THE NEW GUY AT THE PRESS DEMOCRAT: “The newspaper is there to do what great organizations do, and hold power to account, and lift up the folks who need lifting up,” Fusco said. “To me, the great thing about news organizations is that if we do our jobs well, we get the haves to care about the have nots. And I think the Press Democrat and its sibling publications really embody that — at a time when it’s more important now than ever, given the political climate in America.”
— Chris Fusco, freshly appointed exec editor of the Press Democrat
CONGRATS, CHRIS, on your new job. On the off chance you’re serious, I suggest you look into your owner’s mysterious ownership of the old Northwest Pacific Railroad, the most lucrative parts of it anyway, that former Congressman Doug Bosco somehow came into possession of. I also understand that the Bosco Group, or however he, Anderson and the rest of that rapacious gang are organized, is making a move on the old state hospital property near Sonoma, much to the horror of nearby residents who fear even more traffic on overburdened Highway 20 and a total end to the few shreds of rural remaining in that area.
POWER in Sonoma County has seldom been held to account, beginning with the routing of Highway 101 directly through the City of Santa Rosa to accommodate Hugh Codding’s shopping center on the north end of town, thus destroying a once coherent, pretty little place which, since, is long gone into a hellish, San Jose-like sprawl indistinguishable from every other town in America ruined by the Grandgrinds. Even fast-fading Healdsburg, book-ended by massive, under-construction housing developments for well-heeled geriatrics is certain to destroy that town’s small town charm, routed 101 away from its city center.
AS A SUBSCRIBER since 1971, and a family friend of the late, great Art Volkerts under whom the PD really did take on the Northcoast’s outback Babbitts, the paper, like all big circulation paper-papers, has faded, becoming little more than a wine promo sheet and clumsily written press releases. I don’t know, dude, your paper seems like it’s on auto-pilot, with a lot of young reporters who… Well, no point in criticizing a paper with no apparent copy editors.
SOME YEARS AGO, the late R.W. Apple, a dominant figure at the New York Times for many years, stopped in at Boonville’s beloved weekly on a swing through NorCal. He mentioned that he’d been offered the top job at the Press Democrat when the Times owned it but had refused “because I’d have to fire everybody and start over again.” He said the reporters were ok but everyone above them would have to go. Which has been my assessment of the enterprise from the outside looking in ever since Volkerts.
I LOVED this pre-game rant from an Eagles football fan: “You know, a real professional football team, with real professional men, take a loss. Instead, they cried about it. ‘Oh if our quarterback wasn’t hurt…’ If you would have frickin’ blocked for him, he wouldn’t have been hurt! You suck, you’re not man enough to admit it. Now you’re going to come back here, and you’re going to get your ass kicked again, and we’re going to show you how men play. Not like those little whiners from the West Coast who drink their little wine with their pinkies up, and act like they’re so superior. Guess what? This is Philly. You’re going to lose. You suck!”
I HOPE SOMEONE tracked that guy down for comment on the drubbing his Eagles got from the allegedly effete San Francisco 49ers on Sunday.
THE PHILADELPHIA fans are the consensus worst in sports. When you have five-year-olds flipping off visiting Niner fans already running a gauntlet of curses and insults, well golly, I’ll bet that kid is a handful in kindergarten. Niner fans are rabid but nothing like the oafs and oaf-ettes in Philly.
I THOUGHT our sports fans were pretty bad until I watched a Netflix documentary on the great Brit soccer player, David Beckham. Beckham got red carded (kicked off the field) during the 1998 World Cup. England went on to lose the game to Argentina after a penalty shoot-out. England’s loss was blamed on Beckham and, for a time, he became the most reviled man in England. Volumes of death threats and insults aimed at him and his family necessitated a phalanx of security men everywhere he went.
MONICA HUETTL reported on the Mendofever website: “Mendocino County LAFCO was presented with options for raising money for the Ukiah Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency. The plan to fund the GSA will either be a property tax assessment or a bill for water usage. The GSA submitted another invoice to the water districts to fund the rate study. Redwood Valley’s portion is around $9,000, due in March 2024. The benefit to the landowner is that by monitoring groundwater, hopefully, the existing wells won’t go dry, as many have done in the Central Valley.”
WE WOULD BE VERY SURPRISED if Redwood Valley water users accept or support a tax or fee for this dubious “Agency” and its wine-industry dominated Board, which the state forced on the Ukiah Valley and has been paying for until recently. Especially if all they’ll get for it is some vague hope that the GSA will ensure that their wells don’t go dry. The only thing we’ve seen that the GSA has produced is some consultant-generated water modeling studies that few people besides themselves have shown much interest in. Ukiah Valley needs water, not another layer of water bureaucrats. (Mark Scaramella)
ADAM GASKA: The state funded the Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Plan and that’s it. Currently the GSA is being funded by URRWA (Upper Russian River Water Agency, a JPA of Redwood Valley, Calpella, Millview and Willow water districts), City of Ukiah, County of Mendocino, Russian River Flood Control. We scrape together about $300,000 to pay for the monitoring and reports to keep the state happy.
Our Groundwater Sustainability Plan was accepted by Department of Water Resources but they recommended we do a lot of studies. The consultant would like us to assess “fee’s” to collect $2 million annually to pay for said fees. Technically it is not considered a tax because it is a government agency created by a state mandate so it’s a fee which means voters don’t get to vote. They will be given a chance to protest once we decide the fee schedule and method. If 50%+1 don’t protest, the fee goes forward.
I am pushing back to only budget the minimum well monitoring and reports. My proposal is for the water districts to continue to pay $10-15 annually based on service connections which is a little less than we pay now. Then we would assess a fee on property within the basin which includes Redwood Valley, Ukiah and all points in between. That would be about $10 per acre per year if it was a flat acre fee but a parcel fee would likely be easier. I want to cap our budget at $300,000-400,000 per year. Shaking $2 million out of the community is crazy.
If DWR wants us to do studies, they can provide us some funding.
GASKA CONTINUED: I do address more than just water but water is what I actually have some influence on currently. I farm for a living and do that as a full time job. I also have two kids and a wife. In my spare time, I educate myself on things other than water and often write about them. Today, I went to an open house at New Life Clinic in Ukiah, a dual diagnosis/treatment center. It was very informative.
I am not OK with the dam closures. It will be devastating as I often say. IWPC couldn’t pull together the $18 million to do the studies the government mandated to relicense the PVP. It’s PG&E’s private property. They didn’t want to keep paying for all the BS the government wants to keep it going. Studies, fish ladders, maintenance of the dam itself all add up. No one can force them to maintain it or relicense. If Lake County wants to keep Pillsbury, they should approach PG&E about buying it. Mendo and Sonoma would be very interested in buying water. The new infrastructure is going to cost $50 million alone. All the new storage necessary to actually put the 27,000 AF they estimate would continue to be diverted is probably going to cost half a billion dollars.
ISRAEL’S LEADERSHIP must be assuming that the International Criminal Court will never mount a case. Many of their observations about the Palestinian people have been chilling, and their open decision-making process makes the imputation of command responsibility easier than it is in more chaotic circumstances. The Israeli minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, has declared that he has “released all restraints,” that the Israeli army is “fighting human animals and will act accordingly,” that the plan is to “eliminate everything” and that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before.”
Senior Israeli military and government officials have stated that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” and that “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
The former head of the Israeli National Security Council, Major General Giora Eiland, has said that “creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal” and that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, has invoked the Allies’ bombing of Dresden and other German cities in the Second World War — which she claims caused 600,000 deaths—to justify Israel’s actions. The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, has claimed that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true,” while Netanyahu has described the conflict as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness” and invoked the biblical injunction to destroy Amalek (“Do not spare them: put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”). Such statements have a genocidal intent. – Conor Gearty (London Review of Books)
WHAT YOU DON’T HEAR about the Gazan slaughter by the Israeli Likud Party is that many Israelis are as shocked and appalled as the rest of the world is. The extent of the grand slaughters of World War Two weren’t widely known until after the War, but the all-out blitz of the trapped Gazan population is available for viewing, live, with every night’s television news. Our government’s pathetic bleatings that “We’ve urged the Israelis to avoid civilian casualties” is so transparently feeble that makes it even more obvious that the Biden Administration is a co-conspirator in this huge crime.
AND AS THIS ATROCITY in the Middle East is underway, we’re still funding the proxy war in Ukraine because the Biden Administration has no plan to end it, let alone the diplomatic ability to get it done even if there was a plan. Sending Blinken and his inept crew to cool out the world’s hotspots is like sending Kim Kardashian out there. You know in your bones that the rest of the world just laughs at the Biden team and shakes their collective head at Biden’s obvious decrepitude. You see news clips of global gangsterdom looking on disbelieving while Biden slurs his way through his big print platitudes. The only question of the Middle East now is how far will the catastrophe spread, how disastrous will it be when the guns finally cease fire.
AVERAGE INCOME citizens find it harder and harder to get by in what is universally billed as capitalism’s finest hour, with magic money everywhere except where much of the real work gets done. And “liberals” of the Biden-Harris Democratic Party type, have managed to exacerbate race relations by defining people as “oppressed” whose grievances hardly amount to oppression in any historical, global sense of the term while they fund two wars on two continents.
JIM SHIELDS: Geiger’s Long Valley Market officially shuttered it doors Thursday, Nov. 30, coming as a surprise to no one. Geiger’s ownership “team” staying true to form, closed its operations without even the common courtesy of a public announcement or notice taped to the entry doors. They’re a reprehensible bunch of clueless, classless, pathetic pieces of humanity.
This lamebrain trust came up with the novel idea of operating a grocery store without groceries.
Last Spring, the owners put out a letter-statement to the Laytonville community, essentially laying the blame of the store’s decline on the collapsed weed industry.
While I have certainly spoken and written thousands of words about the failed County Cannabis Ordinance’s adverse impact in our rural areas, most of us business owners are surviving, albeit with reduced revenues.
Local people were and are doing their best to support local businesses. Laytonville area folks would have continued supporting Geiger’s if they had not been driven away by an empty store and owners who seemingly don’t care or give a damn.
People here in Laytonville supported Geiger’s Store for 80 years. They made it an institution. A place where everybody shopped, stopped and talked to neighbors, renewed old acquaintances, and met new folks. It was definitely a happening place.
None of that is happening anymore.
I want everyone to know that for some time I’ve been working with other community members, and more recently with Supervisor John Haschak, to come up with a plan(s) to solve this problem. We’ll be discussing all of these things at our Town Council meetings, and I’ll keep you updated.
AS A DAILY viewer of the BBC News, I happened to see BBC news anchor Maryam Moshiri flip off the BBC’s international news audience, which that night included me. Ms. Moshiri’s bird flew so subliminally fast, I wasn’t sure I’d seen what I thought I’d seen. “Wot the hell?” I gasped. “Hey! I think the BBC news lady just flipped everyone off!” The BBC? No way. That would be like getting flipped off by Queen Elizabeth.
I WASN’T SEEING THINGS, and Ms. Moshiri was soon on the air apologizing for “a silly joke” not intended for a live broadcast. She said she’d been joking around with her production team, pretending to count down using her fingers.
“It was a private joke with the team and I’m so sorry it went out on air! It was not my intention for this to happen and I’m sorry if I offended or upset anyone. I wasn’t ‘flipping the bird’ at viewers or even a person really. It was a silly joke that was meant for a small number of my mates,” she said, adding a “face palm” emoji.
Some people took offense, commenting on Moshiri’s tweet that it was unprofessional and using it to call for the defunding of the BBC. But she was also inundated with support from dozens of people who had found the moment amusing, with one writing: “As a BBC license payer I demand more of this type of behavior.”
I THINK American news people should take up the bird toss after their every bogus newscast, which is all of them. “This is David Muir signing off, and this is for all you saps out there who think you’re getting the straight skinny from me.”
I WONDER if the “progressive” Northcoast cares that their Congressman Huffman is deeply complicit in the Gaza genocide? Huffman’s largest campaign donor in 2021-2022, the J Street PAC, is lobbying Congress to approve $3.8 billion plus “emergency” military funding for Gaza-destined tanks, bombs and bullets.
HUFFMAN also gets tens of thousands of dollars in campaign money from weapons dealer Honeywell International, which services the Israeli military.
EVEN BY MENDOLIB’S subterranean standards, last week’s Ukiah tableau featuring councilwoman Rodin, Congressman Huffman and other lib luminaries welcoming Ms. Dueñas to the mayor’s job was pretty low. Just the week before, Rodin, backed by councilwoman Sher, announced, “I will not vote for Dueñas to be Mayor simply to add Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”
DUEÑAS responded by saying she was “very clear” on the job requirements, and added that she was elected to represent “The Latino immigrants, the deaf, the handicapped and the poor.”
Note to Mayor Dueñas: you’re elected to represent everyone, not only your fellow Hispanics, the poor and the handicapped.
MARIN STIRS, as noted in the excellent reporting of Eva Crysanthe:
“On Tuesday, December 5, 2023, a group of self-organized Marin high school students walked out of class for the second time in a month in an act of political protest. Chanting, “What Do We Want? Ceasefire! When Do We Want It? Now!” they carried an oversized, home-made Palestinian flag/banner into “Big Pink,” the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Marin Civic Center.
The youths then duly quieted themselves before assembling in the Board of Supervisors chambers, patiently waiting their turn to speak in support of a ceasefire resolution. The youths’ arguments were well-reasoned, carefully fact-checked, and deeply persuasive. Among other issues, they outlined what were clear violations by Israel of Geneva conventions, and Israel’s disproportionate retaliatory killings of Palestinian civilians…
…If you had any doubt about the threats the peacenik kids said they had sustained earlier, you perhaps needed only to watch what unfolded at the beginning of public comment. That’s when ceasefire petition organizer Joe McGarry, the father of two young children, was interrupted by a woman who had suddenly stood up in the audience, unfurled a large Israeli flag against her body, and shouted, “I hope your children are raped and killed!” followed by additional insults about McGarry.
…It would be difficult to explain how unusual the extreme behavior and language of this woman was at the normally staid Marin Board of Supervisors chambers. But her conduct was excused and supported by the anti-ceasefire crowd, who literally shouted, ‘we support you!’…”
ONE OR ANOTHER proto-fascist Trumpian (Megyn Kelley?) said the other day that Trump has “lost multiple steps mentally — but I’ll take him over Joe Biden any day of the week.”
THE ‘LIBRULS’ are always conflated with the pathetic Democratic Party, a party as reactionary as the Republicans as the bi-partisan support of the ongoing Gazan genocide should make clear even to Trumpians but doesn’t, and both parties are also funded by the same big hunks of money. Everything gone off the political rails in this country has been a bi-partisan effort all the way.
OBVIOUSLY, BIDEN is out of it, ga-ga and not responsible. Trump is absolutely golden-tongued alongside the old Delaware bag man for the credit card companies (presently charging Mafia-like rates of interest). This might be news to some of you, but corporations donate heavily to both political parties, which is why PG&E and the aforementioned credit card companies, to name two of many villainous corporations, are able to so seamlessly put the screws to the American people.
BIDEN, to watch, read, and listen to the mainstream media, “may have slowed down a little,” as one hack put it, but he’s perfectly plausible as president, and right there you have the shameless corruption of lib media because it’s obvious to the whole country the guy is past it, but we’re supposed to believe he isn’t.
A BIDEN-TRUMP re-run will be the ultimate farce, but no way will Biden be the candidate of the credit card thieves and the PG&E power monopolists. It will be interesting to watch exactly how the thugs of the Democratic National Committee dump Biden for Newsom, but you read it here first.
BIDEN will soon be shuffled off-stage for certain, and then all the books by the inside people will appear describing how the old boy was propped up in front of the teleprompters as the insiders held their collective breath that he got on and off without too much of a senility demo. That, plus a couple of books how the Justice Department delayed and tried to rig the system to protect the Biden family from criminal indictments. What a country, but not surprising that a bellowing fraud like Trump can be president, and then president again.
YEA TEAM. Trump has always been pretty much incoherent, a kind of babbling stream of consciousness dude whose genius is that he taps into the anger out there at the entire drift of events in the battered USofA, which he blames, variously, or all at once, on the “Marxist communist liberal socialists” of the Democratic Party, as obvious a gang of bolsheviks since Lenin, to hear El Blimpo tell it. But the idea of this shotgun libel is to pretend that liberals are responsible for everything that’s gone wrong.
FIFTY, SIXTY YEARS AGO, when words still had meaning, a guy who talked ‘marxist communist liberal socialists’ would have been assumed really, really stupid or simply deranged. Nobody would have taken him seriously as anything but comic relief. But the idea of this shotgun libel is to pretend that liberals are responsible for everything that’s gone wrong. That was old ‘Dolph Shicklgruber’s main move — make war on half your people.
MOMOCKEL!
At the November 14, 2023 meeting of the Democratic Central Committee, the Committee endorsed Trevor Mockel for District 1 Supervisor and Maureen ‘Mo’ Mulheren for District 2 Supervisor. They have not made an endorsement in Supervisor District 4 because the anon forces who choose candidates for the Democrats haven’t instructed their Mendo stooges who to support yet beyond MoMockel.
FIRED? WHY?
Editor,
I too was not happy with M. Elizabeth Magill’s and the other university presidents’ responses at the congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus, but I do not support resignation or firing. Everyone in a difficult job has made mistakes and has learned from those mistakes. Should any of us be fired or forced to resign for every mistake we make?
All of these accomplished women were grilled at the hearing trying to balance their duties to protect the safety of their students and their right to free speech. Even the Supreme Court struggles with the same issue.
Yes, their answers at the time were inadequate, but they have subsequently explained their thinking and plans to move forward. They deserved an opportunity to get it right. We would expect the same for ourselves.
Kenneth Olshansky
San Rafael
A READER WRITES: Dear Mr. Wizard, How can it be that major university presidents cannot rationally explain student body outrage regarding the humanitarian disaster ongoing in Palestine without falling into the demagoguery of antisemitism, without any attempt whatsoever to discuss the failed statecraft and continuous wars that have plagued the region since day one in 1948? Who’s in charge here?
ED REPLY: The Wizard thinks the three administrators should have ridden out the should-have-been-anticipated demagoguery of professional demagogues and not resigned. But I’d think academics would be able to slam dunk questions as to what is and what isn’t anti-Semitism. When you have 19-year-old blank slates shouting Hamas slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the response should have been something like, “These children of privilege couldn’t find Gaza on a two-state map, and don’t know which river to what sea. They aren’t anti-Semitic, they’re just young and dumb; but, like those of us who are old and dumb, they’re shocked by the Israeli slaughter of 1.8 million trapped people, and shocked that their own government has blocked a ceasefire. It’s a comprehensively dismaying series of events.”
NORTHCOAST high school football produced two state champion teams, Ferndale and St. Vincents of Petaluma, three state champs if you count Marin Catholic. Some enterprising kid reporter might be able to eke out a living writing about high school football from Marin north, coverage that seems to have died when Herb Dower retired from the Press Democrat.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Maxed out credit cards? I can believe that. I don’t eat out very often- personal preferences- but the cars parked at all of the restaurants show that I am an exception. How do people afford to eat out with their families- several times a week? This past spring 4 of us sat down for lunch at Black Bear Diner in Woodland, California. Two of us had burgers, one a sandwich, and the fourth had a salad. Three waters, one soda. With the tip it came to $100.00. A hundred bucks for lunch. Debt, debt and more debt. I read somewhere that even in Weimar Germany, during the hyperinflation nightmare then endured, the restaurants were always full. Perhaps that is what is happening here. People sense things are bad. People know in their guts that things are not as they should be. So they say “to hell with it” and whip out that plastic for a nice meal knowing it may be the last time they get to enjoy it. I don’t know. What I do know is we are at the precipice of incredible change. Incredibly bad or incredibly good. Who knows. My wife and I eat out once a week and to keep costs as well as our waistlines down, we buy one meal and split it between the two of us. Believe it or not, we always leave the joint very full and satisfied.
[2] Many of us buy into the idea that the U.S. Empire and Western Civilization is in the process of collapsing. This is not necessarily a fast or linear process, and the art of surviving and adapting usually keeps the nimble too busy to declare a point or event where the sky actually fell.
But, the sky does fall. Just like it did for the Romans, the Church, the Confederacy, the Nazis, and so on. Just like it will for the American Empire. The end of the era of cheap energy will usher new systems of civilization on a much smaller scale. So the news of today is not so hopeless or grim. It’s confirmation that the process of collapse and rebirth is working as it must.
[3] How’s the economy doing? Let’s just say that even in college I did not eat Ramen noodles. Now as a grown ass adult I have started the practice. Actually, with the variety of flavors they have, it is a nice warm meal for these colder pre-winter days. It is a shelf stable product, and the price per meal is dirt cheap too.
[4] Over in the nearby big city there are several beautiful buildings. The library especially. Built by Carnegie. Wiki tells me he built over 3000 libraries in the US and other countries. What has Gates built for the plebes lately?
[5] Many many moons ago I was traveling in the Soviet Union. They had bread stores in the USSR. To compare one such to a boulangerie in France would be a mistake, of course, and the name of a bread store in Russia is not near as mellifluous as boulangerie; in fact, it sounds more like clearing your throat (seriously). But Russian black rye is still quite good. One day entering a bread store the shelves were empty. We asked our Intourist guide (a KGB agent) why the shelves were bare. She replied that the reason the shelves were bare is because the local farmers had bought it all; according to her (the party line), the bread was so inexpensive that the farmers were buying it up to feed their pigs.
[6] How would the ‘Transition to Renewables’ work on a day like today in Ct?
Air is damp, heavy & still, sky looks like it has been dredged up from the bottom of the NAtlantic; the phrase Darkness at Noon applies here. And tonight 5″ of rain and 70 mph winds are predicted. Our Governor states our nuclear power plant & natgas fired power plants will be closed by 2035, at which time we will be at ‘Net 0’. Our a$$kissing & worthless local media never presses him on how this is possible. Where would electricity come from today, for example; no sun, no wind, nothing? Just to replace the nuclear plant in Waterford will take hundreds, maybe thousands, of wind turbines. So far we have three, one that doesn’t work. The other two, not far from me, will be shut down tonight when the high winds hit. Except under ideal conditions those monstrous things are unproductive. Once 2035 rolls around, and the ‘Transition to Renewables’ is complete, we will be f#kked.
[7] Last night, I set a live trap of my own manufacture at the rat hole on the wall at floor level. Now, understand, that West coast (The Best Coast) rats have higher standards than those East coast rats, usually found in New Jersey. I bated the trap with peanut butter, roasted peanuts from a bag, and a piece of fine red Briette cheese (Again, our rats have standards, and cannot be enticed by a shiny bauble or cheap meal…unlike the New Jersey rats, or, as I understand, the New Jersey women…)
The rat…666, refused my offering.
So it continues….
Be First to Comment