Mendocino County Today: Thursday 5/9/24

Warming | Ash & Harv | Jim Martin | Community Choir | Prohibited Person | HIV & Syphilis | Navarro Estuary | JAG Shuffle | Blue Pacific | Misguided Consolidation | Animal Hospital | New Margaritas | Bill Bradd | Duncan Peak | Ed Notes | Yesterday's Catch | Dead Creek | Homeless Crisis | Cold Coffee | $24 Billion | Recess | Wine Tears | Get It | Breast Obsession | Cinco Babe | Muir Story | Solar Powered | Not Welcome | Pro-Lifers | Huffman Disappointing | Lazy Congress | Protest Progress | New Slavery | Israel Shahak | Flower Garden

A CONTINUALLY BUILDING PACIFIC RIDGE of high pressure will continue to bring warm temperatures and gusty N to NE winds through the end of the week. This combination of elements will allow for unseasonably warm and possibly record high temperatures closer to the coast, but also for interior valleys. A cooling trend is expected by the weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Clear skies & 47F this Thursday morning on the coast. Let the warming begin. Great weather is forecast for the next 10 days, although we all know the fog is always lurking nearby. No fog in sight yet.

JIM MARTIN

Dear Friends of Jim Martin,

It is with a heavy heart that I share the news of Jim's passing. As many of you know, he fought hard against lung cancer for the past few years. He loved life, and wanted it to last as long as it could, but because of that he didn't always share his struggles. He was a man that cared deeply for those around him, and I'm sure you each felt that from him. I hope the thought of him brings you a smile or a chuckle, because joy and laughter were core components of who he was and what he brought to this world.

If you have a moment and the desire, we (his family) would love to hear a few words or a story that you remember of your time with Jim.

Thank you for being an important part of Jim's life. 

Beth, Gracie and May

Emails can be sent to Beth at bbenson@mcn.org

IF YOU'D PARK STRAIGHT, TERRY…

On Monday, May 6, 2024 at 11:49 P.M., a Mendocino County Sheriff's Office deputy was working on uniformed patrol in the 1200 block of Marina Drive in Redwood Valley. The deputy observed a male subject inside of a vehicle parked in a manner which blocked several parking spaces.

The deputy contacted the sole occupant of the vehicle who was identified as Terry Richmond, 43, of Willits. 

The deputy conducted a search of the vehicle and located a loaded firearm. A records check of Richmond was conducted for past prohibiting violations or convictions. Richmond was found to be a prohibited person and unable to lawfully possess firearms or ammunition due to prior convictions.

At the conclusion of their investigation, the Sheriff's Deputy developed probable cause to believe Richmond committed the following crimes: Prohibited person in possession of a firearm, Prohibited person in possession of ammunition, and Carrying a loaded firearm not registered to subject.

Richmond was subsequently arrested and booked into the Mendocino County Jail for the above charges, where he was to be held in lieu of $25,000 bail.

PUBLIC ADVISORY SYPHILIS AND HIV PREVENTION 

HIV and SYPHILIS are HERE in Mendocino County. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.

If you had sexual contact or shared injection drugs with a partner whose history is unknown, you may have been exposed to HIV and SYPHILIS. 

For HIV tests, please see the link and phone numbers provided below: takemehome.org 

For free rapid HIV testing contact Patty at MCAVHN at 707-272-9811 

Planned Parenthood in Ukiah 707-462-4303 to schedule an appointment, ok to walk in for testing without an appointment. 

Be sure to ask about post-exposure treatment. It must start within 72 hours. For more information, please see a medical provider. 

(Mendocino County Public Health Presser)

NO TIMBER HARVESTING IN MENDOCINO COUNTY’S JACKSON STATE DEMONSTRATION FOREST IN 2024, Charter Revision On May 8 Advisory Group Agenda

by Frank Hartzell 

CASPAR, 5/4/24 — With one roaring exception, all the usual sounds of spring have returned to the Jackson Demonstration State Forest in Caspar.

The woodpeckers whoop their exotic songs, the swallows dive and chirp while making their nests, the bears lumber through brush, the hikers, bikers and mushroom hunters (with permit) explore favorite trails that have become new again. While much of the huge forest exists permanently in a kind of cathedral like silence, the oppressively wet winter blossomed and birthed millions or billions of bugs, birds, mammals, amphibians and even a reptile or two.

But there is no sound of chainsaws and falling trees, and there is no chance of more tree-cutting for profit until 2025, possibly even later. A timber harvest plan that uses pre-burning and other environmentally favored techniques will be on the agenda of the Jackson Advisory Group (JAG) on Wednesday, May 8 at Fort Bragg Lions Hall on Redwood Street. Even if approved, that harvest would not begin before 2025.…

mendovoice.com/2024/05/no-timber-harvesting-in-mendocino-countys-jackson-state-demonstration-forest-in-2024-charter-revision-on-may-8-advisory-group-agenda

ANOTHER MISGUIDED CONSOLIDATION

A READER WRITES:

That was quite the furball [at the Supervisors meeting on Tuesday] and they did let us down by not taking a final stand on the gas station. But we, and the board have let Dr. Miller down without even knowing it. I do remember the whole conversation as it happened and like many, did not see the significance at the time. I’ve been on the BHAB almost a year and I really said my first words to Dr. Miller recently and it was a direct question as to whether having so much power in one position was a good thing. So, I knew about it but still didn’t see the clear picture until yesterday. I specifically challenged her as to it possibly being looked at as cultist, and staff in its good intention has supported this look, unintentionally. The board has done exactly what we have asked by using the talent we have to the fullest. I’m still posing the question to both county employees and the public whether they want many unhappy low paid workers or just a few highly motivated individuals on the payroll. I believe at this point I have decided on the latter especially now seeing I got exactly what I asked, happy higher performing customer service-oriented staff and department heads. As for Jenine, what I have seen is exactly what I’m hearing from the newly taken on public health employees. She is smart, detail oriented, and service driven. She is a bargain.

Same for CEO Antle.

They very much disappointed me not making the final decision to back planning and buildings denial of the gas station. I want growth, but in the right places. The bottom of Ridgewood grade is not one of them. Whoever had the idea for a strip mall out there was a dummy. Huge waste of time which is a systemic problem with the board.

Lastly, two highly paid attorneys sat there and watched huge amounts of time debating over procedure without intervening which is their job. One mangled our marijuana program, and the other is not showing me much. I wish they again, would take out two jobs and pay a higher rate for one sharp person like Charlotte Scott. Different people have different skills despite the same training, she has shown me she tries to be board engaged and on point with most of her initial assessment’s in real time.

I was happy to see from all aspects more public engagement for or against, anything. I hope that grows as the year progress’s and we take on new members to the board. We are not going to all agree, but we can at least be more civil in standing our own positions. Attacking without a solution is just reactive fear which needs to die a quick death in this county.

* * *

MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: We heard that Ms. Scott declined the position of County Counsel and that’s why they ended up hiring Mr. Ross as a double-the-cost contractor out of the SF seraglio.

* * *

MAZIE MALONE:

Re; Converging Public Health and Mental Health Director in my opinion is a giant mistake. We need Jenine Miller’s focus on Mental Health, Illness and Addiction, period. The problems are too numerous and pervasive for her to be in both roles, it muddies the waters even more. Obviously I understand the intersection of PH and MH, so seems like it makes sense, but it is a very bad idea. Families and those suffering with Mental Health Issues deserve and require a faithful focused Mental Health Director.

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Didn’t we just undo the failed experiment of combining MH PH and Soc Services? (HHSA) And here we go again. Ms Miller will burn out, it’s too much for one person. HHSA went from 3 directors to 1. When that failed it went back to 3. Now we are going to 1 again? We never learn and we repeat, repeat, repeat and wonder why we are where we are. Stupid, stupid stupid. And what is happening at Soc Services? Without a director now for how long? And who now is over Children’s Services since the sad and untimely death of Jena Conner? No one in leadership is mentioning any of these events.

* * *

JULIE BEARDSLEY:

Dear Editor,

As a follow up to Adam Gaske’s letter regarding the proposed merger of Behavioral Health and Recovery Services (BHRS) and Public Health, I’d like to point out that over 30 experienced Public Health staff left, retired or were fired after Public Health Director Anne Molgaard was fired by CEO Darcie Antle, and Dr. Jenine Miller, a psychologist with no Public Health background was appointed as interim PH Director. Since that time, Miller has forced out or fired staff members who knew what should be done and spoke out, (including the Director of Nursing, the Director of Maternal Child and Adolescent Health, the epidemiologist, and multiple RN’s, and Supervising Public Health Nurses), and surrounded herself with “yes men” who laud her and praise her, despite the fact that Public Health is a shadow of what it was. Dr. Coren left early because he disagreed with Jenine Miller’s management. Public Health is being overseen by BHRS staff who are not familiar with the functions of a Public Health department, and many projects and initiatives that were underway when Molgaard was the Director have now been shelved. These projects were important to the health of the community. BHRS staff may be well-intentioned, but I am very concerned about how the functions of the PH department are being eroded. Back when the Health and Human Services “super agency” was broken up, there was discussion about whether to merge BHRS and PH. At that time, past Medical Officers and Directors, as well as current PH staff, contacted the BOS to express their concerns and to urge them to not approve a merger because Jenine Miller was in no way qualified to run Public Health. Nothing has changed, except that a majority of people who understood what was necessary for a functioning PH department have left and you have inexperienced employees who naively believe that everything is fine, rah-rah Jenine Miller, or are afraid to speak up for fear of retribution. I hope going into the summer we have no major Public Health events. And I would also note that Mendocino County is now #1 in drug overdoses, one of the top counties in suicide rates, and you just have to drive down State Street to see the number of obviously mentally disturbed individuals wandering around yelling at their hallucinations. It seems to me that whatever BHRS is doing is not being very effective, and I would urge the BOS to have Dr. Miller focus on the issues of mental health and substance misuse.

Public Health is about prevention. BHRS is about treatment. They are two very different modalities and require different degrees and training. Our community deserves better.

* * *

MARK SCARAMELLA:

The Supervisors’ knee-jerk tendency these days is to consolidate to thinking it might save money or because they simply can’t fill senior positions. These are not good reasons for consolidation. It has nothing to do with Ms. Miller. The original idea to combine Public Health, Social Services and Mental Health was to reduce three directors and three separate sets of admin/finance staffs to one. Instead, all it did was leave the three quasi-directors in place and create a new and completely unnecessary fourth super-administration over them which, coincidentally, became Carmel Angelo’s first position in Mendocino County. We were the only ones pointing out that that “consolidation” without the reduction in admin and director positions was nothing but a giant waste of money. It turned out to be a power grab by Carmel Angelo who soon became disenamored of Mental Health because their billings were not reliably reimbursed by the state, not because of any perceived operational shortfalls. So she privatized Mental Health by bringing in former Ortner Manager Tom Pinizotto who rigged the adult mental health contract for Ortner who had no qualifications for the work. When the Grand Jury pointed out that Mr. Pinizotto had “the appearance of a conflict of interest” (he had an actual conflict, not that Mendo cares about such things), the Supervisors denounced the Grand Jury and insisted that the Ortner contract was “legal.” When that blew up Camille Schraeder picked up the pieces while everybody blamed Ortner and became the monopoly they are to this day. (The County has since sued Ortner for mental health data they don’t have and Ortner as a company is out of business. We have no idea where that suit stands; it’s pointless anyway since Ortner doesn’t have anything to provide.)

Where was I? Oh yes, consolidation. 

We do not know of a single “consolidation” in Mendocino County history that has worked out well. The combination of the Assessor’s office with the Clerk and Recorder’s office has not saved any money and put a person inexperienced in Assessor’s office operations in charge of it and assessments have been in catch up mode ever since. The consolidation of the Auditor and Treasurer was a bad idea opposed by everyone but the Supervisors, and it’s still a mess. The consolidation of Animal Care with Animal Control could have been an improvement if it was put in Ag or the Sheriff’s office, but instead it sits as an bastard child in what was Health and Human Services. We have no idea who the Animal Care & Control Director reports to. Ms. Angelo’s attempts to put combine the cannabis program into Ag and then in Planning and Building were complete failures. And now we have this backdoor consolidation of Public Health and Mental Health because they can’t find anyone to run Public Health (they had a perfectly good Director in the person of Barbara Howe but she ran afoul of Angelo and was escorted out by security in one day. Now they are talking about combining Mental Health and Public Health without any plan or analysis (just like they did with Auditor/Treasurer). A few Board members have balked a little because there has been no formal organizational change or plan, just an extra assignment for Dr. Jeanine Miller. But Supervisor Mulheren doesn’t want any dissent in the room so she’s trying to push through the Mental Health/Public Health marriage despite these bleats from her colleagues. Since the Mental Health department is little more than an administrative function that funnels no-bid contracts to the Schraeders now after privatization, its role is mostly a financial and administrative/contracting function as an extension of Ms. Schraeder’s private company who does whatever mental health “work” is being done. 

There was never a good reason to combine any of these offices which were set up by people in the past who knew a little about what they were doing, as opposed to these bumblers and pretenders. The public needs an independent Auditor, an independent Treasurer, an independent Assessor and an independent Clerk-Recorder because they should not be subordinate to the political winds and whims in the Supervisors chambers. Unrealized, unanalyzed and un-followed up on consolidations for alleged financial or personnel reasons are a formula for corruption, nepotism, insider dealing, and waste. But, as shown by the recent election of a patently unqualified candidate over a clearly experienced one in the First District, and by the near-complete lack of public interest in the Board meetings or the budget, the public no longer seems to care about such basic County matters. So here we are and things are not likely to get any better. And when the AVA is gone, all this sordid history (including the intelligent remarks like those above) will be buried in our archive where no one will remember it’s even there.

PS. The Plot Thickens. Late Wednesday we heard that the County’s SEIU 1021 Union rep has filed a formal complaint about the hurry-up petition that was circulated among the Public Health and Mental Health employees late Tuesday afternoon pointedly asking those employees to sign up in favor of Dr. Miller’s appointment to run both offices. 

The person who circulated the petition is a woman named Angel Slater, a public health nurse who works directly for CEO Antle as a Disaster Relief Nurse Manager and who was Supervisor-elect Madeline Cline’s campaign manager while serving in that taxpayer funded position.

KATHERINE PENNYLANE

Hey community!

Just saw this post and thought I’d give everyone on the ridge a heads up:

“Just called Mendocino Coast Animal Hospital and they are shutting down end of May! The message says they’ve tried selling the business to no avail.

My dog was due for an annual and needed updates rabies shot.

We need better animal services on the coast.

BOONVILLE DISTILLERY: Our new margarita flight…pepperoncini margarita, pickle margarita, and the devil’s margarita (our classic margarita topped with Anderson Valley Pinot Noir!) each one refreshing and tasty! Come check with out!

BILL BRADD

William John Bradd was born on May 1, 1935, in Toronto, Canada, to Gerry and Elinore Bradd. Gerry was a professional hockey player and Elinore was a Mohawk Indian who passed away when Bill was a toddler. Because his father was often away for hockey games, Bill lived with his grandparents and uncles and learned early to be independent. Living on a farm on the Precambrian Shield in rural Northern Ontario shaped much of his early writing.

At age 22 he was in Toronto working at the Goodyear Tire Company factory. As comfortable as he was in a working-class environment, where he learned to love dancing and carousing, he also felt drawn to writing and began auditing classes at the University of Toronto. Two years later he moved to New York City and began a lifelong activity — organizing and giving poetry readings.

In 1965 he moved to Big Sur where he joined with followers of Gurdjieff, continued writing poetry, and winning a Canada Council grant for his work. He supported himself as a bartender. By 1972 he had moved to the Mendocino Coast where he created a literary and interview program called “Collage” on a local radio station. It was through this that he met a young radio assistant, Judy Sperling, who became his life companion for the next 47 years.

Bill continued to organize poetry readings and read in venues from Canada and New York, to San Francisco and throughout Northern California. His reading was extremely powerful, entertaining and impactful. He produced three iterations of North Coast “Poetry on the Radio” programs. His work with California Poets in the Schools inspired a generation of Northern California poets. Many poetry magazines published his work. Bill was an interviewer for the bicentential project Mendocino County Remembered, editor of The Mendocino Review and a co-founder and editor of the Ten Mile River Press, which received a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Bill's excellence as a raconteur and storyteller is captured in three spoken word CDs. He published seven books of poetry including: Snuffling Sound, A Kingdom of Old Men, Dialogue of a Three-Cornered Hat and Continent of Ghosts. His memoir/novel Notebooks from the Emerald Triangle describes a slice of unique local history.

Through all his work, his love of the spoken word, and his irreverent, non-judgmental, and creative experimentation (e.g., “Avenue of Madness”), Bill was an inspiration for and companion to countless poets, artists and musicians in Canada and the United States.

He was an ace card player, a lifelong horse racing enthusiast, a lover of his own and others’ dogs and cats and reveled in his life along the Ten Mile River, canoeing and watching the wildlife.

He is survived by ex-wife, Victoria, daughter Michelle Ryan and the love of his life, Judy Sperling. His spirit survives in the rural Ontario farmland, in California coastal hills, valleys, bars and dance halls, in the Mendocino sunshine and fog and wherever the spoken word has importance in the human heart. His web site — https://billbradd.com/ — will stay up for 5 years and additional work will be posted periodically.

Bill passed into the realm of the spirit on April 9, 2024. May he Rest in Peace, Love, and Beauty.

(originally published in the AVA, with a few additions. — Duane BigEagle)

ED NOTES

LATE EMPIRE CHRONICLE: THE FINAL PLUNGE

Editor,

Yesterday Anne and I were in the Fort Bragg medical system so that she could be seen by her primary care physician. Anne had to fill out a form which instructed her to choose from a menu of every conceivable gender configuration. And then the next instruction was… I'm not making this up: 

CURRENT GENDER____?

Michael Nolan

Comptche

MY GRANDSON, a sixth grader, told me a kid in his class is a furry. A what? “A furry. She pretends she's an animal and sometimes crawls around at recess.” Apparently there's a furry movement, thousands of extreme anthromorphs who don animal suits for meetings. I wonder if incompatible species mix, dogs and cats, say. I occasionally get press releases whose authors sign themselves, she/her or he/him or they/them. The she/hers and he/hims haven't replied when I write back: Is you twins? 

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, I felt sorry for Trump as I read about Stormy Daniels testimony yesterday at Orange Man's weird trial for whatever in New York. In my under-informed opinion of the lascivious proceedings against the former president and infamous rue, I thought it had something to do with financial irregularities, among them paying Stormy to keep quiet about a joyless but non-commercial sexual encounter the two of them shared years ago at a golf tournament. Why the judge allowed Stormy to even appear let alone describe the mechanics of what the fun couple did seems to have had more to do with humiliating Trump than anything that looks like justice.

HOW DANGEROUS IS TRUMP? As they have done for the last sixty years, the Democrats are keening in loud weepy choruses that if Trump is re-elected it means “the end of democracy.” In the country whose two political parties are owned by the rich, What democracy? But fer shure Big Trouble is headed our way in November, although Trump's first tour as president wasn't nearly as destructive as W. Bush's, the latter igniting the entire Middle East and destabilizing the whole world based on the lie that Saddam Hussein was about to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. W's entire administration should still be in the federal pen, but these creeps get standing o's wherever they go..

TRUMP is not Hitler or Mussolini. He doesn't have the smarts, doesn't have a plan, doesn't have smart enough helpers, doesn't have the support of even a solid half of us Americanos who vote, which is way less than half, doesn't have the generals, doesn't have, overall, the means to “end democracy,” which has managed to end itself anyway in money and the Joe Biden Construct.

WHAT TRUMP can and already has done is stir up the armed wahoos, who he's rhetorically prepped to jump off if he loses to the Biden Construct. How much trouble can bully boy militias cause? Regionally, probably a lot, but not enough to bring shopping or the NFL to a halt.

TRUMP'S JUDGE lacks gravitas. He looks like… well, a silly person, a person not to be taken seriously, as if the bailiff had barked, “All rise!” and Captain Kangaroo walked out. Without going all Retro White Man on you here, but Mendo's two judges back in the day, O'Brien and Broaddus, looked and acted like judges. There are nine Mendo judges today for a population of 90,000 people. 

TODAY, likely as not, you get a judicial Captain Kangaroo. O'Brien warned me one day when I argued with him about his illegal order that a kid I was responsible for be banned from the county, “If you say another word I will have you taken into custody.” Something like that, but he wasn't jivin' and I had to get back to Boonville so I sat down and shut up. Another day I was in Broaddus's court when he fired like a half-dozen guys off to state prison. His courtroom was packed with crying wives and girlfriends, and the judge, who seemed in a foul mood, appeared to take each felon personally. As the weeping increased at about the fourth guy, Broaddus, looking fiercely out at the crowd, growled a loud, “Next!” I got a little apprehensive myself that he might send everybody in the room to the state pen. 

BUT FAST FORWARD to a courtroom in Las Vegas and OJ. Yes, that OJ. In a mesmerizing Netflix documentary, called, “OJ: Made in America” there's a clip of the broken football hero, an internationally famous person, a god who fell as far as any god of ancient myth, as he was being sentenced for a bumbling robbery aimed at getting his memorabilia back from the petty crooks who'd stolen it from him. The judge, a youngish woman, took a long, loud slurp from her fast food drink before she read off a long list of inflated charges that got OJ more than 30 years in prison. The consensus among observers was that she was taking OJ all the way down for getting away with his murders of Nicole and Ron. But I ask you, slurping a soft drink in this context?

ON THE SUBJECT of courtroom farce, DA Eyster's conjured non-case against falsely dismissed, elected County Auditor Chamise Cubbison has yet to get to the prelim to see whether Eyster has a case or not. The DA was going to bring his non-case himself, but he's handed it off to a Santa Rosa attorney at $400 tax dollars an hour to argue it for him. Last we heard, the Rose City ace was “getting up to speed” on the matter, which is non-existent so she'll have to make one up. Which, I would think will take some time. When this howling bullshit finally gets to court what do you think the odds are that the judge will toss it? A million to one? Ten mil?

INCIDENTALLY, Democracy in Mendocino County is looking kinda shaky. We have the DA, in league with a cowardly and incompetent board of supervisors removing an elected county official, waiving the presumption of innocence, and we have Mendo's wine industry funding the election of a young Potter Valley cowgirl over much more experienced candidates simply because she can be depended on not to interfere with the booze biz.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, May 8, 2024

JORGE FERREYRA-ALVAREZ, Lucerne/Ukiah. DUI.

RONDA HARBOR, Willits. Violation of domestic violence court order.

ANDREW IANNUZZI, Clearlake/Ukiah. Parole violation.

LAMONT JONES JR., Ukiah. Failure to appear.

FRANK ONETO JR., Dos Rios. Parole violation.

ALEX SANCHEZ, Fort Bragg. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, probation revocation.

POLITICIANS KEEP SHIFTING BLAME AS CALIFORNIA’S HOMELESSNESS CRISIS WORSENS

by Dan Walters

Over the last half-decade, state government has spent about $24 billion to ameliorate California’s worst-in-the-nation homelessness crisis. Local governments and private charities have spent countless billions more.

Despite those immense expenditures, the number of unhoused Californians has continued to increase to more than 181,000 in the latest federal census. It’s not only the most of any state but the highest ratio vis-a-vis population, and 28% of the national total.

The data imply that whatever officials have been doing hasn’t worked – or even more ominously that underlying factors, such as extremely high living costs, particularly for housing, and macro economic trends are so powerful that officialdom can only nibble at the margins no matter how much money they spend.

Recent political discourse on the issue indicates that Gov. Gavin Newsom, state legislators and local government officials recognize, if not publicly acknowledge, the virtual impossibility of significantly reducing homelessness, and therefore have evolved into self-protective blame-shifting.

When Newsom was running for governor six years ago, he promised to appoint a “czar” who would wage a frontal assault on homelessness. A year into his governorship, reporters pestered him about making good on the promise. Obviously irritated, Newsom pounded the podium at a budget news conference and snapped, “You want to know who’s the homeless czar? I’m the homeless czar in the state of California.”

As the number of homeless people continued to rise, Newsom began shifting from promises of effective action to blaming others for failure – local government officials in particular. Just last month, for instance, Newsom demanded more oversight of local performance and threatened to withhold additional funds for those deemed to be ineffective, saying, “I’m not interested in funding failure any longer.”

Local officials, most of whom are Newsom’s fellow Democrats, have responded with complaints that one-year budget appropriations prevent them from establishing permanent programs to move people off the streets and into housing.

Both Newsom and local officials complain about a federal appellate court ruling that homeless encampments cannot be cleared unless their occupants have access to housing. That issue is now awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Meanwhile, the state auditor’s office last month issued a highly critical report on the Newsom administration’s Interagency Council on Homelessness, or Cal ICH, saying it has failed to accurately report on homelessness efforts and coordinate state efforts.

“Until Cal ICH takes these critical steps, the state will lack uptodate information that it can use to make datadriven policy decisions on how to effectively reduce homelessness,” the report declared.

State legislators of both parties joined the finger-pointing game this week during an “oversight” hearing in an Assembly budget subcommittee.

They took turns roasting Meghan Marshall, the Cal ICH executive officer, for a lack of data on which programs have been effective.

“You come to a budget committee, and there’s no numbers,” Assemblyman Phil Ting, a San Francisco Democrat, told Marshall. “How many people have we helped? How many people are off the street? … Because that’s what the public wants to know. What’s the money been spent on?”

She replied that “data quality issues” have delayed the collection of data Ting wanted. “That sounds like an excuse,” Ting snapped back.

“The long and short of it is we have to stop measuring success by how many dollars we’re spending,” Assembymember Josh Hoover, a Republican from Folsom, chimed in. “I am frustrated by the lack of urgency that I see today and the lack of data.”

The finger-pointing will probably become even more intense as the homelessness crisis worsens, as voters become more frustrated, and as politicians, including a governor with national ambitions, try to avoid the fallout.

ON LINE COMMENT

That is $$$24 BILLION of OUR Tax Dollars Spent!! 24 BILLION….Hmm…I’m no genius like the well-paid suits hanging out on the government payroll but I gotta say what I see as obvious obstacles that somehow they might have missed (despite their many many meetings, conferences, committees and taxpayer-funded councils)

1) They’re wasting our money! The “Finding a Solution” people have created a jobs program around the homeless situation and are pretending to do something about which most of us do care. But just like weed grow eradicators they have created a honeypot for funding that will only disappear if they actually do the job they are saying they are doing and resolve the problem. So why would they really solve the problem? Do we think they are that stupid? No- “homeless solving people” are here to stay! And suck us all dry. Even as more of us cannot keep up with increasing taxes and then we also slip into losing our homes! It’s a self-reinforcing loop…

2) Yeah it’s a macro-problem!! No surprise unless you’re not paying attention. For years we have known that there are more empty housing units available than there are homeless people. Because these housing units have been bought up as investments by already-wealthy people who would rather see them sit empty. I’m guessing they work as a tax write-off as they get called a “loss” and that counterbalances some obscene wealth being generated elsewhere in their wonderful portfolio thereby reducing their tax bracket and taxes due? (That’s a guess- I’ve never been or wanted to be up in that realm of income manipulation). Also, we have known for years that many real estate purchases are being done not by regular people but by “real estate holding corporations”. Often they never even inspect the house/apartment building but just grab them to hold. Are many of these corporations foreign-owned, like maybe Chinese? Yes. And some are just regular old money-washing schemes done by cartels and other organized crime syndicates that just have too much money. Obviously people who have so much wealth that they can invest long-term in real estate and not bother with piddly returns like…rent. And this drives up the real estate market and not-so-suddenly regular working families cannot afford to buy a home…anybody encountering financial disaster will have no time to recover before they are forced out and thrown onto the streets. There they will be given food stamps and a tent and a kind word in the rain as the “Homeless Solution Committee Members” collect paychecks (w/ medical and pensions and vacation pay) and drive home in their electric cars.

3) Governor Greasy Newsom was Mayor of SF when this homelessness crisis first became very apparent back around 2004-2006 ish. He campaigned in 2007 as being the guy who would address the issue. That was …17 Years Ago. Now he has blown another 24 BILLION DOLLARS of OUR MONEY. And the problem is worse. Is he really the guy to fix it? You gotta ask yourself….

CALIFORNIA WINE IS IN SERIOUS TROUBLE

For 25 years, the wine industry boomed. Then it started to unravel

by Esther Mobley

Megan Bell felt certain that her winery was going bankrupt.

When she released a new batch of wines in August, only three of her 19 distributors agreed to buy any. She was running $65,000 over budget on opening a tasting room in Santa Cruz. And she owed $80,000 to grape growers.

Sales in the second half of the year were the worst Bell had seen since starting her small business, Margins, eight years ago. “2023 was a disaster,” she said. And she knows she wasn’t the only winemaker feeling it: “If anybody’s not telling you that, they’re lying.”

The entire $55 billion California wine industry is, like the wine industry worldwide, experiencing an unprecedented downturn right now. No sector is immune — not the luxury tier, not the big conglomerates, not the upstart natural wines. Wine consumption fell 8.7% in 2023, according to leading industry analyst the Gomberg Fredrikson Report, a sobering reversal for an industry that had, for a quarter-century, taken annual growth for granted.

This year could be the breaking point, with many industry figures predicting “a good-sized house cleaning,” as put by Ian Brand, owner of I. Brand & Family Winery in Monterey County. 

“A lot of brands are dead but they don’t even know it right now,” echoed Michael Honig, president of Honig Vineyard & Winery in Napa Valley. 

An extinction-level event has not come to pass — yet. But regardless of the winery survival rate, it’s become clear in 2024 that the nature of the California wine industry has fundamentally changed. After decades of unfettered growth beginning in the 1990s, wine consumption started to flatten around 2018. Now, following what appeared to be a spike during the pandemic, it’s in dramatic decline. 

“The industry’s had the wind at our back for a long time,” said Jeff O’Neill, CEO of O’Neill Vintners and Distillers, which owns more than a dozen wineries. “And finally the music has stopped.”

No single factor is responsible for California wine’s present predicament. Millennials and Gen Zers aren’t drinking as much alcohol as older generations. Hard seltzer and canned cocktails have stolen market share. The current medical consensus suggests that alcohol is unequivocally bad for human health. (Beer and spirits sales are struggling, too.) 

A new set of problems emerged with the pandemic, though wineries didn’t realize it at the time. 

In 2020, with everyone stuck at home, wine sales skyrocketed. “We all thought, ‘this is fantastic, we’ve found the holy grail of selling wine, and this is just going to continue,’” said O’Neill. Many wineries increased production. But the demand dried up when people realized they’d bought too much and weren’t depleting it quickly enough, a phenomenon now known in the industry as “pantry loading.”

The unsold cases piled up. Meanwhile, with fewer people going out to restaurants post-COVID, wineries saw a key sales channel wane. Rising interest rates drove distributors to reduce their inventories, buying less from wineries. Because there’s a years-long lag between the time a wine is made and the time it’s sold, it took a while before wineries could notice these effects — let alone do anything about them.

Slowly and then all at once, the simmer reached a boil.

“So far this year we’re down 10% (in sales), which is the first time in 17 years we’ve ever been down,” said Morgan Twain-Peterson, owner of Bedrock Wine Co. in Sonoma.

In her decade in business, “2023 was the first year that we didn’t grow,” said Martha Stoumen, whose eponymous winery is in Sebastopol.

“If you’re lucky, you’re down 10%. We are,” said Brand. For many California wineries, he added, a 10% drop could be “existential” if it lasts too long.

In the past, wineries had recourse when sales dipped and expenses rose: raise the bottle price. But that’s become trickier. “There’s too much competition,” said Steve Lohr, president of J. Lohr Vineyards in San Jose. “And with the overall market going down, there just isn’t room for price increases.”

Until recently, Megan Bell believed Margins was about to become one of the wineries that just didn’t make it.

Bell, 33, is energetic and outspoken, with a wide grin that tends to morph into a laugh. When she started Margins in 2016, she was one of many bright-eyed young California winemakers realizing the dream of having their own wine label. 

Although it took five years before Margins was bringing in enough income to pay Bell a full-time salary, she felt confident she was on the right track. Her wines — mostly underloved grape varieties like Cabernet Franc and Assyrtiko — received positive press. She built a loyal wine club and got distribution in 10 states. She started farming her own vineyard. She and a friend, winemaker James Jelks of Floréz Wines, co-leased their own winemaking facility, a former apple-storage warehouse.

Finances were always tight. In her best year, Bell said, Margins brought in about $430,000 in revenue and just under $40,000 in profit. But in 2023, her net profit margin was merely 3%.

Knowing that opening the tasting room — a 120-square-foot nook that she affectionately calls the Wine Cubby — would be costly, she took out a $95,000 loan. But the buildout would ultimately cost $134,000, not including the rent and tasting room employee salary she was paying before it opened.

Bell prided herself on her resilience in the face of hurdles like these. This was just the nature of running a small California winery, right? But when fall 2023 rolled around and nearly all of her distributors declined to buy her new wines, the panic set in.

Bell estimated that by the end of February she’d be $11,000 in the red. That meant going out of business.

Margins managed to survive, barely. The bank increased Bell’s loan. After a failed inspection and a year and a half of waiting, the tasting room’s permit finally came through in December. Eventually, to her parents’ chagrin, she resorted to a crowdfunding campaign. The $24,000 in donations helped her get through a couple of scary months.

On a chilly spring morning, as she drew samples of wine from portable stainless tanks in her winery, Bell reflected on the strategic changes she plans to make going forward. “I’m going to make half as much wine this year,” she said, spitting a taste of Vermentino into a bucket. She was giving these wines a final assessment before a mobile bottling line arrived, making sure they passed muster. Bell paused and smiled. The Vermentino had summoned an aromatic memory, reminding her of the smell of sunscreen by a pool in the summer. 

From now on, she announced, she will no longer bottle any product that hasn’t been at least 70% pre-sold. She’s hoping to sell a larger proportion of her volume through the Wine Cubby, an inviting space with a muted-teal backsplash and open cabinets full of decorative knickknacks. There, she gets a bigger cut of the bottle price than when she sells to restaurants or shops.

But even if she makes it through, this last year has left Bell deeply disillusioned with her trade. “The tasting room will save us, but I was barely able to cross that finish line before the gate was shutting,” Bell said. Part of the reason she’s so transparent about her struggles, she said, is because she wishes someone had given her a clearer picture of what it would be like to run a winery before she’d decided to devote her life to it.

Interviews with 16 California wineries about the present crisis revealed one popular theory: This may simply be a market in need of a correction. There are too many wineries in California, too many grapevines planted, too much wine being bottled for the market to bear. This is an industry that grew complacent, so accustomed to its baby boomer-dominant customer base and its old way of doing things that it hasn’t been forced to meaningfully innovate in a long time.

And while winery owners may feel as if the sky is falling, many industry analysts hold a more measured perspective. “This is really, I believe, an inventory adjustment,” said Gomberg Fredrikson Report editor Jon Moramarco. Once all the pantry loaders finally drink through the wines they stockpiled during lockdown, he believes they’ll start buying wine again. 

But even the optimists clinging to this view don’t envision the kind of growth that was standard a decade ago. “There were some other times when we saw little hiccups in the overall growth of wine,” said Lohr, such as during the 2008 recession. What the industry is experiencing now, he said, “is meaningfully different.” According to Moramarco, the best-case scenario is a return to the flattening growth curve of 2018 and 2019. The boom times are over.

For young winemakers like Bell, the end of the boom times may also mean the end of a certain version of the California wine dream. Everything that drew Bell to this work in the first place — the chance to farm, the geeky grape varieties, the community of fellow winemakers — is all for nought, she said, if it becomes impossible to pay the bills. 

“Things feel really sad right now,” Bell said. “I’m looking at people who are like me eight years ago and thinking, you’re never going to make it.”

(SF Chronicle)

* * *

MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: You won’t find me shedding any tears for the wine industry’s self-inflicted problems. But Ms. Mobley’s report sounds to me like just a 2024 version of the old “How do you make a small fortune in the wine industry? Answer: Start with a large one.” Call me jaded. Every few years there’s a big hullabaloo about one wine industry problem or another. Underlying most of it is the natural boom-bust cycle and the periodic gluts (i.e., overproduction based on overhyped wine drinking expectations) associated with it. Back in the early 2000s Lewis Purdue documented a lot of it in his outsanding little book about the SoCo wine industry: “The Wrath of Grapes.” In the past it’s been unsubstantiated health claims, or the glassy-winged sharpshooter, or the demanding banks/lenders, or water shortages, or adulterations making it into the mainstream wines (and the news), or two-buck chuck, etc. You pick. People forget that the wine industry almost literally owns the California Democratic Party (and vice versa) (Thompson, Pelosi, Newsom, etc. etc.) and they are not going to let the wine industry suffer like other “ag” crops. You can be sure that if things get particularly tight, some quasi-bailout bill or another will be engineered for them at the federal or state level. Of course, there will be some accompanying shake-outs and some marginal little guy wineries will be forced to sell their vineyards and wineries and tasting rooms to their neighboring big guys. But that’s what they deserve for raising their glasses to toast an industry that sees them as little more than captive grape juice suppliers. Those smaller, frequently organic and fair-labor staffed outfits better prepare for another bumpy ride while Big Wine gets ready for another government handout.

WHY ARE WE OBSESSED WITH BREASTS?

After her own mastectomy, sociologist Sarah Thornton sought to answer the question.

by Alisha Haridasani Gupta

The day before her double mastectomy surgery six years ago, the author and cultural sociologist Sarah Thornton let her breasts free. She went swimming in an outdoor pool in the San Francisco Bay Area and untied her bikini top, allowing her 34Bs to sway in the water and soak up the sunshine. It was her way of saying goodbye to them, she said in a recent interview.

“I was someone who kind of dismissed them as just dumb boobs, irrelevant, not important,” she said. As a self-proclaimed feminist, she used to think that any obsession with breasts was vain and distasteful, driven by a superficial need to please the male gaze. Her own breasts were the focus of two sexual harassment incidents in her teens, and, about a decade ago, they became a source of fear: Breast cancer ran in the family and doctors discovered atypical cells. After much prodding and testing, getting rid of a part of her body that she wasn’t particularly attached to seemed like an easy precaution to take.

But months after her surgery, which included getting implants that felt like “silicone impostors” — so foreign and inanimate to her that she felt compelled to give them the names Bert and Ernie — she became “just a total muddle of emotions around what I lost and what I gained,” she said. “Bert and Ernie were really weird for me — they were larger than I’d ever had before, they were hard, I had no nipple sensation anymore.” (For our video interview, Thornton wore a crew neck T-shirt with a drawing of Bert, Ernie and other Sesame Street residents across her chest). It was then that she realized she hadn’t appreciated her breasts enough.

Thornton’s exploration into the cultural significance of breasts resulted in her new book, “Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts,” which will be published on May 7. “Tits,” she writes, is her preferred word; “breasts” sounds sterile and is associated with cancer and feeding, while “boobs” suggests unseriousness, like “booby prize” or “booby trap.”

Thornton wrote the book “in order to help women reappraise their chests in positive ways, and men, too,” she said. “Actually, I would really like men to read the book because so many of them think they really know about tits.”

(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

How do you feel about ‘Bert’ and ‘Ernie’ now, after writing this book?

After I finished the book last November, I actually had another surgery. I got rid of Bert and Ernie. And I now have Glenda and Brenda. And the good thing about Glenda and Brenda, compared to Bert and Ernie, is they’re smaller, they are much more comfortable. I like these girls now. I can wear some of my old jackets. Actually last night, I wore a jacket I hadn’t worn since before I had the first surgery.

My attitude toward this part of our bodies has been totally transformed. Studies show that most women in America are dissatisfied with this part of their body. And these days I’m like, Are you kidding me? This is the emblem of womanhood and it’s right under our face, it’s front and center.

You note in the book that much of the dissatisfaction women feel stems from the pressure to fit a specific idea of attractiveness. How did breasts become a subject of eroticism?

In the early 20th century, legs were most fetishized. You have to remember that women had been wearing long skirts throughout the 19th century and then, in the ’20s, there was a radical shift in the clothing women wore — legs started to be seen after World War I. Of course, you usually only saw them from the knee down. Betty Grable? Her legs were insured for a million dollars. That was partly a publicity stunt, but it was because her legs were her asset.

That totally shifts after World War II. There’s a shift with pinups and Hollywood and magazine publishing. But very importantly, there’s also the rise of baby formula. You don’t have the full sexualization of the breast when they’re associated with breastfeeding. There’s a correlation you can see between breast milk substitutes and the sexualization of breasts because, if a baby owns a breast, it interrupts a man’s ownership of the breast.

More recently, the sexualization of breasts has resulted in the huge popularity of breast augmentation. Are we still obsessed with big breasts?

I don’t think big is best anymore. I would say that augmentation reached a peak in 2007 — there is a sense that the really big boobs look old-fashioned.

Augmentation also skews more working class nowadays — actually, I would say conspicuous boob jobs skew working class. In one study, a segment of British working class women, for example, see fake tits as a form of consumption that gives them status and signals that they are independent women in command of the male gaze. And then similarly, a contingent of Brazilian women who began their lives in poverty want people to know they have implants as a form of financial accomplishment.

The whole notion that big breasts are the benchmark beauty ideal is particularly American and possibly runs right through the Americas. But in Asia, for example, there’s a very long history of breast binding. And actually the sexiest women had flat chests. You can see that in the costume of a geisha. In Africa — I reference a sculpture from the Dogon tribe, but you can see this in other tribal aesthetic traditions as well — this kind of dagger-like breast, a downward pointy breast, is the beauty standard and it’s absolutely related to nursing.

Peoples living in hot climates did not tend to cover their chest, male or female, and breasts were not sexualized and still are not sexualized in those cultures. Breasts are honored principally for their hydrating, nutritional and immunological functions. And their eroticization is a kind of perverse import.

In your book, you touch on the breast-related legends and symbols embedded in many major religions. Was there an idea you came across that stands out?

In south India, there’s this notion that nipples are a third eye. That I find hugely appealing, because I didn’t realize how sentient and living my nipples were until I lost all my breast tissue and the nerves to my nipples were cut off. We also know that the relationship between mother and child is absolutely a communicative one — an infant’s saliva and body temperature and everything about an infant during nursing is in a feedback loop with the mother’s body and the breast milk will accommodate, in different ways, infant nutritional need. This kind of interpersonal communication through the breast is validated by medical studies. Actually, a milk scholar that I have in the book calls this “corporeal communication.” I actually really love that term.

(NY Times)

JOHN MUIR, THE UNTOLD STORY

Reviewed by Jonah Raskin

Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness. By Robert Aquinas McNally. University of Nebraska Press; May 1, 2024

“Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infected’ with ‘wild animals’ and ‘savage’ people.”

— Luther Standing Bear

John Muir is so firmly lodged in California lore and legend that he seems as impregnable as El Capitan, the huge granite monolith in Yosemite National Park which Muir helped to create in 1890 and then aimed to protect with help from our jingoist big game hunter Theodore Roosevelt. Muir’s name is written all over the state of California: John Muir Wilderness, John Muir National Monument, John Muir National Monument, John Muir College, John Muir High School, and more. 

You’d think he was God or his son. Almost everyone today who loves the wilderness also loves Muir, the Scots-born Calvinist who came to the US as a young man, wandered far and wide, co-founded the Sierra Club, and became known as “The Father of the National Parks.” There’s a dark side, too, that citizens ought to know about now. Maybe it’s time to dethrown Muir. 

In 2020, the Sierra Club issued a statement that read, “As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir's words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.” Bravo Sierra Club. That statement ought to have been issued ages ago and should be widely distributed today.

Those who don’t love Muir, point out that he wanted to remove Indians from the wilderness by force, and keep them out, forever. They also point out that Muir regarded Indians as “dirty,” “smelly” “savages” who could not be “civilized.” So, wage a genocidal war against them, he urged, and exterminate them. Others held that view, but not all settlers and whites. 

Now, along comes a new biography of Muir titled Cast Out of Eden by Robert Aquinas McNally—the author of The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age—who aims to balance the “good” Muir against the “evil Muir,” as one might call him. Margaret Verble, a Cherokee and a novelist, writes that “McNally takes Muir off his pedestal and paints him as a man of his times, blinded by his belief in white supremacy and his faith in manifest destiny.” But McNally doesn’t take Muir down from his pedestal nearly far enough.

In the Epilogue to his biography, McNally writes that “the big thing Muir got so right” was the “awe that wild spaces call up connects us to the cosmos and shines a beacon through the black holes of human existence.” Why one wonders did that awe not connect Americans to the Indians? McNally adds that, “where Muir went wrong was in assuming that this soulful connection to the wild belonged solely to people who traced their ancestry to northern Europe.” Indeed, Muir went egregiously wrong.

McNally aims to be balanced. He misses an opportunity to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Still, every so often, McNally takes off the kid gloves and reveals Muir’s connections to the robber barons and identifies his racist barbs directed not only at Indians, but also at American Blacks and Chinese. McNally also exposes the brutal exploitation by white settlers of Indians and Chinese in the “unsettling” of the West, plus the pillage of Indian graves and the desecration of Indian arts and crafts including “totem poles.” But he doesn’t inhabit his book with real Indians such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and others. He relegates them to the background,

What Muir didn’t realize ages ago, and what McNally today doesn’t seem to realize is that “the wilderness,” as it was and still is called, is a fiction imported from Europe by settlers and then imposed on the American landscape. And why use the word “Eden” to describe the places that Indians inhabited? It only mythologizes the landscape and doesn’t make sense. It wasn’t Eden to the Ojibwe, the Jilkoot, the Ohlone and or any of the other tribes who made the place we call America their home.

Luther Standing Bear (1868-1939) spoke for nearly all Indians when he noted in his book, Land of The Spotted Eagle (1933), “We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills and winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild.’ To us it was tame.” Standing Bear added, “Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infected’ with ‘wild animals’ and ‘savage’ people.” Standing Bear was not only an author. He was also an actor in Hollywood movies. He knows how Indians have been depicted on screen. Not pretty or honest.

The word and the concept of the white man’s “civilization” irked Standing Bear immensely. He noted that it had “not added one whit to my sense of justice; to my reverence for the rights of life; to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.” 

McNally does not quote Standing Bear or mention him. He hardly mentions any specific, individual Indians, nor does he provide his generic Native American with names and identities. Indeed, he largely omits the story of California Indians from the pages of Cast Out of Eden, though he sometimes describes them as victims and losers. They have also been survivors who honor the past.

Yes, as McNally observes, there are exceptions to Muir’s steady servings of white supremacy. He wrote for example that “Some of the best people in the world are Chinese, and we must not hate them.” But he added that “they are birds with feathers so unlike our own they seem to have been hatched on some other planet.” What he gave with one hand he took away with the other.

 The real story of John Muir, the foe of Indians, will probably have to be told again and again before Americans begin to realize that to create “the wilderness,” settlers, ranchers, soldiers and statesmen slaughtered Indians who lived in California’s mountains and valleys and who tended the landscape. 

The U.S. needs a massive education program in which Indians can tell their own stories about invasion, occupation, colonization and their resistance to the men and women who arrived with guns, bibles and the gospel of Manifest Destiny. 

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

All they do is lie, connive and contrive propaganda that is then blasted through the left leaning media.

When called on the lies they quietly might make a retraction.

Is anyone surprised?

They also repeatedly call for violence and then claim they are not doing it.

In 2018, Maxine Waters criticized the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy on illegal immigration that led to separating families at the border, telling a crowd, “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!”

If this is not a call for violence I don’t know what is.

HUFFMAN? NEVER AGAIN

Editor: 

It’s dumbfounding to me that Rep. Jared Huffman could vote to approve another $20 billion toward Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in his lengthy excuse for doing so, and in nearly a single breath, write, “I support continued funding for Israel’s security needs,” and yet “innocent civilians in Palestine are out of time.”

Shame on Huffman. He is a smart man. He knows the scale of the human atrocities now being committed in Palestine. He knows American munitions comprise about 70% of the bombs and drones and bullets being wielded in Gaza. He knows children are being blown to pieces in front of their parents or otherwise starving, that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal and that none of this would be happening if the U.S. denied Israel its political and economic support.

We expected more of Huffman, but he has hewed to a dangerously centrist party line. He will never again get my vote.

Greg King

Arcata

BIDEN SAYS THE U.S. WILL NOT SUPPLY ISRAEL WITH WEAPONS TO ATTACK RAFAH

The president’s remarks underscore a growing rift over the war in Gaza. He also acknowledged that U.S. bombs have been used to kill Palestinian civilians.

by Erica L. Green

President Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that American bombs have been used to kill Palestinian civilians as he warned that the United States would withhold certain weapons if Israel launches a long-threatened assault in southern Gaza.

In some of his strongest language to date on the seven-month war, Mr. Biden said the United States would still ensure Israel’s security, including the Iron Dome missile defense system and Israel’s “ability to respond to attacks” like the one Iran launched in April.

But he said he would block the delivery of weapons that could be fired into densely populated areas of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering.

The president had already halted the shipment of 3,500 bombs last week out of concern that they might be used in a major assault on Rafah — the first time since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 that Mr. Biden has leveraged U.S. arms to try to influence how the war is waged.

On Wednesday, he said that he would also block the delivery of artillery shells.

“If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities, that deal with that problem,” Mr. Biden said in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett.

He added: “But it’s just wrong. We’re not going to — we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells used, that have been used.”

Asked whether 2,000-pound American bombs had been used to kill civilians in Gaza, Mr. Biden said: “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers.”

Mr. Biden’s remarks underscore the growing rift between the United States and its closest Middle East ally over the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 people and caused a humanitarian crisis. The United States is by far the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, and the Biden administration plans to deliver a report to Congress this week assessing whether it believes Israel’s assurances that it has used American weapons in accordance with U.S. and international law.

Mr. Biden had resisted earlier calls to condition aid to Israel Mr. Biden has remained unwavering in his support of Israel’s right to defend itself, even as he speaks out forcefully against the invasion of Rafah and grows frustrated with what he once described as Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing.”

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has rebuffed the U.S. warnings, saying that Israel would move forward with eradicating Hamas even if it has to do so alone.

This week, the Israeli war cabinet voted unanimously to move forward with a Rafah assault, and Israeli forces warned more than 100,000 civilians to evacuate as it started what it called “targeted strikes” against Hamas.

U.S. officials said this week that Israel had said its operation thus far in Rafah was “limited” and “designed to cut off Hamas’s ability to smuggle weapons into Gaza,” but continued to express their concern with an escalation.

Mr. Biden said he did not consider Israel’s operations in Rafah to date to qualify as a full-scale invasion because they have not struck “population centers.”

But he said he considered them to be “right on the border,” adding that they were causing problems with key allies such as Egypt, which has been integral to cease-fire negotiations and opening border crossings for humanitarian aid.

Mr. Biden said he had made it clear to Mr. Netanyahu and his war cabinet that they would not get support if they moved forward with an offensive in densely populated areas.

“We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” he said, “we’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”

Mr. Biden was also asked about Gaza protests on college campuses — specifically chants calling him “Genocide Joe” — that have erupted in recent weeks.

Asked if he hears the message of those young Americans, Mr. Biden said:

“Absolutely, I hear the message.”

(nytimes.com)

INTRODUCTION to Israel Shahak's ‘Jewish History, Jewish Religion,’ still the best guide to current events in the Middle East 

by Gore Vidal

Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. “That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.” As neither Jack nor I was an anti-semite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics. 

Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state has resulted in 45 years of murderous confusion, and the destruction of what Zionist fellow travellers thought would be a pluralistic state - home to its native population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future home to peaceful European and American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who affected to believe that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Samaria. Since many of the immigrants were good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they would not allow the new state to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians could live with them as equals. This was not meant to be. I shall not rehash the wars and alarms of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA, Israel’s unlikely patron. 

Unlikely, because no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a “homeland.” It is as if the American taxpayer had been obliged to support the Pope in his reconquest of the Papal States simply because one third of our people are Roman Catholic. Had this been attempted, there would have been a great uproar and Congress would have said no. But a religious minority of less than two per cent has bought or intimidated seventy senators (the necessary two thirds to overcome an unlikely presidential veto) while enjoying support of the media. 

In a sense, I rather admire the way that the Israel lobby has gone about its business of seeing that billions of dollars, year after year, go to make Israel a “bulwark against communism.” Actually, neither the USSR nor communism was ever much of a presence in the region. What America did manage to do was to turn the once friendly Arab world against us. Meanwhile, the misinformation about what is going on in the Middle East has got even greater and the principal victim of these gaudy lies - the American taxpayer to one side - is American Jewry, as it is constantly bullied by such professional terrorists as Begin and Shamir. Worse, with a few honorable exceptions, Jewish- American intellectuals abandoned liberalism for a series of demented alliances with the Christian (anti-semitic) right and with the Pentagon-industrial complex. 

In 1985 one of them blithely wrote that when Jews arrived on the American scene they “found liberal opinion and liberal politicians more congenial in their attitudes, more sensitive to Jewish concerns,” but now it is in the Jewish interest to ally with the Protestant fundamentalists because, after all, “is there any point in Jews hanging on, dogmatically, hypocritically, to their opinions of yesteryear?” At this point the American left split and those of us who criticized our one-time Jewish allies for misguided opportunism, were promptly rewarded with the ritual epithet “antisemite” or “self-hating Jew.” 

Fortunately, the voice of reason is alive and well, and in Israel, of all places. From Jerusalem, Israel Shahak never ceases to analyse not only the dismal politics of Israel today but the Talmud itself, and the effect of the entire rabbinical tradition on a small state that the right-wing rabbinate means to turn into a theocracy for Jews only. I have been reading Shahak for years. He has a satirist’s eye for the confusions to be found in any religion that tries to rationalize the irrational. He has a scholar’s sharp eye for textual contradictions. He is a joy to read on the great Gentile-hating Dr Maimonides. 

Needless to say, Israel’s authorities deplore Shahak. But there is not much to be done with a retired professor of chemistry who was born in Warsaw in 1933 and spent his childhood in the concentration camp at Belsen. In 1945, he came to Israel; served in the Israeli military; did not become a Marxist in the years when it was fashionable. He was — and still is — a humanist who detests imperialism whether in the name of the God of Abraham or of George Bush. Equally, he opposes with great wit and learning the totalitarian strain in Judaism. Like a highly learned Thomas Paine, Shahak illustrates the prospect before us, as well as the long history behind us, and thus he continues to reason, year after year. Those who heed him will certainly be wiser and — dare I say? — better. He is the latest, if not the last, of the great prophets.