REALLY, is it necessary to hear from every media person in the country on the Connecticut event? What's to say? Have you heard a single comment or analysis that wasn't simply a statement of the obvious? A lonely nut with easy access to weapons murders a bunch of people with guns no civilian should possess. This horror was more terrible than most because most of the vics were children. And for the next maniac the terror bar is now higher. He'll have to take out a whole school to top Newtown.
MOST OF THE COMMENT about Connecticut I've heard deeply offended me, especially NPR's “coverage,” which was heavy on the shrinks, natch, given the preponderance of narcissists in the NPR demographic. “Tell me, doctor, what should we say to our children?” Unless the children ask, don't tell them anything. By the time a kid is nine, if he's of normal intelligence, he already knows that a high percentage of the adults around him are at least ten degrees off, and that irrational, inconsistent behavior is the norm.
BUT IF THE KID does ask about all the sad talk he's hearing and the scary pictures he's seeing because your television set plays round the clock and the kid has absorbed hours of stuff he shouldn't have to see, tell him that he happens to have been born into a place that manufactures as many human psychos as it does inhuman gizmos, that crazy people are everywhere but the odds that one of the free range nutcases roaming America will do something bad to him are practically nil. So now, Johnny and Jill, go back to shooting people on your video game and don't worry about it.
BAD PARENTING certainly includes the idiots who drag their small children to these outdoor memorials. Why lay a terrible, one-off horror on your kid? Are you trying to give him nightmares, trying to make a nut case out of him? Let him be a kid. In a few years, he'll be fending off the psychosis massed outside the front door anyway. Until then, it's your job to keep him happy and safe, not to scare the bejeezus out of him.
DEPARTMENT OF UNINTENTIONAL HILARITY from that fount of unintentional hilarity, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat: (1) “Local educators react to Conn. shooting, prepare for students' questions.”
I CAN JUST HEAR our Mendocino County Superintendent of Schools: “Anybody around here know how to spell Connecticut?”
AND THEN there was this PD classic: (2) “Shooter at Conn. school said to have personality disorder.” Think so? Let's not rush to judgment here.
SO THE PRESIDENT rolled up to Newtown in a bullet-proof caravan of armored vehicles filled with armed men to talk to the nation about violence, while here in Boonville I frantically searched for the channel where the Niners game went on interrupted by the Hypocrite in Chief. Twenty murdered children as mega-photo op seemed outrageous even by the depraved standards of our times, as did, it occurred to me, my mild panic that I might miss 15 minutes of the Niners vs. The Patriots football game. I knew, we all knew, that Obama, who knocks off children all over the world every day, as have his predecessors back to our beginnings, would say that he was going to make sure "this never happened again."
AN HONEST ADDRESS would have gone something like this: "Fellow Americans, we have lost our way. We're crazy and we're dangerous. There's no cure for it. Therefore, I'm disbanding America as an organized enterprise. Good night and good luck." “What choice do we have?” Obama said. “Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”
MEANWHILE, the gun nuts have gone to the mattresses. Meet the Press said Sunday they couldn't find a single elected opponent of gun control to come on the show. The NRA also ducked an invitation. The people who did show up, people like Dianne Feinstein who, like the President, moves around with an armed phalanx as does Nancy Pelosi and the rest of Big Lib, appeared on Meet the Press to say she'd introduce a bill to ban assault rifles, as if there already aren't millions of them out there, and as if things generally aren't so deteriorated that such a ban would make any difference whatsoever to reduce the national level of ultra-vi. This is the political party that brought us Madeleine Albright who said on 60 Minutes in 2009 that 500,000 Iraqi children murdered by Clintonian sanctions was "worth it." She got a Medal of Freedom from Obama. Of course the Bush regime went on to murder a lot more Iraqi children and the beat went on and on and on.
LOUIE GOHMERT, a Texas Republican, appearing on Fox News, national sanctuary for America's toughest talkers, distinguished himself by observing, "I wish to god she had had an M4 in her office," Gohmert said of Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the shooting.
CONFESSION. I own three guns, a shotgun and two handguns. I rationalize my ownership to myself by saying I get threatened a lot when, in fact, I haven't been threatened in five years. Even when I was rolling in 'em it occurred to me that it was highly unlikely I would have one handy if one of the tough talkers actually showed up to do me harm.
ON THE OTHER HAND, some of us remember the Cloverdale family awakened deep in the night when a drug-crazed psycho, bent on mayhem, crashed through the front door of their home and charged up the stairs to their bedroom. The homeowner was lucky he had a gun handy, and that was the end of that. The intruder, by the way, had come out of nowhere. He'd picked that address at random.
AND IT'S THAT FEAR, I think, that drives a lot of gun nuts, the NRA membership, the deep down and mostly irrational fear that things have fallen completely apart and the police are no match for the malign forces everywhere.
JEFF COSTELLO COMMENTS: "The shock value of these shooting incidents has been diluted by repetition. And we know that each one is treated as an individual 'lone-nut' thing. Because we must not address the larger social/cultural/political/ spiritual reasons why this has become a regular and frequent thing in exceptional America."
I WAS CURIOUS how the jocks would react to the Connecticut horror, not sure they'd react at all seeing as how sports people tend to monomania and seem only dimly aware of events outside the ballpark. The sports talk guy I like best is KNBR's Mr. T, Tom Tolbert, a former NBA forward and, incidentally, a teammate of Cloverdale's Craig MacMillan at Arizona State back in the day. Tolbert's a cut above most of the jock-jocks, smarter and funnier. But it wasn't Tolbert I tuned in Saturday; it was some other guy whose name I didn't get. But sure enough, a few minutes in, the guy said, in that hyper-masculine shout the sports talk jocks adopt, “Yeah, yeah, terrible tragedy yesterday in Connecticut. Don't really have the words to describe… What can anyone say? But in the wake of that thing in Connecticut, it's really, really great and heart-warming to see the teamwork of the kids…” and he went on to name the football teams of two obscure institutions of alleged higher learning who'd just played in an even more obscure bowl game.
COMMENT. What’s nearly as depressing as that event today in Connecticut, is how familiar all the rhetoric is, how shallow it is, how unwilling the media are to take it deep, to consider the true reasons these things happen, and are happening more and more often. At least Obama, alone in the coverage of today’s mass murder, showed some real emotion. Why do these things happen in America more than they happen in other countries? Beyond the easy availability of guns, and that horse fled the barn long ago, I’d say, in a fancy word, atomization, a dramatic social collapse that has left thousands, maybe millions of people crazy and alone, so isolated and angry that the angriest, the person most removed from human feeling, thinks his best revenge for the life he doesn’t have is to pick up a gun and shoot down kindergartners.
ENOUGH. 1. Only registered gun ownership, following completion of a 3-day firearms training course with rigorous testing; 2. No firearms or magazines holding more than 6 shots; 3. 10 year jail sentence for illegal ownership of firearm or ownership of non-compliant firearm; minimum 25 year jail sentence with non-self-defense brandishing or use of any firearm involving actual or potential injury; 4. Lifetime loss of ownership privilege with conviction of any felony; 5. Registration of all ammunition and firearm identification of all fired ammunition.
FROM MEN IN BLACK I: “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers!” “Your offer is accepted.”
LAST TUESDAY, The Board of Supervisors announced that they’ve hired an expensive San Francisco attorney named William Osterhoudt to advise them in their response to the federal subpoena regarding Mendo's attempt to bring a measure of order to marijuana production while also making a public buck from our multi-million dollar export crop. The Supervisors could, of course, tell the feds to stuff their subpoena without paying an outside attorney to do it for them, which would force the feds to jail them (maybe) but certainly force the issue in such a way that it would make the feds look ridiculous. Which the feds already do given their Obama-sponsored drug stance. But Mendocino County should not be paying a nickel for legal advice on this particular matter or any matter at all since we already pay royally for a County Counsel.
ACCORDING to Osterhoudt’s website he is a 1968 graduate of Hastings law school, then he became a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco, providing indigent criminal defense to persons charged with federal crimes prior to and during the advent of the federal defender program. He continued to act as an Assistant Federal Public Defender through 1971, when he entered private practice in San Francisco. “During his 40 years in practice, Osterhoudt has acquired extensive trial experience in cases ranging from ‘white collar’ or business-related matters, RICO, mail and wire fraud, money laundering, false claims, banking and savings and loan violations, criminal copyright infringement, narcotics, and gang-related homicide and conspiracy allegations and international extraditions, to state and local homicide, assault and drug prosecutions, and vehicle code violations."
VEHICLE CODE VIOLATIONS? What else does this guy do, denture repair? With Osterhoudt’s extensive criminal defense experience in federal crimes, according to him anyway, it’s hard to avoid the implication that the County may be anticipating criminal charges, not just how to decide which marijuana records to run through the copy machine and send on down to the federal drones in San Francisco.
OUR NEW COUNTY COUNSEL, Tom Parker, told the Ukiah Daily Journal, when he arrived a few months ago from the wilds of Colusa County, that he was abreast of marijuana court decisions, suggesting that he could handle pot-related litigation. So far, about all Parker can handle is "No comment." And now the Supervisors have gone to San Francisco for a very expensive criminal defense guy to defend Mendocino County against the federal subpoena for the County's marijuana-related records. The taxpayers, then, will be essentially double-billed for this particular fiasco because we already pay No Comment Parker, and now we're paying this other guy for work Parker suggested he could do. And ought to be able to do, and should be directed to do by the people who hired him, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors.
SEEMS TO US that the Supes are getting jacked around by Parker, their own lawyer. Of course all this has gone down in the usual "closed session," so we'll never know for sure how or why the decision to hire Osterhoudt was made. But I'm surprised the Supes didn't simply tell Parker to respond to the feds himself. But they didn't, and here comes some big wind out of Frisco to run up a big bill on the Mendocino County rubes who, of course, keep telling the rest of us rubes there's no money for this, that and the other thing.
WHAT EXACTLY THE FEDS want from Mendocino County regarding Mendo’s now abandoned pot licensing program remains vague, but we hear they are looking for money. Does Big Bro want the zip-tie money because Bro thinks it derives from illegal drug activity? Are they looking for crooks who might have been skimming money out of the program? It’s unlikely Bro is interested in people who grew 5, 25, or 99 plants — but they could be. I mean, you’ve got all these lawyers sitting around in the Frisco Federal Building with nothing else to do. Apparently. If they want the infamous M. Cohen, they already have him and don’t need County records to nail a guy who was in business right in plain view. Individual supervisors? Doubt it, although you’ve got pro-legalization (Pinches), pro-pot (Hamburg), and pro-9.31 permit system (McCowen) sitting there. (Supervisor Smith strikes us as more of a Prozac person.) The Supervisors included pot legalization in their legislative platform for the current year. But we know that the feds seem disposed to emotional decision-making based on personalities, as in “I’m gonna get that SOB” as much as law, logic, or pesky ethical concerns. Speaking here as a whining taxpayer, I can’t remember the last time the US Attorney out of San Francisco nailed anything close to a dangerous person or entity. Ditto for DC, and we live in the country whose lead bankers robbed all of us.
BACK TO DOPE, and the dopes at the US Attorney’s office, Melinda Haag proprietor. Mendocino County issued 18 permits the first year (2010); 91 permits the second year (2011); voluntary zip-ties going as far back (I think) as 2009 and continuing through this year’s growing season. Different prices for zip-ties and permit applications in 2010 and 2011; different prices for zip-ties for applicants as opposed to 25 plant and under growers who just want the zip-ties; and permit inspection fees (retained by the inspectors) added on to the cost, with different numbers of required inspections for continuing permit holders and newbies; and different price structures for different inspectors. And although you could go back up and sort it out, I believe that all those funds were dumped into one account at the Sheriff’s Office, but spread over several different budget years. How much money did the program make for official Mendo? Who knows?
ACCORDING TO THE WASHINGTON POST, Colorado is assembling a government task force to figure out “how to create a market for legal, recreational marijuana” in the state without bringing the feds down on them, ala Mendocino County. If the former (presumably) toker in the White House has a plan for dealing with Colorado and Washington State's voter-approved green light for green bud he hasn't revealed it. But Obama did tell ABC News' Barbara Walters last week, “We've got bigger fish to fry. It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it's legal.” Under Obama, in what our national pot battalions have viewed as major treachery on the part of Obama after promising pre-election to go easy on weed, the Drug Enforcement Administration has aggressively gone after medical marijuana dispensaries in California, where they are legal. Attorney General Eric Holder, a cipher on every issue including pot, said in a speech Wednesday that he would announce a policy on the new state laws “relatively soon,” and a Department of Justice spokeswoman on Friday said the marijuana issue is “still under review.”
COASTIES slipped into their high waders last week when a 9-foot tide rolled in about 10:30am last Thursday, the highest tide of 2012. And a guy reminded me just today (Monday the 17th) that the Mayan Calendar says the whole world goes down this weekend. "Whatever," as the young people say. So long as the Apocalypse doesn't interfere with Sunday's Niner-Seahawk game.
THE COUNTY, as they pay mightily (and unnecessarily) to beat back the federal pot subpoena, will take another big hit when the family of the infant murdered last week in Fort Bragg brings the inevitable wrongful death suit. The family has hired Robert Petersen of the famous Petersen lawyer clan, a guy who doesn't lose very often, if ever, and this one will cost lots and lots and still won't be enough.
CPS TURNED THE BABY over to a man who can't keep himself off the tweek let alone care for an infant. And it's hardly the first blunder by these people, albeit the first resulting in death. CPS has been dominated by incompetents for years, a fact of local life the Supervisors, and the Superior Court of Mendocino County, should have long ago remedied, and would have remedied if CPS was regularly interfering in the lives of the families on Ukiah's Westside.
JAMES MARMON, a Mendocino County CPS worker fired for identifying the precise problem with CPS, again puts his finger right on the nut of the problem: “This is a copy of an email I sent to the County today regarding baby 'Emerald.' To Lowery, Angelo, Losak, Applegate, and the Board of Supervisors. As far as I am concerned, you all assisted Tubbs in murdering this child. The paradigm shift that was put into place is the problem. How do you fix this? By putting responsibility back onto the social worker where it belongs and provide them with all the training and tools needed to do their jobs. When social workers are protected from ‘being torn apart in court’ and all decisions and recommendation are that of the Agency not individual social workers, then you have placed the children of our county in great danger. I have talked to other social workers who say they like the shift because they don’t have to make the tough decisions; those social workers should go. Mendocino County is the only county in the State, and as far as I know, the Nation, which has made this shift known as from the “Social Worker Recommends” to the “Agency Recommends.” Social workers therefore don’t take responsibility for the job they do. The State has provided the proper tools and guidelines, but Mendocino County chooses to ignore them. To end with, since the Agency made the choice to take all responsibilities in the decision making process, then I believe the Agency should take all the blame in this child’s death. Stacey Cryer and Bryan Lowery need to go. For over four years I attempted to warn you all about the dangers of the paradigm shift among other issues and you all turned on me in retaliation. As I told you all before, I will not go away quietly. — James Marmon MSW”
QUANTITATIVE EASING. Translated that means the privately owned banks known as The Fed are printing money as fast as they can to pay off debt that's mounting faster than The Fed can print new bills. Among other ongoing crimes being committed against US, the value of the currency most of us don't have is being undermined.
JAMES KESTER, formerly of Boonville, got 35 years to life in prison Friday for the second-degree murder of Jason Blackshear, 42, back in September of 2011. The complaint said that Kester entered Blackshear's Babcock Lane home in Fort Bragg “at about 8:20pm on September 5th of 2011 and beat Blackshear to the point where he couldn't fight back,” in the words of prosecutor Scott McMenomey of the Mendocino County District Attorney's Office, then Kester wrapped an industrial-type extension cord around Blackshear's neck and strangled him to death. Kester maintained that Blackshear had attacked him first. “I fought for my life in that shed,” Kester said in a statement he read when he was sentenced Friday. Kester will do every day of the 35 years before he's eligible for parole.
CALL ME a bleeding heart, but knowing a little about the address where Blackshear breathed his last, and knowing something about Blackshear when he lived, I'm inclined to Kester's version of events. I remember Kester as a happy little guy before he was brought down by the evil white powder, and I wish he would have just walked away from Blackshear after he'd subdued him instead of murdering him.
THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS’ “Ad Hoc Committee” which was assigned the politically difficult task of finalizing the County’s policy regarding the use of the County’s Veterans Facilities, has finished their work. The Committee came up with the compromise that declares the local Veterans For Peace a “non-profit group” qualifying them for a reduced rate for use of the buildings. (“Real” vets groups get free use, others will pay a sort-of commercial rate.) This simple option could have been instituted a year ago and saved everyone a lot of trouble, but it required Supervisors John Pinches and John McCowen to weigh in to put the question to rest.
HUMBOLDT BAY BILLIONAIRE Rob Arkley, having long ago purchased the Eureka City Council and the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, is now intent on securing public funding to study the feasibility of an East/West rail connection linking Humboldt Bay to the Sacramento Valley and the national rail network traversing the Sacramento Valley. Arkley, of course, has idle real estate holdings on Humboldt Bay. He somehow envisions Humboldt Bay as a deep water container port and conduit for Asian imports which, if there were an east-west rail link, could be being distributed to the east via Humboldt Bay. Except Asian goods can, and presently are, shipped through Canada and arrive in the major distribution center of Chicago a day quicker. The East/West promoters propose to build a rail line where none now exists, where no right of way exists and where they will have to traverse several mountains and rivers, gashing their way through a couple of national parks as they go. Even for a grandiose outback tycoon like Arkley the task is formidable. The City of Eureka is on board as are most other public entities in HumCo, since the area has nothing but dope exports and the college in Arcata going for it at the present time. The Port of Eureka was developed where there was a major timber industry in the area. That industry is gone for the foreseeable future. No one in a position to do the Arkley R&R seems willing to stand up to Arkley to tell him the East/West proposal is an expensive pipe dream that can’t be done short of slave labor and a blanket waiver of the rights of a jillion existing entities. And if it could be built, its cost of construction would never be repaid by its freight business.
MENDOCINO COUNTY lost one of its living links to the past with the passing of Lila Lee in Ukiah on December 13th. She and her husband Robert were instrumental in the creation and operation of the Mendocino County Historical Society and the Held-Poage Library in Ukiah where she was the librarian for decades. Nothing gave this pair more delight than sitting in the living room of their home on Grove Street and sharing stories and photos about Mendocino County history. Lila also aided the Grace Carpenter Hudson Museum and the Anderson Valley Historical Society Museum. The contribution of the Lees to the preservation of the history of Mendocino County is enormous, greater than enormous because without them much would have been lost. I just hope the Lees are properly memorialized in a County now dominated by transients with no regard for, or even any interest in, the history of Mendocino County
NEW COUNTY RETIREMENT TIERS. No, you can't leave and you can't fall asleep. If we had to sort through this stuff to translate it for you, you can hang around long enough to read it. Ready, begin! Tuesday, the Supervisors decided how they were going to implement the new state pension reform law. “General” County employees can now retire at age 67 and enjoy, if that's the word, a pension that is 2.5% of their highest salary for each year worked, which is up from 2% at age 57, but ten years down the line the retiree may have departed for the happy hunting grounds. Law Enforcement can now get 2.7% at age 57, down from of 3% at 55. A fourth “tier” will be added which lowers the County’s fraction of pension contribution to 50-50, down from the County’s 55% share. There are a number of other provisions regarding how pensions are calculated, such as which years are used to determine the salary that the pension is based on and cost of living adjustments. If your math skills are deficient you're probably in for some surprises, all of them unpleasant. But the board decided not to authorize cost of living adjustments (increases) in pensions, a fairly substantial money saver. For the County, not for you. All the changes will mean that new hires will earn smaller pensions and will not get cost of living increases in their pensions. Lots of details remain to be ironed out, not the least of which is negotiating the cost-sharing percentages with each of the eight bargaining units that represent County employees. When the dust settles and new hires start coming into the system, the County can start reducing the amount they have to set aside for pensions each year, which, in theory, could free up some money for other programs and services. But it’s too early to know how much savings will result from this “reform” because there are a lot of variables for actuaries and accountants to factor in.
SEEMS LIKE every month there’s an announcement specially designed to alarm the dimmer sectors of our palest demographic. This month, it’s the news out of the Census Bureau that by 2043 “whites will no longer make up a majority of Americans.” The horror, the horror! You mean, are you saying, there won’t even be room for us in Redding?
SOME OF US RECALL the odd case of Mendo social worker, James Marmon. When Marmon complained that records at the Willits office of Children’s Protective Services were being altered and purged, Marmon’s supervisor, Bryan Lowery (now acting Director of Mendocino County Health and Human Services Department while Director Stacey Cryer is out on extended leave), informed Marmon that Lowery had deleted Marmon’s reports regarding a case Marmon had investigated. It seems that Lowery didn’t like Marmon’s conclusions. Marmon, in a letter he made public, accused Lowery that his “deletion of these documents was an attempt to cover-up an unlawful detention of two children in which he [Lowery] had misled Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputies into believing that a protective custody order (warrant) had been issued by the court.”
THE UPSHOT of Marmon’s brave attempt to act in the best interests of two children? He was fired and, as is the way in Mendocino County’s government circles, vilified by his superiors. Marmon has already been awarded $50,000 by the County for firing him, and he’s appealing his dismissal at the state level. Odd that the county would fire and reward the guy at the same time, but that’s what happened.
BUT IF CPS and Mendocino County fires a guy for trying to do honest, ethical work, how do you suppose those same people that fired Marmon will handle the beating death of the Fort Bragg child they blithely handed over to a known methamphetamine user? I’ll bet their shredder has gotten a lot of use lately.
LOOKING THROUGH what information we have been able to find on the Marmon case, much of it from Mr. Marmon himself, we saw the same old names all the way back to CPS atrocities of yesteryear — Becky Wilson, A.J. Barrett, Lowery. And now a dead infant. Isn’t it about time for the Superior Court and the Grand Jury to take a hard look at how this department operates?
ADD LOOK ALIKES: Colin Kaepernick San Francisco 49ers quarterback and Sarah Ann Allen of St. Helena who found herself in the Mendo County Jail last week.
A FELLOW CALLED ARTURO REYES has been named president at Mendocino College. A press release wafting out of Ukiah says, “Arturo Reyes is the Executive Vice-President of Academic and Student Affairs at Solano Community College. Previously, he worked as the Interim President/VP of Academic Affairs at San Jose City College and the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cosumnes River College. He taught Spanish full-time at Cosumnes River College and Will C. Wood High School in Vacaville, Calif. His education includes a BA and Teaching Credential in Spanish and a Masters in Educational Administration from CSU Sacramento. Currently, he is completing an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership at UC Davis.” He starts work on January 7th.
AGENDA ITEM 6b for the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors begins: “It is customary for the Board of Supervisors to honor outgoing Supervisors in recognition of their public service.”
IT IS ALSO customary to straight-up lie about what amounts to an endless parade of nuts and incompetents who have served as County supervisors, shoving them out the door on a smelly blast of turgid rhetoric that completely falsifies their actual performances.
OUTGOING 4TH District Supervisor Kendall Smith, who narrowly eluded arrest for theft of public funds, for some reason got to write her own goodbye: “Supervisor Kendall Smith, elected to office in November 2004, devotedly represented the constituents of the 4th Supervisorial District for eight years, from January of 2005 through 2012. Supervisor Smith served two terms as Chair of the Board in 2007 and again in 2011, the latter year in which she oversaw one of the most difficult fiscal years in the County’s history that required many tough budgetary decisions. She has served with distinction on many boards and committees including the Mendocino County Board of Retirement, Mendocino Council of Governments (MCOG), the Fisheries Restoration Grants Program and the North Coast Integrated Regional Water Management Plan/Policy Review Panel, to name a few. Her passion and concern for the environment has positively affected the local region’s wilderness lands, marine life, coastal ecosystems, old-growth redwood groves and salmonid restoration practices through sponsorship of items on Board Agendas and her involvement in the community. The citizens of Mendocino County deeply appreciate her leadership, her dedication to public service, and her passionate advocacy for sound public policy in representing Mendocino County. The Board of Supervisors wishes to recognize outgoing Supervisor Kendall Smith and show their appreciation for her service by adopting a resolution in her honor as follows:
“WHEREAS, KENDALL SMITH was elected to serve as Fourth District representative to the Board of Supervisors in 2004 by people who pay no attention whatsover, commencing her term of office on January 1, 2005 to unfailingly misrepresent constituents of the Fourth District of Mendocino County while protecting the interests of herself and her dogs for whose care she often billed the taxpayers of Mendocino County, and
Whereas having been re-elected to serve a second four-year term because the local media except for the AVA failed to alert voters that Ms. Smith was dishonest, marginally competent and perhaps certifiably 5150, and
Whereas, Ms. Smith somehow parlayed her experience as wine and cheese facilitator for Congressman Thompson into eight long years as a Mendocino County Supervisor, and
Whereas, during Ms. Smith’s eight years as Fourth District Supervisor she did indeed fully commit herself to maximizing her own compensation while minimizing that of all other Mendocino County employees, and
Whereas, Ms. Smith served on many boards and committees for no other reason than to fatten her travel and conference reimbursements, and
Whereas, Ms. Smith stole well over the minimally documented $3,000 for travel not traveled, and
Whereas Ms. Smith, aided and abetted by Mendo bureaucrats of comparable ethical functioning, only repaid the money she stole after four grand juries documented the thefts and DA Eyster threatened to prosecute her, and
Whereas, Ms. Smith bullied staff who are delighted to finally see the back of her Whereas, Ms. Smith went on every tax-paid junket she could pressure her colleagues into subsidizing, and
Whereas, Ms. Smith's incoherent presentations at public meetings sent eyeballs rolling and her colleagues deep into slumber, and
Whereas, Ms. Smith never took a clear position because no one could ever figure out what the hell she was talking about, and
Whereas, in the tradition of incompetent Fort Bragg supervisors, Ms. Smith helped to hopelessly screw up the Retirement Board and every other commission she served on, and
Whereas, Ms. Smith went to great lengths to see that her own unused office in the Fort Bragg County office complex was maintained, preventing productive use of the space by productive county employees,
Now therefore be it resolved that on behalf of the residents of Mendocino County and the Fourth District this board officially breathes a collective sigh of relief at Ms. Smith’s departure.
COSTLY ACTS OF SERIAL VANDALISM at the Hill House, Mendocino, last Thursday night where some ten persons had their tires slashed. The same lowballs probably broke into other nearby cars and at least one house, all of which were robbed of valuables. The Hill House management has gallantly stepped forward with an offer to file insurance claims on behalf of the persons vandalized.
AUSTIN MORRIS, the son of prominent Mendocino County economic commentator John Sakowicz, received a proclamation honoring the valiant young man from the Sups on Monday, December 17th. Last summer young Morris saved the life of another crew member who had fallen from the Kaisei, a research ship with Project Kaisel, monitoring the radioactivity emitted by the Fukushima Diachi nuclear reactor disaster. Morris pulled the young woman from the frigid 10-12 foot winter swells when she fell overboard during night watch off Vancouver.
WE WERE WONDERING why we hadn’t heard from Congressman Winebottle on the Newtown Massacre. Today, courtesy of Hank Sims at LostCoastOutpost.com, we discover that he has been designated as the Democratic Party’s Chief Doer of Nothing on the subject. Sims: “Politico reports that our representative in Congress (for another couple of weeks) will be leading a task force set up to look at possible changes to gun laws in the wake of the Newtown killings. Apparently, Congressman Mike Thompson was chosen to lead the Democratic task force in part because he is a hunter and a gun owner, and therefore has some cred. “This is not a war on guns,” he told Politico reporter Ginger Gibson. “Gun owners and hunters across this country have every right to own legitimate guns for legitimate purposes and our Democratic caucus is not declaring war on guns.” Meanwhile, Sen. Diane Feinstein is pledging to introduce an assault rifle ban on the first day of the next Congress.”
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