Mendocino County Today: October 24, 2012

MUCH AS I ADMIRE Giants pitcher Ryan Vogelsong, his post-game spiel after beating the Cardinals about how God had taken a personal interest in him and the National League playoffs, reminded me that it was time to grab my New Testament for Matthew 6:5-6: “And when you pray you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Play ball!

WHILE WE'RE at the ballpark, how about an end to champagne showers in the locker room? It's sooooooooo old, as are the Gatorade showers for winning football coaches. The champagne sprays are sooooooooo old even the ballplayers find them tedious, as their retreat to goggles indicates.

SUPERVISOR HAMBURG sends along an invitation for “Luncheon with First 5 Mendocino Commissioners at the Adult School, Boonville.” First 5 basically serves as funding for nice jobs for Nice Ukiah Ladies. The money comes from the cigarette tax. It's supposed to help the children of the poor, and maybe it occasionally does. But myself, I think it's just a lot of rakeoff by the Nice Ladies who “luncheon” in Boonville while everyone else eats lunch, and many of the children the money is supposed to benefit eat no lunch at all.

ESPECIALLY CONSIDERING the true state of hundreds, if not thousands, of children in Mendocino County whose third graders rank last in the state in reading to grade level and few of whose children in the welfare system live in stable, safe, healthy families. According to Children Now, a statewide organization that says it “promotes children's health and education,” also says some 15% of Mendocino County youngsters “experience recurring abuse or neglect.” And so on. Maybe Supervisor Hamburg can start an effort to disband First 5 with a view to distributing its million dollars a year directly in subsidies to the worst off children. First 5 doesn't do them any good at all.

BACK IN '72, and still relatively new to the Anderson Valley, my house became campaign headquarters for George McGovern, the last Democrat as he turned out to be. Mendocino County was not the liberal hothouse it has since become, going something like 80% for Nixon. We gave it a good shot for George, though, relentlessly calling Democrats from the Anderson Valley to the Mendocino Coast and urging them to vote for George. There were a lot more registered Republicans in The Valley, and maybe more in the County as a whole than Democrats, the reverse of today's registration. During the Giants game commercials last night (Monday) I watched snatches of the debate between the presidential candidates, lamenting every word I heard from both of them as they outdid each other in imperial assumptions and promises of more Drone murders and big blank checks for submarines and all kinds of lethal gadgetry presently being fought to a standstill by medieval gunmen fighting out of caves. Can you even imagine either of these two Wall Street-funded ciphers saying anything like what George McGovern was cheered for saying in 1970: “This chamber reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land… Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed.”

ON THE OTHER HAND, as a reader points out, “The liberal media fails to note that George McGovern in his role as United States Senator called upon the federal government to use US troops against the uprising at Wounded Knee. It is fitting that Russell Means would outlive George McGovern even if only by a few hours.”

C.W. NEVIUS writes for the SF Chronicle. Last week one of his columns was headlined, “City's progressives have lost their way,” and his lead sentence read, “There was a time when the far left wing of the Democratic Party stood for something.” The city's “progressives,” as Nevius describes the conventional liberals he's talking about, are not “left” in any traditional sense of the term which, in the days when words still had meaning,  meant persons hostile to capitalism as the basis for social-economic-political organization. That's what 'left' means. 'Far left' doesn't mean anything except as a lazy pejorative for hack journalists to describe people they don't like. The SF progs are not hostile to capitalism, and “far left” applied to any sector of the Democratic Party makes no sense. If the Frisco Progs broke from the Democrats they might again stand for something, but so long as they faithfully get behind death and destruction as national policy. The whole political show has been shoved so far to the right that the left is now code for mainstream liberals. The nutballs of the Tea Party even describe Diane Feinstein as a "leftist." But there isn't an organized left in America. There are rearguard elements, I guess you could say, but out there in media fantasy land there's really only this purplish poison miasma slowly asphyxiating all of us. "Progressive' is merely a term some liberals apply to themselves to distance themselves from the Democratic Party lib-labism they can be counted on to support at election time. They know the Party is evil but they're afraid to be left (sic) out of it.

THERE WERE LEFTISTS, real ones, coming in the windows at Saturday night's San Francisco tribute to Alexander Cockburn. Many of us who were there, including our late comrade while he lived, have been cordoned off by the $400,000 a year capos at places like Democracy Now and the Pacifica Network, interchangeable homes of the cult-brained clay foot worshippers. Cockburn was always too much for them, their phony post-mortems to the contrary, and he never argued with me when I went off on how sneaky and dishonest and stupid and how generally awful on a personal level so many of them are, how non-left they are, faithfully shuffling in behind the Democrats at election time. And their constant talk about “doing good” as they raise one dollar for good and five for themselves. CounterPunch is a fitting gift from Cockburn, a legacy that will keep on giving as the last place where the unfettered left, the unbought left, will always roam free.

TWO FROM THE TIP OF THE EMERALD TRIANGLE:

(1) “ON OCTOBER 19, 2012 a California Highway Patrol (CHP) patrol unit stopped a vehicle driven by Keiston M. Shivers for speeding in the area of Fawn Lodge Road in Trinity County. When the CHP Officer contacted Shivers he noticed the odor of marijuana inside the vehicle. The CHP Officer searched the vehicle and located a box containing $50,000.00 in cash. The Trinity Narcotics Task Force (TNTF), consisting of members of the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office and the CHP, responded to the scene to assume the investigation. Trinity County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Nate Trujillo and his K-9 partner Johnny responded to the scene. The K-9 alerted on the vehicle and the money. Both Shivers and his passenger, Donavon J. Fields claimed they did not know the box contained money and they both said the money was not theirs, and they did not know who it belonged to or what it was for. The investigation led Officers to believe the money was connected to drug trafficking. The TNTF arrested Fields and Shivers for the attempt to transport marijuana and money laundering.

(2) ON OCTOBER 20th, 2012 at approximately 11:50 pm a California Highway Patrol (CHP) unit stopped a vehicle driven by Jeremiah S. Fazzio for making an unsafe lane change on Highway 299 in the area of Fawn Lodge Road in Trinity County. When the CHP Officer contacted Fazzio he noticed criminal indicators of drug trafficking. Trinity County Sheriff Deputy Nate Trujillo and his K-9 partner Johnny responded to the scene to investigate the vehicle. Johnny alerted to the presence of an odor of a controlled substance. The Officer searched the vehicle and located 102 plastic bags containing marijuana in the trunk. Each bag appeared to contain approximately 1 pound of marijuana. The Trinity Narcotics Task Force (TNTF) consisting of members of the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office and the California Highway Patrol were summoned to the scene to assume the investigation. Fazzio stated he had never seen the marijuana before and did not know where it came from. Fazzio was arrested by the TNTF for possession of marijuana for sale and transportation of marijuana. 
Fazzio was being held on $10,000.00 bail and bailed out of the Trinity County Jail on October 21, 2012.