Mendocino County Today: Thursday, Jan. 4, 2024

Little Lake | Clearing | Ed Notes | Restaurant Stiffers | Adult School | Lions Celebrate | Joseph Foucher | Decapitated Seals | Stormcloud | Accidental Death | Caspar Pond | Josiah Foushee | Yesterday's Catch | Extravagant Joy | Strongest Dream | Bridge Nets | Rescue Selfie | Huffman Stance | Paris 1957 | Declines Offer | People's Park | Walker Save | Domestic Propaganda | Cordless Punch | Epstein Documents | Digs Chicks | America Beautiful | County Line

CALMER WEATHER will briefly build today with light coastal rain this evening. A moderate, cold storms system remains on track for Saturday with snow falling as low as 2000 feet in the northern half of the area. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 46F under partly cloudy skies this Thursday morning on the coast. Yesterday's morning showers gave us .06" of rainfall. We have a 30% chance of rain later today then clear for tomorrow. Rain Saturday, clear Sunday, then more rain next week.

ED NOTES

BOONVILLE'S MYSTERY HOUSE. Over the years, Wilson and Marchie Summit raised a whole football team of athletic boys in an earlier version of the house pictured here. If there's such a thing as an un-family house, this is it. 

THE ODD MAKEOVER of the property has raised ire and eyebrows all over town. You can't miss it because the place is in the center of commercial Boonville between the Disco Ranch Wine Bar and Boont Berry Farm on Highway 128 opposite the Redwood Drive-In.

FIRST, THE NEW OWNER painted the place an eye-throbbing aqua-blue, but as we all agree, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” even if the beholder goes blind from the visual presented.

THEN the new guy erects an illegally tall tin fence on which he posts a warning sign that trespassers will be shot, the only sign of its apocalyptic type in the Anderson Valley. Just like any community we've got our share of grumps, but none who are likely to shoot you for saying good morning.

THE COUNTY ordered Mr. Friendly to reduce the height of his concealing fence so his house is visible. So, in lieu of the too-tall fence, Mr. F put in a summer corn crop, but now it's winter, the corn is gone and we get the full frontal of the house and an inner fence apparently rigged to make it look like it's electrified.

WHO IS THIS GUY? He's less friendly than his weird premises. Neighbors say he routinely flips them off if they so much as glance his way, not that he's around much in daylight hours. A young man seems to be living in a rear building. 

THE OWNER is rumored to be from Cloverdale where aqua-marine house colors are rare and posted shoot-to-kill warnings are unknown, at least in the city center, as are boarded up windows of inhabited structures. We've got the full paranoid monte going here — fence, boarded up and painted over windows, inner fake electric fence, concealing twelve-foot corn in the summer months, gun warnings, vicious dogs, cameras, stadium-quality night time illumination. Even the Jehovah Witnesses wouldn't dare knock on this door.

AS IF HIS INITIAL “I've got guns and I'll open fire on you if you dare enter” was insufficient to keep people away, Boonville's least welcoming resident has now posted additional signs announcing he's got vicious dogs waiting for you if you survive his small arms fire. 

SPECULATION around town mostly goes like this: “If that nut is cooking dope in there he's certainly drawing a lot of attention to himself.” The consensus is that law enforcement's curiosity has got to be equal to ours, but I have to wonder on what pretext could law enforcement get inside the house? “It's the Sheriff! Open up. You're weirding out this whole town. We need to have a look around.” In the meantime, don't let your kids trick or treat and hope the place doesn't blow up.

FOUR ADULTS FAIL TO PAY $500 BILL At Local Left Coast Seafood Restaurant In Ukiah On January 2, 2024; Surveillance Camera Photos Below, Contact Restaurant Or UPD With Any Information You May Have.

MADELINE CLINE: Re: Left Coast

The group was identified and contacted. They have reached a resolution per Left Coast social media.

AV ADULT SCHOOL JANUARY OPEN HOUSE AND REGISTRATION DAY

Happy New Year!

Please see the below informational flyers for classes offered this winter and spring 2024 to adults in Anderson Valley.

We will offer English as a Second Language (two levels, three class options), Citizenship, Child Development classes (in Spanish), three levels of Conversational Spanish, two levels of Guitar, Creative Writing, Chorale, and Watercolors.

Most classes start the week of February 5th and run through May 24th. Prices for these classes range between $12 and $60 for the entire semester. Teacher information, start dates, and meeting times are on the attached flyers or our new website: https://www.avadultschool.org/

You can register via the website, phone, or email, or by coming to our January Open House and Registration Day on Sunday, January 21st from 12:30-2:30. Please come and meet teachers, see the classroom, enjoy free delicious food, and bring a friend or family member! For details, see the attached invite.

Please help us spread the word and don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or need help registering.

Best wishes,

Maggie Von Vogt
School Co-Coordinator & Language Teacher
Anderson Valley Adult School
office: 707-895-2953
www.avadultschool.org

LIONS CLUB CELEBRATES NEW COLLABORATION With Fort Bragg Senior Center And Food Bank For 2024

by Frank Hartzell

There are less than 400 shopping days until Christmas now, but the Fort Bragg Lions Club, Fort Bragg Food Bank and Redwood Coast Seniors have already found a way to have a much merrier 2024.

By working together like never before Christmas 2023.

The Fort Bragg Lions Club celebrated its 50th annual free Christmas dinner, with much of the usual on Christmas Day. There were Lions up before dawn preparing turkey, homemade stuffing, green beans, mashing potatoes and doling out pies.

As usual, the Lions put dinners together for about 400 seniors who were shut in or didn’t want to go out.

But there was something new - much larger participation by the Fort Bragg Food Bank. 

And the Fort Bragg Senior Center took all of the reservations. Marci Lazarus coordinated drivers and the routes for the homebound delivery services. 

“This made it all possible and fantastic,” said Cindy Lemas, who along with her husband, “Captain” Tim Gillespie, spearheaded the dinner for the 20th year.

All three non profits were thrilled about more collaboration in 2024.

“Honestly, I don't know why we had not partnered with the Senior Center for all of these years. They have a list of Seniors, they do meals on wheels, and have direct contact with the clients. This really looks like this will be a huge win-win for the future,” Lemas said.

The Fort Bragg Lions Club’s annual free Christmas dinner was the biggest party in town for many years. After preparing meals for the homebound, more than 300 people then came to the hall for the live “in house” full dinner, bar and gifts, which included music, performances and a big Christmas spread with gifts for all for many years. There were always hundreds of home deliveries first thing in the morning and then dinner for all in person attendees and a champagne toast. But the pandemic, combined with declining volunteers and rising ages of core members made 2020 through 2022 tough times for the event. The newspaper, which once wrote up the dinner every year, now wanted $500 to advertise it. The hall pickup and the home deliveries were pulled off in 2022 but at the expense of a very small group of Lions who worked around the clock. Harvest Market and volunteers like long-time Lions Darrell and Annette Phillips, Lavender Irwin and teacher Michael Lang helped pull it off with the Gillespie family and a handful of others. The club thought about pulling the plug in January 2023. Things looked bleak again when a key organizer for homebound deliveries never got back to the Lions Club in December 2023 and in desperation, Lemas reached out to the Senior Center.

And presto! The Lions had fun again. Everybody who wanted a dinner got one and more and nobody had to volunteer for all of Christmas Eve and all Christmas day.

“The Senior Center took all of the reservations and did a spreadsheet. Then Marci Lazarus (who delivered for many years) coordinated 7 volunteer drivers to deliver. We also partnered with the Food Bank this year. Due to the inability to fundraise as we normally do, due to (the pandemic years), we were very short on funds, and the Food Bank donated Safeway gift cards and several turkeys. So in turn, we provided 50 meals for the Food Bank to hand out to their clients. Harvest Market and Purity really helped alot with the donation of numerous items we needed, including rolls, sweet potatoes, bunches of fresh onions, celery and the fixin's needed for the stuffing. This was Tim's, Nicole's and my 20th year, a happy Lemas said.

Lemas is hopeful that the live dinner can come back next year instead of just pickup at the hall.

“We really miss serving Seniors, inside the hall. It is a big family reunion of Seniors and friends that have no family in our area, and otherwise would spend Christmas alone. If we can muster up enough volunteers, perhaps next year we can pull it off.”

The Lions served up 18 turkeys, 12 donated by the Food Bank. There were 65 pounds of canned green beans, 120+ pounds of potatoes that the Lions mashed and made gravy, there were 90 pounds of yams, 40 pies and perhaps best loved of all, 20 trays of Capt. Tim's homemade stuffing. It all got to the seniors without the volunteer seniors working themselves half to death this year.

“Shows that when community organizations work together #1 more hands = less work #2 new friends and forever bonds are made amongst volunteers across all organizations #3 the goals of each of the organizations are met - their missions are fulfilled and everyone feels the satisfaction of knowing they made a difference in at least one person's life today,” Lemas said.

Nancy Kaan Food Bank Volunteer and Vicki Hayes, a Senior Center Volunteer were among the other key volunteers for the event.

SEAL PUPS WERE TURNING UP HEADLESS on the Mendocino Coast. Experts finally confirmed the culprit

by Grace Toohey

The deaths have been seen since at least 2015.

Finding dead seals along California's coast is not novel in and of itself. The marine mammals get sick, are stillborn or even wash ashore after being fatally struck by a boat.

But decapitated seals? That was something new for North Coast ecologists — even ones who study stranded marine life.

Again and again since at least 2015, the mysterious — and gruesome — deaths kept occurring, primarily involving harbor seal pups at MacKerricher State Park, not far from Fort Bragg in Mendocino County, according to Sarah Grimes, marine mammal stranding coordinator and educator at the Noyo Center for Marine Life in Fort Bragg. The killings weren't happening en masse, but up to a dozen or so of the carcasses were discovered each of the last few years, she said.

Now researchers have finally solved the years-long mystery of the headless seals: coastal coyotes, a finding first reported by the Mercury News.

In a wildlife camera set up last year near the seal rookery at MacKerricher State Park, ecologist Frankie Gerraty captured a coyote decapitating its prey, confirming many researchers' hypotheses about the maimed seal carcasses.

“We had a captivating capture of a coyote dragging a freshly killed seal into the [camera view], and over the course of five minutes proceed[ing] to take its head off,” said Gerraty, a doctoral student in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at UC Santa Cruz.

That breakthrough video hasn't yet been published or shared publicly as researchers are working to further understand the seemingly new predator-prey relationship, Gerraty said. He hopes they will publish their research on the coastal coyotes in a future paper, documenting how the species has become not simply a beach scavenger but also a beach predator.

Gerraty's cameras have also confirmed this new predator-prey relationship at Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County, he said.

Gerraty started hearing about the decapitated harbor seals as he was doing research on the coastal coyote s' diet; he said it was well documented that they would scavenge already-dead seals.

Grimes had been working to understand the phenomenon — only with clues, not any confirmation.

“I went from domestic dog to bald eagle … what is doing this?” she said. “It's my job to really be a detective and look into these carcasses and try to figure out what is going on with them.”

But she was stuck.

When Gerraty started to hear about the decapitated seal carcasses, he said, he “had a hunch it could be coyotes because we knew they already spend a lot of time on beaches.”

But when he saw one of the headless seals up close, he thought the cut along the neck was too clean to be a coyote's work, and worried it might even be a human's.

Then the video footage proved him wrong.

“We know, 100%, that coyotes are responsible for killing a number of seals in a handful of sites,” Gerraty said.

“It's obviously gruesome, but at the same time … coyotes and harbor seals are native species,” he said. While this interaction appears to be new to scientists today, he added, “in reality it could be the restoration of this relationship.”

Coyotes are making a comeback in the Bay Area and Northern California after decades of decimation by farmers and ranchers, who poisoned and hunted the feral canines.

“As these predators are recovering, it's really interesting to think about how the ecological relationship may be coming back or not,” Gerraty said. He said it wouldn't surprise him if, historically, coyotes hunted seals, but it has never been documented.

It's important to foster and understand this native habitat and natural life cycle, Grimes said — and to not think of coyotes as savage or ruthless.

“This really is nature's balance,” Grimes said. “The coyote is not a villain. It's part of the ecosystem that has been missing for some years.”

It's still unclear why the coyotes are going for just the seals' heads and then leaving the bodies for other scavengers, but Gerraty has his suspicions.

“My guess is that the brains are pretty nutritious compared to a lot of other seal parts. Blubber can be pretty hard to get through,” he said.

But those questions will continue to drive Gerraty's research into just how widespread this predation is and what it could mean for each species.

“It could have interesting implications for both the seals and coyotes,” he said. He doubts the coyotes' current hunting patterns would have any drastic effect on the harbor seal population, but he said it could affect where they congregate and give birth.

“If these seals are realizing that some of these sites are risky … they might choose to give birth and 'haul out' in other locations,” Gerraty said. Depending where they move, he added, it could be less suitable for pup development or food sources, which could have more long-lasting effects.

Because of these many still unknowns, Grimes said, it's important for people to continue reporting marine creatures that are stranded — this is, dead on the beach or alive but unable to return to the water — to the West Coast Marine Stranding Network, which is run through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration .

“We learn so much about ocean health,” she said, “through those stranded animals.”

(LA Times)

MOM'S NOT FEELING WELL TODAY

Original Press Release:

On October 8, 2023 at approximately 3:00 PM the California Highway Patrol was notified of a reported traffic collision in the area of Sherwood Road and Birch Terrace in Willits (Brooktrails Subdivision).

After the collision, the driver of one of the vehicles, a Toyota Sienna van fled the traffic collision scene.

The reported traffic collision prompted the response of CHP officers and Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputies to assist as needed.

Upon arrival, CHP officers interviewed the one motorist at the traffic collision scene and also located the Toyota Sienna van unoccupied a distance away from the collision scene.

The motorist provided a physical description of the driver of the Toyota Sienna van which was subsequently given to the Sheriff's Deputies who thereafter located the driver walking on Birch Street.

A CHP officer responded to Birch Street and contacted the driver in connection with the traffic collision investigation.

This resulted in the CHP officer placing the driver, Root Harvest Birimisa (26-year-old male from Eureka, CA), under arrest for DUI and hit and run resulting in property damage.

Birimisa was subsequently booked into the Mendocino County Jail.

As a result of the arrest, the CHP officer had the Toyota Sienna van towed and stored by a Willits area towing company.

On October 9, 2023 the Eureka Police Department initiated a missing persons investigation into the reported disappearance of Christine Ann Randolph (53-year-old female from Eureka).

During the investigation Officers and Detectives in Humboldt County began to follow up on several leads in an effort to locate Randolph.

A multijurisdictional response was launched by the Eureka Police Department with the assistance of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Fortuna Police Department, California Highway Patrol, California State Parks, Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office and the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.

Investigators learned Randolph's family had become concerned for her safety after learning of Birimisa's October 8, 2023 arrest. Birimisa was identified as being Randolph's son and that the pair were known to be traveling together.

On October 11, 2023 Mendocino County Sheriff's Detectives assisted Investigators from the Eureka Police Department who had obtained a search warrant authorizing a search of the Toyota Sienna van in connection with the missing persons investigation.

The interior of the Toyota Sienna van was packed with a significant number of belongings to include clothing, luggage and living supplies.

Investigators began removing the belongings and subsequently located a deceased female adult who was located in a section of concaved flooring which was concealed by the large number of belongings.

The female adult was identified as being Randolph and the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office assumed investigative lead into the circumstances of her death.

At this time there is an active coroner's investigation in an attempt to determine the classification and cause of Randolph's death.

A forensic autopsy has been scheduled for 10-14-2023 to include blood alcohol and toxicology analysis.

Anyone who might have information which could assist Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Detectives is urged to contact the Sheriff's Office Tip-Line at 707-234-2100 or the WeTip anonymous crime reporting hotline at 800-782-7463.

* * *

Update, January 3, 2024

On January 3, 2024 the coroner's investigation into the death of Christine Ann Randolph was concluded.

The Chief Deputy Coroner classified Randolph's death as an accident with her cause of death being Acute Combined Diazepam, Nordiazepam and Morphine Toxicity.

CHUCK ROSS, MENDOCINO COUNTY HISTORY: 

120 years ago this week: Tragedy struck a Greenwood / Cuffey's Cove family. Josiah “Cy” Foushee (center) was working as fireman on Shay locomotive #139 the “Campbell” with Clarence Stout as engineer. They were returning to the Elk Creek woods pushing a string of empty disconnects, bob-cars, ahead of them. 

Crossing the Soda Fork trestle one of the empty cars jumped the track and the others bunched up behind it. Quicker than they could throw it in reverse, the engine toppled from the bridge. Both men jumped but Foushee was caught beneath the engine and scalded to death. Stout was badly burned but recovered fully. 

The locomotive was repaired and renumbered #5 and renamed “Helen P. Drew”

CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, January 3, 2024

ADAM CHAVIRA, Redwood Valley. Controlled substance, vandalism.

CHRISTOPHER COCHRAN, Willits. Marijuana for sale.

SOREN GREGSON, Ukiah. Under influence, resisting, probation revocation.

WHITNEY HUGHES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

ADAM LAFLIN, Laytonville. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. 

STEVEN MALEAR, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, unspecified offense.

KRISTO OUSEY, Ukiah. Parole violation.

ERIC PETTERSON, Laytonville. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, suspended license, failure to appear, probation revocation.

MEGAN VANHORN, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance for sale, paraphernalia, probation violation.

DANIEL YEOMANS, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, county parole violation.

MITCH CLOGG ON NEW YEAR'S EVE: 

It's too late for me to be here, but I gotta say this. I watched New Year's on TV, wondering at the extravagant joy on everybody's faces. Mostly it was Times Square, but we went everywhere, and the mood was the same everywhere. (“Everywhere” did not include places that are tragic right now.)

What all the celebrations had in common was that there were no contests except nonsense ones, no conflicts, no sides to take, no team to root for or against--absolutely no reason to feel anything but friendliness for the people around you, and it released everybody. They were screaming mad with pleasure at being in a jubilant mob of similarly screaming-mad people in the dead middle of a winter night.

'Swonderful!

“IT’S A FUNNY THING if you believe you’re absolutely right. You can get drunk off the feeling of how right you are. In your life, at any given moment, the strongest dream in that moment wins that moment. I am a very powerful dreamer … That’s the trick to life. You have to be wise enough to know when you are living in your dream. And you have to be humble enough to accept it when you are in someone else’s.” 

— Dave Chappelle

IT TOOK DECADES, BUT SAN FRANCISCO FINALLY INSTALLS NETS To Stop Suicides Off Golden Gate Bridge

Suicide prevention barriers at the famous San Francisco span have been completed more than a decade after officials greenlighted the project.

by Olga R. Rodriguez

SAN FRANCISCO — Kevin Hines regretted jumping off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge the moment his hands released the rail and he plunged the equivalent of 25 stories into the Pacific Ocean, breaking his back.

Hines miraculously survived his suicide attempt at age 19 in September 2000 as he struggled with bipolar disorder, one of about 40 people who survived after jumping off the bridge.

Hines, his father, and a group of parents who lost their children to suicide at the bridge relentlessly advocated for a solution for two decades, meeting resistance from people who did not want to alter the iconic landmark with its sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay.

On Wednesday, they finally got their wish when officials announced that crews have installed stainless-steel nets on both sides of the 1.7-mile (2.7-kilometer) bridge.

“Had the net been there, I would have been stopped by the police and gotten the help I needed immediately and never broken my back, never shattered three vertebrae, and never been on this path I was on,” said Hines, now a suicide prevention advocate. “I’m so grateful that a small group of like-minded people never gave up on something so important.”

Nearly 2,000 people have plunged to their deaths since the bridge opened in 1937.

City officials approved the project more than a decade ago, and in 2018 work began on the 20-foot-wide (6-meter-wide) stainless steel mesh nets. But the efforts to complete them were repeatedly delayed until now.

The nets — placed 20 feet (6 meters) down from the bridge’s deck — are not visible from cars crossing the bridge. But pedestrians standing by the rails can see them. They were built with marine-grade stainless steel that can withstand the harsh environment that includes salt water, fog and strong winds that often envelop the striking orange structure at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay.

“We have a continuous physical suicide barrier installed the full length of the 1.7-mile bridge on the east and the west side. The bridge is sealed up,” said Dennis Mulligan, general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District.

The barriers are already working as intended, he added.

As the project neared completion in 2023, the number of people who jumped fell from an annual average of 30 to 14, with the deaths in the spots where crews had not finished installing the barriers yet, he said.

Some people still jumped into the net, and crews then helped them out of there. A handful of them jumped into the ocean from the net and died, he added.

The nets are meant to deter a person from jumping and curb the death rate of those who still do, though they will likely be badly injured.

“It's stainless-steel wire rope netting, so it’s like jumping into a cheese grater,” Mulligan said. “It’s not soft. It’s not rubber. It doesn’t stretch.”

“We want folks to know that if you come here, it will hurt if you jump,” he added.

Firefighters in both San Francisco and Marin counties are being trained to climb down and rescue anyone who jumps into the nets. For now, ironworkers who maintain the bridge and are trained in rescue techniques perform many of the rescues. On the deck, members of a bridge patrol work to spot people considering suicide and prevent them from jumping. Last year, they dissuaded 149 people from jumping, Mulligan said.

Bridge officials were first asked to do something about the suicides shortly after the bridge opened eight decades ago. But it was a small group of parents, including Hine’s father, Patrick, who formed the Bridge Rail Foundation in 2006 and got the job done.

The name stems from the group's demand that the 4-foot-high (1-meer) railing along the bridge be raised. Its members often showed up at bridge meetings clutching large photos of their loved ones.

But a public comment campaign showed most people didn't want to raise the railing because it would block the sweeping views from the bridge.

An architectural firm recommended the nets based on the success a similar net had in preventing suicides in Bern, Switzerland, where officials installed one at a popular terrace overlooking a river, said Paul Muller, president of the Bridge Rail Foundation.

In 2008, bridge officials began exploring the idea of installing nets and after settling on a design, officials had to come up with the money to build them. In 2014, Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District officials approved the project for $76 million.

Construction costs have risen to $224 million, Mulligan said. In a lawsuit filed against the district that year, Shimmick Construction Co. and Danny’s Construction Co., the lead contractors on the project, said the nets and other work on the bridge as part of the project would cost about $400 million.

Changes and flaws in the government’s design of the nets and deterioration of the bridge’s maintenance platforms raised the construction price, the companies said. The contractors say they have lost approximately $100 million on the project and spent another $100 million to pay expenses and laborers to ensure the project’s completion.

“At no point did we let the litigation, or the fact that we haven’t been paid everything we are owed, get in the way of the work,” Steve Richards, CEO of Shimmick, said in a statement.

“Our dispute is with the District,” he added. “The people of California should not be deprived of the safety netting because of the District’s behavior.”

A hearing on the dispute is scheduled for June. Mulligan said the bridge district filed a countersuit in October.

Critics of the project say a lot of money is being spent on the nets to deter people who are determined to end their lives and who will simply find another method to do it.

But supporters of the nets, including the Bridge Rail Foundation, point to studies by Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley that show that most survivors will not try to kill themselves again. They say stopping easy access to lethal means is crucial to preventing suicides.

Dayna Whitmer, whose son, Matthew, jumped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2007, said she believes her son, whose body was never recovered, would have been deterred by the nets.

“A lot of people, when they’re that focused on a method, they don’t see anything else around them,” she said. “And if they get to that point where they can’t do it, they kind of just throw their hands up and sort of walk away. And I’m thinking that’s something he would have done.”

(Associated Press)

JARED HUFFMAN REMAINS EVASIVE WHILE PALESTINIAN CIVILIANS DIE

by Norman Solomon

Reading social media posts and press releases from Rep. Jared Huffman, of San Rafael, is illuminating.

The House member repeatedly and quite properly condemned the horrific killings of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 by Hamas. He repeatedly and quite properly condemned antisemitism. What he has not done is devote anywhere near the same amount of emphasis to condemning the horrific killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza that have continued since that day.

This is particularly striking since Huffman has routinely joined with others in Congress to vote for supplying many billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and ammunition to the Israeli military. It has persisted in killing Palestinian civilians — estimates say over 20,000 of them since early October. The wherewithal is largely courtesy of appropriations from Huffman and his congressional colleagues.

A pattern of civilian carnage was soon obvious. By mid-November, five weeks into Israel’s massive bombing of Gaza, the World Health Organization’s director-general told the United Nations that the Israeli military was killing Palestinian children at an average rate of about six per hour. That amounts to about 1,000 kids each week.

One wonders whether members of Congress, now providing such easy rhetoric in public statements to justify huge and ongoing military support to Israel, would be so comfortable with those appropriations if they had to dig their own dead children out of rubble.

As a Jewish American, I know about antisemitism. I grew up with the frightening stories of storm troopers and concentration camps, where some of my relatives perished. I know full well that antisemitism is a real problem. None of that justifies continuing to vote in the House of Representatives for massive military aid to Israel — aid that has been and is being used to slaughter civilians as innocent as ones you would see at a shopping mall in Corte Madera, San Rafael or Novato.

By mid-October, there was an opportunity for members of Congress to take a clear stand for a cease-fire. Eighteen Democrats in the House signed on as co-sponsors of the cease-fire resolution (House Resolution 786). But Huffman chose not to be among them and he is still not a cosponsor.

Instead, Huffman has basically supported President Joe Biden’s policies toward the conflict. On Nov. 19, Huffman posted on social media that a cease-fire would require “Hamas releases all hostages, disarms & relinquishes control of Gaza” — in effect, first unconditional surrender. While a letter to Biden that Huffman signed two days later urged “immediate cessation of hostilities against targets with a civilian presence to facilitate the timely evacuation and protection of children and babies,” it notably did not call for a cease-fire.

In the White House and on Capitol Hill, ethnocentric and racial biases have combined with geopolitical priorities and political expediency to enable U.S. government support of ongoing atrocities by the Israeli military. Huffman is a participant in this dynamic.

Congressman Huffman would better represent the decency of people in this congressional district by actually supporting a single standard of human rights.

Unfortunately, proclaiming opposition to antisemitism sometimes serves as a smokescreen for egregious and lethal double standards.

In early December, Huffman distanced himself — a bit — from the ridiculous and manipulative conflation of the Israeli government with the religion of Judaism, writing in a tweet that “anti-Zionism is often antisemitism, but not always.” Since many Jews are anti-Zionist, that should hardly be a revelation.

Yet, last month, Huffman touted his “long-standing opposition to BDS” — the effort to boycott, divest and sanction Israel — and he flatly called it a form of “antisemitism.” Such labeling evades the fact that authoritative human rights groups — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli organization B’Tselem — have declared that Israel is an apartheid state.

It sounds as if Huffman is claiming that such nonviolent measures as boycotting Israel are antisemitic. That’s absurd. Much as it would have been absurd to call such nonviolent measures that were aimed at South Africa’s apartheid government “anti-White.”

Someday, hopefully, a member of Congress representing Marin will have the minimal courage to apply a single standard of human rights to foreign policy.

(Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. A former candidate for Congress, Solomon lost a primary election to Rep. Jared Huffman in 2012.)

MEMO OF THE WEEK

JOHN SAKOWICZ tried to get Congressman Huffman on Sako's KMUD talk show with Sako's scheduled guest, Norman Solomon:

SAKO: “Again, I apologize if I came off as impatient for a response, Jared. In the past few years, we have asked for you to be a guest on our show. I realize you are always juggling a million other things, as you say, but our requests have largely been met with silence -- often with no call-back response, never a firm commitment to schedule in the future. Earlier press secretaries were far more responsive. On Thursday, I promise to introduce you and Norman and let the two of you discuss the issue. I'm not the focus of the show. You are. My co host, Mary, and I will largely step aside except to ask the occasional question. Please reconsider.”

HUFFMAN: "John, I was still considering coming on your show even though I am juggling a million other things. I’m always interested in a “thoughtful” conversation. Your inflammatory and insulting email below makes it clear that is not what you had in mind. Have a nice show. You might ask Norman why he calls me “evasive” but he dodges the most obvious question: what would or should Hamas do under the unconditional and unilateral ceasefire scenario he advocates? They’ve promised to launch as many October 7^th attacks as it takes until every Jew is dead and the state of Israel eliminated. This is a complex and tragic situation. Absolutist positions like Norman’s can sound good to people who are rightfully dismayed by the conflict, but as a Congressman I don’t have the luxury of ignoring complexities and consequences."

1400 LAW ENFORCEMENT PERSONNEL EXPECTED TO GATHER in Berkeley To Support Construction at People's Park in the Next Week

According to reports in the Daily Cal, on the Berkeleyside website and in private communications with several civic sources, as many as 1400 police officers are expected to come to Berkeley in the next week in anticipation of demonstrations against UC actions to continue a dormitory project on the site of National Register People’s Park. According to Berkeley Community Safety Coalition officer and civic activist Moni Law, Park supporters have been asked to join a preliminary gathering at 11 p.m tonight, Wednesday. Construction equipment is expected to arrive at 4 a.m Thursday, possibly to build a fence around the site while most students are out of town. Councilmember and mayoral candidate Kate Harrison told the Planet that UC workers have been asked to expect to provide 24 hour food service to the law enforcement personnel for at least a week.

(berkeleydailyplanet.com)

A FOIA STORY: The State Department Pleads Not Guilty to “Brainwashing”

The Global Engagement Center obliterates the “fine line” between doing its job, diplomacy, and crossing into prohibited domestic propaganda

by Matt Taibbi

In May 2019, the State Department was caught funding a site that issued caustic tweets at journalists deemed insufficiently tough on Iran. The story would likely have gone nowhere, but one of the victims was a CNN contributor and columnist for the Washington Post,who published a first-person horror story: “The State Department has been funding trolls. I’m one of their targets.”

The troll site belonged to something called the Iran Disinformation Project, and the victim was Jason Rezaian, known for having suffered 544 days behind bars in Iran after widely condemned secret espionage charges. The @IranDisinfo account reportedly disapproved of Rezaian’s take on Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy, which included an exacting program of sanctions that the Postwriter, for all his negative feelings about the Teheran regime, criticized as too punitive of Iran’s people. “For these thought crimes,” Rezaian wrote, “we are branded… Tehran’s ‘mouthpieces,’ ‘apologists,’ ‘collaborators,’ and ‘lobbyists’ in the West.”

The episode inspired complaints and fulminating commentary at sites like The Intercept and The Guardian, which were mortified the State Department was paying a little-known site to troll American journalists and human rights activists. The $1.5 million contract was swiftly suspended for @IranDisinfo, but most press outrage was directed at the use of GEC to flog Trump’s Iran policies, not the seemingly graver issue of a diplomatic agency having a $100 million troll-and-censor program to aim at Americans. The Intercept even quoted Barack Obama’s former head of global engagement, Brett Bruen, who said the flap “reflected a broader problem with counterpropaganda funding in the Trump administration.”

Thanks to an accidental detour in a search of the federal FOIA portal, Racketfound revealing background emails about this incident. 

The GEC was created by Barack Obama’s Executive Order in early 2016 but given permanent funding in a bipartisan act of Congress later that year, with sponsors including Republican Rob Portman and Connecticut’s Rob Murphy, and originally had what one source described as an “arc where they were very heavily funding groups in the Russian disinformation space,” only to “try to shift to the Middle East and Iran” under Trump. The shift led to some of the funding squabbles, which were reportedly resolved again as Trump left office. 

The “Iran Disinfo” story therefore had limited legs as mainstream news, because it might lead to questions about who else was getting GEC funds, and why - a Pandora’s Box no one wanted opened. When in the Twitter Files we started to see a river of emails mentioning GEC, one of the first things we learned was that nearly all its contractors are secret. An Inspector General’s report from 2020 not only showed the names of all but three of its 39 GEC contractors redacted, but that most of GEC’s money came from the Department of Defense.

Why would the State Department need to redact the names of counter-disinformation contractors, and why would these be paid for by the Pentagon? A former Defense official explained that GEC claimed to be building a “clearinghouse hub for the entire government” on disinformation, with the aim being able to “zap it in real time.” But they were having funding trouble, so they came to the DoD, “hat in hand,” asking for “like $30 million” for a “bunch of these small entities that no one had ever heard of.” The budget number ended up being larger, but the “hub” idea never panned out. 

Racketlast year filed a raft of Freedom of Information Requests in search of identities of GEC contractors, but a recent production didn’t disclose those names. Out of frustration we went dumpster-diving in the government’s FOIA library, looking for agency data. We turned up an apparently discarded request made by a once-suspended Florida immigration attorney that included revealing exchanges on the Iran Disinfo episode. In one email sequence, an obsequious GEC official (name redacted in the FOIA process) is questioned by Alex Carnes, senior Democratic aide in the Senate Appropriations Committee. 

Just before the “Iran Disinformation Project” story broke in 2019. Carnes sent an email to the GEC counterpart, saying he’d “received word from a few different people” that there were “stories circulating about GEC targeting Americans.” He laid a blunt question on the GEC liaison: “Is there something you expect to be in the press about this topic?”

Days later, as the Post piece and others filled the headlines, a seemingly miffed Carnes told the GEC officer that his agency would need to have a heart-to-heart with his committee. “It sounds like the @IranDisinfo issue is what I was picking up on,” he wrote, adding that it would be “good to discuss this week what happened,” since this was “not the kind of thing we should hear in the rumor mill and then read in the press before we hear about it from State.”

The GEC official tried to reassure Carnes, warning him not to pay attention to the “conspiracy narrative” that exists in “parts of the Internet” about the U.S. government’s “grand plan to brain wash [sic] Americans.”

A by-now clearly impatient Carnes hog-slapped the GEC official in reply, saying:

For the record, I think it’s less of a concern of a conspiracy to brainwash Americans and more of a concern about State resources being inappropriately used to target Americans…

Then, in a line that should inspire uncomfortable emails within the newsrooms of Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) entities like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, and the fact-checking site Polygraph.Info, Carnes suggested GEC shared its “targeting Americans” problem with the BBG. Using federal resources to target Americans, Carnes wrote, is [emphasis mine]:

An issue we’ve had with BBG in the last year and let’s face it, it’s a fine line the GEC itself has wanted to walk. So not totally unfounded.

Carnes hasn’t responded to requests for comment, but the idea that GEC had a mandate to walk just such a “fine line” between legal and illegal messaging is not far from what Michael Shellenberger and I were denounced for arguing in House testimony last year. The line about BBG should also give pause. Although people like Anne Applebaum humorously were warning “The Voice of America Will Sound Like Trump“ as late as June 2020, five months from Joe Biden’s election, the feared Trump takeover at BBG never came to pass. BBG entities in recent years have however begun to sneak in more domestic content, like fact-checks of statements by “big names” like Tulsi Gabbard and Oliver Stone on Syria, or Donald Trump’s comparisons of Covid-19 to the flu, among many other stories.

While Carnes and the GEC official fretted over the actions of one small contractor, other GEC-related FOIA productions, some already made public in last year’s “America First” lawsuit against GEC, show GEC was engaging in a much more ambitious program targeting American media audiences. GEC was in regular contact with virtually every major news agency in America, including CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many others, often pitching stories and asking that its opinions and findings be promoted — both on the record and as unattributed information — by these outlets. 

In one instance, GEC pitched findings in connection to its”Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation“ report to Michael Gordon of the Wall Street Journal. I’m familiar with Gordon from his New York Timesservice in Moscow, but he’s known to American audiences thanks mainly to the infamous “Quest for A-Bomb Parts“ WMD piece he co-bylined with Judith Miller. As the press watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) noted last March, Gordon even after the WMD fiasco continued to “relay the charges of anonymous US officials against official enemies” for years in the Times. 

The “Pillars” report was also sent to platforms like Twitter, seemingly in the hope that they would take down journalists and writers identified as “mouthpieces,” “proxies,” and witting or unwitting “proliferators” of Russian content. This is exactly what the “Iran Disinformation Project” was ripped for doing, i.e. calling people “‘mouthpieces,’ ‘apologists,’ ‘collaborators,’ and ‘lobbyists’” of Iran. The only difference here is that GEC went after Russia instead of Iran, and pointed a finger at writers from sites like Canada’s Global Research instead of a Washington Postauthor.

The “information ecosystem” concept GEC employed was blunt guilt-by-association methodology, by which a person whose views overlap with an “adversary” state could be deemed witting or unwitting “proxies.” This is how former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was identified in a different GEC report as being “highly connective“ with Russia, for instance. GEC’s reports not only included analyses, but trophies — lists of “social media presences” removed from what they called “the matrix.” Such a list was supplied to the Journalin this caseon “deep background.” The email about this portion contained the hilarious off the record disclaimer that “The GEC is in no way claiming a cause/effect relationship between any GEC exposure effort and any account removals,” but the game was obvious.

Was the GEC just being friendly, offering its knowledge to a reporter like a gift? Not exactly. When Gordon hesitated, GEC quickly circled back and, in the language of Gary Cole’s Lumbergh character from Office Space,let him know that “we would like to go ahead and pitch this information to another outlet,” if asses didn’t get in gear.

Gordon humorously asked if he could have until Tuesday to “sort it out” with the Journal.

The piece eventually got approved, and GEC set up an interview between Gordon and former acting coordinator Daniel Kimmage. Even though they were working with one of the most famously cooperative reporters in media, the GEC still asked for a handout, in writing.

“Would you mind giving us the questions in advance?” a GEC official pleaded. That would “go a long way,” he said, to “helping Daniel be prepared.”

Gordon to his credit didn’t send the questions in advance. Still, these episodes, while humorous in some respects, show the broader problem with agencies like GEC, urged by Congress to bring a “a whole-of-government approach leveraging all elements of national power” to achieve what they call a fact-based strategic narrative. 

The piece GEC flogged to Gordon ended up being published with both on and off-the-record references to the Global Engagement Center, but was followed up by essentially identical articles in CNN, Voice of America, CNBC, and PolitiFact, among many others. Some quoted the infamous Alliance for Securing Democracy, the creator of the bogus Hamilton-68 dashboard, in saying Russia was spreading stories about “links between the Pfizer vaccine and the deaths of vaccine recipients.” Since when is it the State Department’s job to defend the honor of Pfizer? 

Apart from showing how reporters generally took it on government faith that certain sites were indeed Russian proxies — at least one I reached last year said it never got a call from any of these outlets — these episodes show how supposedly foreign-facing federal agencies view content removal as part of their mission, and use compliant commercial media to spread messages to domestic audiences on topics beyond their legal remit. “Brainwashing” may be strong, but these activites are forbidden fruit, and as these emails show, it isn’t just Republicans who know it. 

MARCH OF THE CREEPS:

Bombshell new Jeffrey Epstein documents have further revealed the pedophile's relationship with Bill Clinton, with one of Epstein's victims claiming Epstein told her 'Clinton likes them young' - and another suggesting Ghislaine Maxwell may have had a relationship with Clinton's aide. Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20 year prison sentence for sex trafficking, was questioned under oath about her relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. The testimony was part of a 2015 defamation case filed by Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre. One May 2016 document - a request for permission from the judge to take more depositions - includes detail of testimony already taken by Johanna Sjoberg, who was recruited at the age of 21, in 2001, to work as a massage therapist. Sjoberg was recruited on a college campus, had no massage training, and said she was forced to perform sex acts on Epstein. Sjoberg told the lawyers in 2016 that Epstein told her 'Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.' Other details in the trove of documents include how Epstein emailed Maxwell to insist that Stephen Hawking did not participate in an underage orgy on his Caribbean Island in 2006. Hawking, the celebrated wheelchair-bound physicist who died in March 2018 aged 76, was among the guests at a barbecue during a conference on the island sponsored by Epstein.

— Daily Mail 

THE ORIGINS OF AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

In a brief essay that appeared ca. 1925, poet Katharine Lee Bates described her inspiration for writing “America the Beautiful,” the poem that would evolve into one of the nation’s best-loved patriotic songs, during a trip to Pike’s Peak in 1893. Bates was a professor at Wellesley and had traveled west to teach a summer course in Colorado Springs. Bates and the other professors decided to “celebrate the close of the session by a merry expedition to the top of Pike’s Peak.” They made the ascent by prairie wagon. At the top, Bates later wrote, she was inspired by “the sea-like expanse of fertile country … under those ample skies,” and “the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.” Those opening lines—”O beautiful for spacious skies, / For amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!”—would eventually become the lyrics of one of the best-known songs in American history.

Bates finished writing “America the Beautiful” before leaving Colorado Springs but didn’t think of publishing it until two years later. The poem was first printed in a weekly newspaper, The Congregationalist, on July 4, 1895. Bates’s patriotic words were soon set to music, most popularly to composer S. A. Ward’s “Materna,” the tune to which we sing it today. Celebrating “country loved” and the “patriot dream,” the song resonated with Americans from all walks of life and became enormously popular. Within twenty years, Bates (after revising some of the lyrics in 1904) had “given hundreds, perhaps thousands, of free permissions” for “America the Beautiful” to appear “in church hymnals and Sunday School song books of nearly all the denominations; … in a large number of regularly published song books, poetry readers, civic readers, patriotic readers … in manuals of hymns and prayers, and anthologies of patriotic prose and poetry … and in countless periodicals.”

While Bates was initially surprised by the poem’s success, she later reflected that its enduring “hold as it has upon our people, is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.”

This is the version of the poem that Katharine Bates copyrighted and authorized people to use:

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!