing vessel began taking on water one nautical mile offshore from Albion River near Whitesboro, Calif., Sunday. 

Coast Guard Sector Humboldt Bay command center watchstanders received a notification just after midnight of the sailing vessel Playtime reportedly hitting a submerged object in heavy fog. The vessel began taking on water with two people onboard who only had their cell phones and emergency flares available. 

At approximately 1 a.m. watchstanders directed the launch of a Coast Guard Station Noyo River 47-foot Motor Life Boat crew and a Coast Guard Air Station Humboldt Bay MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew. 

The boatcrew arrived on scene at 1:45 a.m. and recovered both people from the vessel. The survivors were transported by the boatcrew to Fort Bragg, Calif., in good condition. 

The Playtime was determined unsafe to attempt to salvage and was reported submerged with Sector Humboldt Bay issuing a broadcast to alert mariners of a potential hazard-to-navigation. 

“This case could have gone south quickly,” said Capt. Mark Hiigel, commander, Sector Humboldt Bay. “Search and rescue, especially at night, is inherently risky and is almost always a difficult mission to complete. The more a mariner is prepared with appropriate safety gear and emergency communications, the more likely there will be a successful outcome.” 

The Coast Guard recommends the following safety tips for boaters:

Carry a VHF-FM marine radio and monitor Channel 16 for current ocean forecast and emergency marine broadcast information. Cell phones can be helpful, but not reliable for emergencies as they often lose signal and can run out of a fully-charged battery. 

Have and register an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) as they provide the fastest and most accurate way for response crews to locate and rescue people in distress.

Always wear a lifejacket. The Coast Guard estimates that life jackets could save more than 80 percent of boating fatality victims. 

NOYO KING SALMON

COMMUNITY AND AGRICULTURAL INNOVATION in the time of COVID-19:

theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/30/csa-farms-covid-19-agriculture

CORRECTION: In last Wednesday’s Valley People collection we inadvertently attributed a comment about the Anderson Valley Community Services District to Val Muchowski that was written by Joan Burroughs. Our apologies to both. 

ED NOTES

COULDN'T HELP but notice this item on the MCN chatline from Norman deVall: “Hi All… Posting for Gail Lucas… Hi Norman - thank you for this. I have been very concerned about the K9 Takoda. I just talked with the sheriff's dept and they have assured me that Takoda is fine now. (He said he “suffered a few scratches”). Could you possibly post that on the thread so that the community knows?”

GAIL LUCAS is the mother of Marc Lucas, the man who touched off last Saturday's exciting contretemps in Albion during which police dog Takoda had his head jammed by the perp in the perp's vehicle door. Back in the day, Mrs. Lucas was the Sierra Club's jefe for the coastal areas of Mendocino County and active in local liberal politics. Marc Lucas, on the morning of his big adventure, was spotted in Navarro deep in consultation with that community's white powder cohort. He's a regular presence in Navarro. Lucas is also one of many local mental cases whose demons are made much worse by street dope.

THE FOLLOWING VIDEO won't be news to anybody who has visited San Francisco lately, but what may be news is relayed by a former drug veteran of Frisco's streets who estimates of the ever larger street population, now estimated at twenty thousand, about 85% are addicted to hard drugs, the others are crazy. The town's mayor, an obvious incompetent, and its supervisors, should be recalled. (Ditto for Ukiah.) If local government can't manage basic civic order it's time for the people running it to go. SF's tonier neighborhoods, and the vast Presidio, has no homeless people because the cops, local and federal, immediately roust them. But SF has allowed its downtown to become lawless, a drug free fire zone run by criminals. 

SO, what would you do, Mr. Wizard? Basic premise: No persons unable or unwilling to care for themselves would be allowed to live on the streets. Government certainly wouldn't underwrite street living and public drug use, as San Francisco (and Mendocino County) presently does. The many millions now being squandered on this small population of lost souls should be diverted to mandatory hospitalization in impromptu care centers created from now vacant hotels and motels. SF has already converted a few empty hotels to rooms for the homeless but, Frisco having lost its way some time ago, permits drug and alcohol deliveries to the new tenants! (Just this week a meth lab blew up in a hotel room occupied by a formerly homeless guy.) Every time I hear some self-certified “progressive” justify the present homeless situation as “non-coercive” and “basically the best we can do,” I feel like going out to score some laudanum for myself. But considered philosophically, the devolving society we see out there is devolving so fast that the present population of homeless people will soon be merely one more catastrophe.

EVERY DAY the leadership adds to the prevailing anxiety that there is no leadership, just an ominous drift as people lose work, income, homes, hope. And in November we get a choice between Trump and Biden, neither of whom should be in charge of anything more complicated than pizza deliveries. Trump says something crazy every day while he lambastes Biden for saying crazy stuff, as Biden did again today when he said the Latino American community is more diverse than the African American community. Which it is, especially considering Biden was addressing both the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in a pre-recorded speech, apparently not vetted by his staff. O yeah. Hell yes. This country's going to bounce right back.

REJECTING THE DNC PLATFORM

The Bernie Delegates are making their stand on Medicare for all during a pandemic. More than 700 of the 1,073 National Bernie delegates are saying that just being the lesser evil isn't good enough anymore. There is a bare minimum that you have to stand for in order to earn their votes. And that minimum is free health care for every man, woman, and child in the middle of a pandemic. As a result, about two-thirds of Bernie's delegates will reject the Democratic Party platform in a historic moment on Tuesday.

Nick Brana
National Coordinator
Movement for a People's Party

REDWOOD AVENUE, FORT BRAGG

FORT BRAGG is offering a tenant rental assistance program.

https://city.fortbragg.com/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/1118

FROM THE SHERIFF'S OFFICE

“Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Detectives assisted the Alaska State Department of Public Safety on the service of the search warrant on August 3, 2020 in Fort Bragg. He is being held on $20,000 bail and awaiting extradition to Alaska.”

The Alaska Bureau of Investigation Technical Crimes Unit started their investigation last January. In a press release they said:

“On January 8, 2020, the Alaska Bureau of Investigation Technical Crimes Unit (TCU) in Anchorage received a report that a teenage female in Naknek had been enticed to send explicit images of herself to adults online.

An investigation revealed approximately 1,900 text messages were exchanged with a male named David Orellana (age 56, Fort Bragg,). 

The text conversation was initiated by Orellana, and was very sexually graphic. Orellana solicited images and videos of the teenager, all the while sending her sexual images of himself. 

On March 31, 2020, a Grand Jury indicted Orellana on the charges of Distribution of Indecent Material to a Minor (six counts), Online Enticement, and Possession of Child Pornography. An extraditable arrest warrant was issued for Orellana.

On Monday, August 3, an investigator from the TCU traveled to Fort Bragg, California and, with the help of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, executed numerous search warrants on Orellana’s residence and person.

Orellana made admissions and was arrested on the Alaska arrest warrant. He was remanded to the Mendocino County Jail until the extradition process is completed. The Alaska State Troopers would like to thank the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office for its assistance in the investigation.”

There was also an article posted in the Anchorage Daily News posted Wednesday, August 5th: adn.com/alaska-news/crime-courts/2020/08/04/california-man-arrested-for-child-pornography-charges-tied-to-alaska/

(via MendocinoSportsPlus)

CATCH OF THE DAY, August 6, 2020

CARLTON BACK, Oakland. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

BRET BENGSTON, Ukiah. Parole violation, resisting, probation revocation.

JOHN BOLTON IV, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. 

DAVID CRUZ, Eureka/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs, loaded firearm in public, concealed stolen weapon.

TRACY DODSON, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

DARIN HAMMOND, Fort Bragg. Disobeying court order, probation revocation.

DEVAUN JOHNSON, Calpella. Trespassing, probation revocation.

SHELLY LEGGETT, Lincoln. Harboring wanted felon.

DANA LEWIS, Ukiah. Domestic battery, brandishing, probation revocation.

BRADLEY MAXFIELD, Willits. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, mandatory supervision sentencing, probation revocation.

JACOB MCKEY, Willits. Attempted murder, possession of assault weapon, criminal threats, armed with firearm in commission of felony, grossly negligent firearm discharge. 

ANTONIO MUNOZ, Redwood Valley. DUI, protective order violation, probation revocation.

ERICA ROUSE, Ukiah. Domestic abuse.

JAMES SANDERSON, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-loitering on private property, under influence, controlled substance

ANDY TUCKER, Covelo. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun.

GOING TO BARS ALONE. In my line of work, solo barhopping is often a requirement. I used to find it somewhat tedious; I’ve come to treasure it. While sitting alone, I try not to look at my phone, though I might read a book upon occasion. The best part is meeting strangers. Of course sometimes a stranger in a bar can be unpleasant, but more often than not, they’ve made my day a little better. On the afternoon my grandfather died, in 2018, I found myself sitting alone at the Tempest. I started talking to the couple next to me. When I told them about my grandfather, they asked what his drink of choice had been. It was Bacardi and orange juice — a combination that, as a critic, I cannot recommend. They ordered three, one for each of us. We drank together. The drink tasted awful, but that’s not what I remember most. 

— Esther Mobley

MISFIRE

The Redstone rocket was the direct the genetic descendent of the V-2 buzz bomb, the fat black-and-white missile the Germans had launched with such abandon against London in World War II. Both the V-2 and the Redstone were the brainchildren of NASA's chief designer Werner von Braun. He and his team of German engineers were scooped up by the American army after the war and offered new jobs building rockets for the United States. It was a good deal because the alternative was military arrest. NASA’s new (and first) director Chris Kraft did not care a lick for the Redstone. Any rocket which had been designed to do its most important flying downward to, say, Trafalgar Square could not be fully trusted to fly upward into space. 

His skepticism only deepened when, early in his NASA tenure in November of 1960, he went down to Cape Canaveral to watch a test of a Redstone with a mockup of the one-man Mercury capsule atop it. Part of the job that day was to determine how the flight controllers and the launch pad crew worked together. So Kraft and most of the other people present were stuck in the windowless blockhouse with mission control. They were not standing out in the open where they could actually see the bird fly. 

Only two of the consoles in the control room had television monitors showing the launch pad. Kraft got one of them. When the countdown for the launch reached zero, the Redstone flared and roared just as it was supposed to. The TV camera swept upwards to follow the rocket's flight. Inside the blockhouse the two monitors were filled with -- nothing but empty sky. 

The camera panned back down and there was the Redstone having flown perhaps four inches before thinking better of it and sinking back onto the pad, steaming and smoking. 

The Mercury capsule however had not received the message that the Redstone had gone nowhere. Assuming the rocket was in flight, the capsule popped its little top and released a spray of confetti-like aluminum chaf that was supposed to help the radar technicians keep track of the Mercury. But now the chaf was fluttering about the Mercury capsule like the remains of a giant preposterous party favor. And still, the Mercury wasn't finished. Sensing that the air pressure was now at sea level, the capsule concluded that it had completed its mission and was returning to Earth. So now it was time to deploy its parachute -- which it did. The chute burst out in an orange and white billow and as soon as it did the Canaveral winds took hold of it inflating it to its full size. With every gust the parachute yanked hard against the rocket which was still filled with tens of thousands of gallons of explosive liquid oxygen and ethyl alcohol. 

“Is that chute going to pull the rocket over?!” Kraft shouted into his headset to the engineers outside the blockhouse. 

The engineers answered -- in German. 

“Is that going to pull the rocket over?!” Kraft repeated loudly. Staccato this time. 

More German came back. 

“Will someone please talk to me — in English?!” he demanded. 

At last a few controllers Kraft could understand came on the line but no one had any good ideas about how to proceed. 

Sending the rocket a command to open its valves and harmlessly vent its fuel might once have been a possibility, but it wasn't anymore because the four inch flight had unplugged the umbilical cord which connected the rocket to its command center during its prelaunch phase. 

“Can we plug it back in?” one controller in the blockhouse asked. 

“How?” Kraft replied, already knowing the answer. 

“Well, send someone out there to do it.” 

Kraft and the other men in the room looked around at one another and then back at the TV screen where the fully armed Redstone rocket-bomb could be seen smoldering and swaying, the parachute still tugging at it with every gust of wind. Nobody volunteered for the job. 

Rounding up a cherry picker, riding it out to the pad and sending someone out with a pair of shears to cut the parachute's cord was an option too, in theory, but the same lack of a volunteer with a death wish caused that suggestion to fail even before it reached the floor. 

“We could shoot at it,” came a suggestion from someone in the blockhouse. 

“Shoot at it?” Kraft asked, his eyes wide. 

“With a high-powered rifle, you know, to punch some holes and drain the fuel.” 

This idea was met with thunderstruck silence and the controller who'd offered it sank back in his chair. 

In the end the men in mission control could do nothing but wait. The Redstone, they knew, ran on batteries and batteries had only so much life. For hours they watched as the wind blew and the parachute snapped and the Redstone shuddered. Slowly the rocket lost more and more of its electrical life until it finally it went dead. 

When it did, all of its circuits returned to their safe position, its valves opened and its fuel vented harmlessly away. By the time the controllers had concluded that it was at last safe to go out to the pad and take down the dead rocket, Kraft, making his presence felt at NASA the same way he had when he was first hired by the nascent Aeronautics Council, had established one of the most important of the agency’s growing list of flight rules: if you don't know what to do, don't do anything at all.

— Jeffrey Kluger, “Apollo 8”

WHY THE LEFT MUST REJECT AND ELECT Biden at the Same Time

by Norman Solomon

In the next three months, a dozen states will determine whether Donald Trump wins another four years as president. Those swing states should be central to the work of progressives who are determined to prevent that outcome.

With so much at stake, we can’t afford the luxury of devoting time and energy to endless arguments about whether progressives should vote for Joe Biden if they live in California or New York, or Alabama or Alaska, or other states where the electoral votes are sure to all go to Biden or Trump.

What will matter are the swing states, generally understood this time around to include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. (Also in play are “swing districts” in two states where the statewide winning candidate doesn’t automatically get all of the state’s electoral votes: Maine’s second congressional district and Nebraska’s second congressional district.)

There’s no point—or honesty—in pretending that Biden is a decent guy whose public service has overflowed with compassion. Whether provided by the New York Times days ago or The Nation last year, the grim evidence of Biden’s callous political career is profuse.

During the primary campaign, the organization where I’m national director, RootsAction.org, supported Bernie Sanders and widely distributed documentation of Biden’s decades-long record of serving corporate greed, racial injustice and the military-industrial complex. I’ve denounced Biden’s political record in one article after another after another after another after another after another after another.

But the choice ahead, Trump or Biden, is painfully real. Magical thinking has its literary value, but in politics it’s delusional and dangerous to evade the realities of binary choices when they arise. All too often, discussion of voting can fall into a kind of self-absorption that focuses on a voter’s emotions about voting rather than on the impacts of election results on other people.

“It doesn't matter whether you like Biden or not, that's your personal feelings, irrelevant, nobody cares about that,” Noam Chomsky said in a just-released video. “What they care about is what happens to the world. We have to get rid of Trump, keep pressure on Biden, just as Sanders and associates have been doing.”

Chomsky added: “Politics is activism, not taking five minutes to push a button. Look what's happening in the streets of the country. One of the greatest social movements that has ever developed, led by Black Lives Matter. Take Sunrise Movement, managed to put the Green New Deal on the legislative agenda. This generation is going to decide whether organized human society can survive. And the crucial part of this decision is to get rid of the major barrier to survival, which happens to be in the White House. Get rid of Trump, then we have opportunities.”

My colleague Jeff Cohen, who co-founded RootsAction, told Common Dreams that the “Vote Trump Out“ initiative that RootsAction launched with the Chomsky video is “a two-step campaign: First, vote Trump out. Then challenge Biden from day one. . . It's easier to persuade 'swing voters on the left' who live in swing states to vote for Biden despite their hesitancy if they know we're serious about step two.”

Like it or not, the imperative of defeating Trump is directly in front of us. To make a progressive future possible, beating Trump is absolutely necessary while very far from sufficient. To organize against a government headed by Trump is to push against a thick stone wall. To organize against a government headed by Biden holds out the real potential of progressive breakthroughs.

(Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His books include ”War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death“ and ”Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State.” He is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.)

WAR & PANDEMIC JOURNALISM

The Truth Can Disappear Fast

by Patrick Cockburn

The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the virus and against human enemies are real enough. War reporting and pandemic reporting likewise have much in common because, in both cases, journalists are dealing with and describing matters of life and death. Public interest is fueled by deep fears, often more intense during an epidemic because the whole population is at risk. In a war, aside from military occupation and area bombing, terror is at its height among those closest to the battlefield.

The nature of the dangers stemming from military violence and the outbreak of a deadly disease may appear very different. But looked at from the point of view of a government, they both pose an existential threat because failure in either crisis may provoke some version of regime change. People seldom forgive governments that get them involved in losing wars or that fail to cope adequately with a natural disaster like the coronavirus. The powers-that-be know that they must fight for their political lives, perhaps even their physical existence, claiming any success as their own and doing their best to escape blame for what has gone wrong.

My First Pandemic

I first experienced a pandemic in the summer of 1956 when, at the age of six, I caught polio in Cork, Ireland. The epidemic there began soon after virologist Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for it in the United States, but before it was available in Europe. Polio epidemics were at their height in the first half of the twentieth century and, in a number of respects, closely resembled the Covid-19 experience: many people caught the disease but only a minority were permanently disabled by or died of it. In contrast with Covid-19, however, it was young children, not the old, who were most at risk. The terror caused by poliomyelitis, to use its full name, was even higher than during the present epidemic exactly because it targeted the very young and its victims did not generally disappear into the cemetery but were highly visible on crutches and in wheelchairs, or prone in iron lungs.

Parents were mystified by the source of the illness because it was spread by great numbers of asymptomatic carriers who did not know they had it. The worst outbreaks were in the better-off parts of modern cities like Boston, Chicago, Copenhagen, Melbourne, New York, and Stockholm. People living there enjoyed a good supply of clean water and had effective sewage disposal, but did not realize that all of this robbed them of their natural immunity to the polio virus. The pattern in Cork was the same: most of the sick came from the more affluent parts of the city, while people living in the slums were largely unaffected. Everywhere, there was a frantic search to identify those, like foreign immigrants, who might be responsible for spreading the disease. In the New York epidemic of 1916, even animals were suspected of doing so and 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs were hunted down and killed.

The illness weakened my legs permanently and I have a severe limp so, even reporting in dangerous circumstances in the Middle East, I could only walk, not run. I was very conscious of my disabilities from the first, but did not think much about how I had acquired them or the epidemic itself until perhaps four decades later. It was the 1990s and I was then visiting ill-supplied hospitals in Iraq as that country’s health system was collapsing under the weight of U.N. sanctions. As a child, I had once been a patient in an almost equally grim hospital in Ireland and it occurred to me then, as I saw children in those desperate circumstances in Iraq, that I ought to know more about what had happened to me. At that time, my ignorance was remarkably complete. I did not even know the year when the polio epidemic had happened in Ireland, nor could I say if it was caused by a virus or a bacterium.

So I read up on the outbreak in newspapers of the time and Irish Health Ministry files, while interviewing surviving doctors, nurses, and patients. Kathleen O’Callaghan, a doctor at St. Finbarr’s hospital, where I had been brought from my home when first diagnosed, said that people in the city were so frightened “they would cross the road rather than walk past the walls of the fever hospital.” My father recalled that the police had to deliver food to infected homes because no one else would go near them. A Red Cross nurse, Maureen O’Sullivan, who drove an ambulance at the time, told me that, even after the epidemic was over, people would quail at the sight of her ambulance, claiming “the polio is back again” and dragging their children into their houses or they might even fall to their knees to pray.

The local authorities in a poor little city like Cork where I grew up understood better than national governments today that fear is a main feature of epidemics. They tried then to steer public opinion between panic and complacency by keeping control of the news of the outbreak. When British newspapers like the Times reported that polio was rampant in Cork, they called this typical British slander and exaggeration. But their efforts to suppress the news never worked as well as they hoped. Instead, they dented their own credibility by trying to play down what was happening. In that pre-television era, the main source of information in my hometown was the Cork Examiner, which, after the first polio infections were announced at the beginning of July 1956, accurately reported on the number of cases, but systematically underrated their seriousness.

Headlines about polio like “Panic Reaction Without Justification” and “Outbreak Not Yet Dangerous” regularly ran below the fold on its front page. Above it were the screaming ones about the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian uprising of that year. In the end, this treatment only served to spread alarm in Cork where many people were convinced that the death toll was much higher than the officially announced one and that bodies were being secretly carried out of the hospitals at night.

My father said that, in the end, a delegation of local businessmen, the owners of the biggest shops, approached the owners of the Cork Examiner, threatening to withdraw their advertising unless it stopped reporting the epidemic. I was dubious about this story, but when I checked the newspaper files many years later, I found that he was correct and the paper had almost entirely stopped reporting on the epidemic just as sick children were pouring into St. Finbarr’s hospital.

The Misreporting of Wars and Epidemics

By the time I started to research a book about the Cork polio epidemic that would be titled Broken Boy, I had been reporting wars for 25 years, starting with the Northern Irish Troubles in the 1970s, then the Lebanese civil war, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the war that followed Washington’s post-9/11 takeover of Afghanistan, and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. After publication of the book, I went on covering these endless conflicts for the British paper the Independent as well as new conflicts sparked in 2011 by the Arab Spring in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

As the coronavirus pandemic began this January, I was finishing a book (just published), War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds, the Confrontation with Iran. Almost immediately, I noticed strong parallels between the Covid-19 pandemic and the polio epidemic 64 years earlier. Pervasive fear was perhaps the common factor, though little grasped by governments of this moment. Boris Johnson’s in Great Britain, where I was living, was typical in believing that people had to be frightened into lockdown, when, in fact, so many were already terrified and needed to be reassured.

I also noticed ominous similarities between the ways in which epidemics and wars are misreported. Those in positions of responsibility -- Donald Trump represents an extreme version of this -- invariably claim victories and successes even as they fail and suffer defeats. The words of the Confederate general “Stonewall” Jackson came to mind. On surveying ground that had only recently been a battlefield, he asked an aide: “Did you ever think, sir, what an opportunity a battlefield affords liars?”

This has certainly been true of wars, but no less so, it seemed to me, of epidemics, as President Trump was indeed soon to demonstrate (over and over and over again). At least in retrospect, disinformation campaigns in wars tend to get bad press and be the subject of much finger wagging. But think about it a moment: it stands to reason that people trying to kill each other will not hesitate to lie about each other as well. While the glib saying that “truth is the first casualty of war” has often proven a dangerous escape hatch for poor reporting or unthinking acceptance of a self-serving version of battlefield realities (spoon-fed by the powers-that-be to a credulous media), it could equally be said that truth is the first casualty of pandemics. The inevitable chaos that follows in the wake of the swift spread of a deadly disease and the desperation of those in power to avoid being held responsible for the soaring loss of life lead in the same direction.

There is, of course, nothing inevitable about the suppression of truth when it comes to wars, epidemics, or anything else for that matter. Journalists, individually and collectively, will always be engaged in a struggle with propagandists and PR men, one in which victory for either side is never inevitable.

Unfortunately, wars and epidemics are melodramatic events and melodrama militates against real understanding. “If it bleeds, it leads” is true of news priorities when it comes to an intensive care unit in Texas or a missile strike in Afghanistan. Such scenes are shocking but do not necessarily tell us much about what is actually going on.

The recent history of war reporting is not encouraging. Journalists will always have to fight propagandists working for the powers-that-be. Sadly, I have had the depressing feeling since Washington’s first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 that the propagandists are increasingly winning the news battle and that accurate journalism, actual eyewitness reporting, is in retreat.

Disappearing News

By its nature, reporting wars is always going to be difficult and dangerous work, but it has become more so in these years. Coverage of Washington’s Afghan and Iraqi wars was often inadequate, but not as bad as the more recent reporting from war-torn Libya and Syria or its near total absence from the disaster that is Yemen. This lack fostered misconceptions even when it came to fundamental questions like who is actually fighting whom, for what reasons, and just who are the real prospective winners and losers.

Of course, there is little new about propaganda, controlling the news, or spreading “false facts.” Ancient Egyptian pharaohs inscribed self-glorifying and mendacious accounts of their battles on monuments, now thousands of years old, in which their defeats are lauded as heroic victories. What is new about war reporting in recent decades is the far greater sophistication and resources that governments can deploy in shaping the news. With opponents like longtime Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, demonization was never too difficult a task because he was a genuinely demonic autocrat.

Yet the most influential news story about the Iraqi invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S.-led counter-invasion proved to be a fake. This was a report that, in August 1990, invading Iraqi soldiers had tipped babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and left them to die on the floor. A Kuwaiti girl reported to have been working as a volunteer in the hospital swore before a U.S. congressional committee that she had witnessed that very atrocity. Her story was hugely influential in mobilizing international support for the war effort of the administration of President George H.W. Bush and the U.S. allies he teamed up with.

In reality it proved purely fictional. The supposed hospital volunteer turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. Several journalists and human rights specialists expressed skepticism at the time, but their voices were drowned out by the outrage the tale provoked. It was a classic example of a successful propaganda coup: instantly newsworthy, not easy to disprove, and when it was -- long after the war -- it had already had the necessary impact, creating support for the U.S.-led coalition going to war with Iraq.

In a similar fashion, I reported on the American war in Afghanistan in 2001-2002 at a time when coverage in the international media had left the impression that the Taliban had been decisively defeated by the U.S. military and its Afghan allies. Television showed dramatic shots of bombs and missiles exploding on the Taliban front lines and Northern Alliance opposition forces advancing unopposed to “liberate” the Afghan capital, Kabul.

When, however, I followed the Taliban retreating south to Kandahar Province, it became clear to me that they were not by any normal definition a beaten force, that their units were simply under orders to disperse and go home. Their leaders had clearly grasped that they were over-matched and that it would be better to wait until conditions changed in their favor, something that had distinctly happened by 2006, when they went back to war in a big way. They then continued to fight in a determined fashion to the present day. By 2009, it was already dangerous to drive beyond the southernmost police station in Kabul due to the risk that Taliban patrols might create pop-up checkpoints anywhere along the road.

None of the wars I covered then have ever really ended. What has happened, however, is that they have largely ended up receding, if not disappearing, from the news agenda. I suspect that, if a successful vaccine for Covid-19 isn’t found and used globally, something of the same sort could happen with the coronavirus pandemic as well. Given the way news about it now dominates, even overwhelms, the present news agenda, this may seem unlikely, but there are precedents. In 1918, with World War I in progress, governments dealt with what came to be called the Spanish Flu by simply suppressing information about it. Spain, as a non-combatant in that war, did not censor the news of the outbreak in the same fashion and so the disease was most unfairly named “the Spanish Flu,” though it probably began in the United States.

The polio epidemic in Cork supposedly ended abruptly in mid-September 1956 when the local press stopped reporting on it, but that was at least two weeks before many children like me caught it. In a similar fashion, right now, wars in the Middle East and north Africa like the ongoing disasters in Libya and Syria that once got significant coverage now barely get a mention much of the time.

In the years to come, the same thing could happen to the coronavirus.

(Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London and the author of six books on the Middle East, the latest of which is War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds, the Confrontation with Iran (Verso). (Courtesy, TomDispatch.com)

THE FOLLOWING LIST is of NINE things a woman couldn’t do in 1971 – yes the date is correct, 1971.

In 1971 a woman could not:

1. Get a Credit Card in her own name – it wasn’t until 1974 that a law forced credit card companies to issue cards to women without their husband’s signature.

2. Be guaranteed that they wouldn’t be unceremoniously fired for the offense of getting pregnant – that changed with the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978!

3. Serve on a jury – It varied by state (Utah deemed women fit for jury duty way back in 1879), but the main reason women were kept out of jury pools was that they were considered the center of the home, which was their primary responsibility as caregivers. They were also thought to be too fragile to hear the grisly details of crimes and too sympathetic by nature to be able to remain objective about those accused of offenses. In 1961, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a Florida law that exempted women from serving on juries. It wasn’t until 1973 that women could serve on juries in all 50 states.

4. Fight on the front lines – admitted into military academies in 1976 it wasn’t until 2013 that the military ban on women in combat was lifted. Prior to 1973 women were only allowed in the military as nurses or support staff.

5. Get an Ivy League education – Yale and Princeton didn’t accept female students until 1969. Harvard didn’t admit women until 1977 (when it merged with the all-female Radcliffe College). Brown (which merged with women’s college Pembroke), Dartmouth and Columbia did not offer admission to women until 1971, 1972 and 1981, respectively. Other case-specific instances allowed some women to take certain classes at Ivy League institutions (such as Barnard women taking classes at Columbia), but, by and large, women in the ’60s who harbored Ivy League dreams had to put them on hold.

6. Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. Indeed the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for any legal action was in 1977!

7. Decide not to have sex if their husband wanted to – spousal rape wasn’t criminalized in all 50 states until 1993. Read that again … 1993.

8. Obtain health insurance at the same monetary rate as a man. Sex discrimination wasn’t outlawed in health insurance until 2010 and today many, including sitting elected officials at the Federal level, feel women don’t mind paying a little more. Again, that date was 2010.

9. The birth control pill: Issues like reproductive freedom and a woman’s right to decide when and whether to have children were only just beginning to be openly discussed in the 1960s. In 1957, the FDA approved of the birth control pill but only for “severe menstrual distress.” In 1960, the pill was approved for use as a contraceptive. Even so, the pill was illegal in some states and could be prescribed only to married women for purposes of family planning, and not all pharmacies stocked it. Some of those opposed said oral contraceptives were “immoral, promoted prostitution and were tantamount to abortion.” It wasn’t until several years later that birth control was approved for use by all women, regardless of marital status. In short, birth control meant a woman could complete her education, enter the work force and plan her own life.

Oh, and one more thing, prior to 1880 which is just a few years before the photo of this very proud lady was taken, the age of consent for sex was set at 10 or 12 in more states, with the exception of our neighbor Delaware – where it was 7 YEARS OLD!

Feminism is NOT just for other women.

KNOW your HERstory.

— Michelle Adam

TWISTED HISTORY

Dear Editor,

Let's compare the Cuban revolution to the American revolution. Why Cuba? Because a lot of the elite leftists think that Cuba is a cool place and they want to visit there. I hope they stay there. They won't. The Cuban revolution was violent with guns etc. Of course after the Castro gang came to power guns became highly illegal and Castro got rid of people who didn't agree with him. 60 years later we still have a Castro. The American Revolution is ongoing. Every four years a peaceful revolution. We are allowed to have guns by our Constitution to control the police. The last election was a huge shock to the power elite. The people actually went against the media, the left, the “politically correct,” the anti-gun lobby, etc. and voted for someone who is not a politician. All the different ways they have tried to remove him as a Russian spy, exposing Biden's son's job for the Ukraine, being a racist -- the list goes on. 

The riots we are having now are a page from the Nazi-Zosalst handbook ‘Mein Kampf’ how the brownshirts would incite riots in the cities of Germany. Today we have Nancy and the Blackshirt leftist elites trying very hard to remove someone the people elected. 

Do you want to lose your country? Is there any hope for California with its lockstep conformity to a socialist future? Why does Socialism come up every 30 years or so as an answer to political fix-alls? History shows socialism does not work but here is why some people buy into it.

Some young people think that it's possible to get something for nothing.

Anything to do with public education is going to advocate for social programs because it is how they are supported.

Bureaucracy loves socialism because it creates more bureaucrats. The problem with socialism is that eventually they run out of other people's money but not when you can print more so is hyperinflation the end of socialism?

In the 1930s America started down this road with a thing called Social Security and all the other giveaway programs that came later. One problem with all these programs is people became dependent on them and less responsible for their own lives. Plus free food, money, housing, etc. buys more time to do drugs and get drunk and go to jail. More cops and lawyers and bail bondsmen and judges etc. This is socialism. Good riddance Bernie.

Tom Madden

Comptche

FLAMING CARS, FLAMING LEFTIES

Letter to the Editor,

Portland is burning.

A few weeks back the Great Mayor of Portland Oregon proclaimed things were under control with the ongoing protests in the city of Portland. The mayor and governor saw no reason for the intrusion nor wanted federal troops in Portland. This brain trust stated that the feds were an agitation to the peaceful protest. What a bunch of unadulterated crap! The peaceful protests I saw on the evening news included firebombs, bricks, rocks, burning cars and buildings. Where in the hell is their sense of reality? These people are running the state? What's next? The people of Oregon must be proud. Yeah! Right! You voted them in!

While the police were being pummeled with everything but the kitchen sink, a large swarm of “lefties” were attempting to break down the doors of the federal building! Well now, do you think that these actions had any spark of Telesis? When asked, they might say, “What the ____?! Don't got it on my phone!” We can assume that the comments made by the mayor that “we have these protests under control” did not include the Federal building and was not being taken care of. Surprise, surprise! Federal crimes beget federal troops, constitutional law 101.

Oregon, you have a problem! When the flaming far lefties take over completely all your problems will just go away. Yeah right.

God bless America, the Donald, Jerry Philbrick

Getting older and still angry

Boonville

FOUND OBJECT