Mendocino County Today: Thursday 6/6/24

By AVA News Service on June 6, 2024

INTERIOR HEAT will peak today with isolated areas of major heat risk expanding into the eastern Trinity River Valley in addition to Lake County. There remain a very slight chance of isolated thunderstorms over high terrain this afternoon. Conditions will ease into the weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 49F with clear skies this Thursday morning on the coast. Clear skies again today but you can see the fog is coming up the coast to about Monterrey currently. We can expect cooling temps & morning fog going into the weekend.

HONORING CAROLYN WELLINGTON

Although she didn’t want services or a big fuss, today we honored Carolyn Wellington at the Anderson Valley Senior Center. I forgot a lot of things in my live speech due to nerves, but here is the original essay:

I have known Carolyn my entire life. I can say that with absolute certainty because in my baby book there is a list of attendees at my Mom’s baby shower when she was expecting me. The list also said what the various guests purchased as gifts and Carolyn purchased that baby book.

Growing up Carolyn was a community staple at local events and of course the AV Market where she made her million dolllar fudge for years. She would of course greet you with, “what are you up to brat?” I can remember if my Mom wouldn’t let me get something, Carolyn would give me a wink and slide a small piece of candy to me. My Mom probably knew about it but Carolyn acted like it was our little secret. If you had a smoker in your family, and they asked you to pick up some cigarettes, you didn’t need to know the brand, you just said their name and Carolyn knew what brand they smoked. That would be totally illegal now. But it was different times.

Then there was Elvis. Carolyn was his biggest fan and every time I see or anything related to him I think of Carolyn. I have traveled to the ruins of Tulum where there was a metal sculpture of Elvis and I thought about Carolyn. When in Vegas, many of the casinos have photos of Elvis. Again I thought of Carolyn. But the motherlode was when I visited Graceland last summer. I knew Carolyn had visited there before—probably more than once—and as a was in awe of all things Elvis, I remember thinking Carolyn must have gone flipping nuts when she was here!

I actually became part of Carolyn’s family when I married my husband, Kevin, 20 years ago. My husband’s stepfather, Sam, is Carolyn’s brother. As we were planning our wedding, Kevin said, my Aunt Carolyn will make our wedding cake! And she did!

Kevin always spoke very fondly of Carolyn. Even though he was a nephew by marriage, she never treated him any less than a blood relative. He is so grateful to her for including him on several vacations and adventures he would’ve never had the opportunity to go on and for all of the close family gatherings. He will always miss her.

In 2019, I started working with her at the Senior Center. Carolyn worked as the sous chef and I was always amazed how efficient she was at her job! She was a fruit and vegetable chopping ninja! She finished her job with plenty of time to spare and was able to relax before greeting the other seniors for lunch. A few years ago, before her retirement, I could see her getting tired. In the back of mind, I feared the day she would throw her hat in. She did give notice not long after that but the classy lady that she was, she gave me plenty of notice and stayed long enough to train her replacement. A true demonstration of her character and work ethic that I will always appreciate. We still miss her at the senior center dearly though.

Carolyn didn’t want a service or memorial but, in my opinion, such an extraordinary woman deserved more than her passing to be ignored. To sum up Carolyn is nearly impossible. She was spunky, sassy, hardworking, she detested cheese (which I never understood-Lol) and had a heart of gold. She loved her family so much and was extremely proud of all of them. Her eyes twinkled whenever she talked about them. She is of the last the Valley greats. The fiber of this community. Carolyn was Anderson Valley.

Carolyn’s family that attended today’s luncheon; Carolyn’s husband, Jim, sons, Rich (wife Donna) and Mike (wife Diana) with two of her grandchildren and 6 of her great-grandchildren.

(Renee Lee)

CONGRATULATIONS EIGHTH GRADE TEAM.

And thank you to everyone that worked so hard today packing.

Congratulations to the eighth grade team for their wonderful graduation ceremony tonight. I don’t have a lot of pictures, so if someone can share, please do.

Also, a huge shout out today for the staff and their students that supported everyone packing the rooms that are affected. We had some classes come in and do very big lifts to get those rooms cleared.

It has just been two years Friday, since the voters passed the bond. As I walked the contractors through today for their final checkouts before they start ripping things up on Monday, it’s pretty magical. I know it has been a lot of work. We have one more day tomorrow where we’re going to have a big push to get everything out of the rooms, including all the furniture. Thank you everyone for all you have done to make this happen. It’s rock ‘n’ roll time!

Eric Perez and Petty Officer Kai at AV High awards night.

HEROES & PATRIOTS KMUD, THURSDAY MORNING

Thursday, June 6, at 9 am, on KMUD, we are interviewing Mark Scaramella of the Anderson Valley Advertiser (AVA).

Publisher Bruce Anderson is recovering from surgery, and we wish him well.

At the end of last month, May 2024, after many years, the AVA discontinued its print edition. Only the online edition is now available.

Our show is a big fan of independent media, and we would welcome you to call into the show to say hi to Mark and thank the AVA for their many years of fact-checked reporting and fearless investigations, all delivered in an idiosyncratic, hard-hitting style.

We are firm in the belief that independent media, like the AVA, is a cornerstone of an informed public and a participatory democracy.

Unfortunately, independent media is an endangered species.

In our lifetime, digital media enabled all media content to be created in the same basic way on the same basic platform, which makes “media convergence,” the technological merging of content in different mass media, inevitable.

The Internet has become the hub for that convergence, a place where music, television shows, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, books, games, and movies are created, distributed, and presented… and that means there is less integrity in media and more fake news.

Anyone with a cell phone can now be a “reporter.”

And as consumers of media, our very relationship with media has changed. Instead of newspapers with professional standards and ethics, we get a highly managed Internet, brought to us by apps or platforms that carry out specific functions via the Internet.

Are you looking for a nearby protest, political rally or town hall meeting? Want to hear a podcast? Can't wait to see a live feed? Don’t search on the Internet—use an app especially designed for that purpose.

And the distributors of these apps act as gatekeepers. Apple has more than 1,803,917 apps in its App Store, and Apple approves every one of them.

The competing Android app stores on Google Play and Amazon have an even greater number of apps (with a similar number of apps in the Windows Store), but Google and Amazon exercise less control over approval of apps than Apple does.

In total, including all iOS and Android app stores, there are currently 8.93 million apps available in the world.

We'll miss the AVA. An era has passed.

Studio call-in number: (707) 923-3911. Say hi to Mark. Wish Bruce well.

Listen at: KMUD | Redwood Community Radio | Northwestern California Radio

John Sakowicz and Mary Massey

co-hosts

HEROES AND PATRIOTS - Heroes Patriots, Radio

JURY DEADLOCKED IN FIRST TRIAL OF HOPKINS FIRE SUSPECT

by Justine Frederiksen

The first trial of a man charged with setting a fire that destroyed about 30 homes in Mendocino County recently ended in a mistrial, according to court documents.

Three years after Devin Lamar Johnson, 23, was charged with aggravated arson for allegedly setting a fire that burned about 50 structures and evacuated hundreds of residents from an area just north of Ukiah in September of 2021, his trial began last month in Marin County Superior Court.

According to court documents dated May 30, the fifth day of the trial, a mistrial was declared that day due to a hung jury, and a new trial was expected to be scheduled the following day. Also according to court documents, another trial has been scheduled to begin on July 24, 2024.

Justin Buckingham, a battalion chief with the Ukiah Valley Fire Authority who investigated the fire, said he was in the courtroom May 22 as jury selection began in Marin County, the jurisdiction where the trial had been moved to shortly after jury selection began in Mendocino County last year.

A trial at the courthouse in Ukiah had been delayed due to concerns surrounding Johnson’s mental status, but the defendant was declared “restored to competency” in July of 2022, and a trial was then scheduled for the following month.

After more delays, the trial was finally underway last year in Mendocino County Superior Court, but soon after jury selection began in January of 2023, Judge Keith Faulder approved a change of venue for Johnson’s trial.

Johnson was arrested two days after allegedly starting the Hopkins Fire on Sept. 19, 2021, after investigators from multiple agencies, including the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, Cal Fire and the Ukiah Valley Fire Authority, had obtained surveillance footage from a nearby business that showed an adult man starting the fire on Hopkins Street near the Moore Street Bridge in Calpella.

Photographer Peter Armstrong, who took a photograph showing what appears to be Johnson standing on a bridge watching the fire, said he was called upon to give testimony at the trial.

According to the MCSO, Johnson was on “active, felony probation for an attempted robbery charge” at the time of his arson arrest, and was booked into Mendocino County Jail on suspicion of “three separate charges of arson: aggravated arson (multiple structures), arson of an inhabited structure, and arson during a state of emergency.”

WHAT GRADE, WHAT YEAR, ANDERSON VALLEY?

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Who Killed Les Crane? A NorCal Cannabis Murder Mystery

https://youtu.be/DxWYTLSlhTc?si=T1CBREFPzQkrOlkY

(Laytonville/Branscomb Community Awareness)

SCOTT WARD: When these bums aggressively panhandle, harass, bully and terrorize my daughter and my two granddaughters when they are shopping, I don’t give a fat rat’s rear-end if they are mentally disabled, addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, or just lazyass vagrants, this behavior is NOT ACCEPTABLE! The millions of taxpayer dollars given to Redwood Community Services and the taxpayer funded Measure G proceeds have not done squat to improve the situation in Ukiah. I am looking forward to Bernie being on the Board of Supervisors and hopefully his knowledge and proven track record will convince at least two more Board members (Madeline Cline and Ted Williams) to vote to change direction and adopt the Fort Bragg model.

THE OLD L.E. WHITE LUMBER CO. WAREHOUSE at the head of the Greenwood wharf as it would have appeared in about 1950.

The old Greenwood Hotel in the distance.

ED NOTES:

ONLY YOU MASOCHISTS would be interested in the mechanics of my urological adventures, which I'll spare you, but show me a guy over the age of 70 who doesn't suffer some sort of penile dysfunction, and I'll show you a fortunate man indeed.

I SAW the dick doc Wednesday for a follow-up exam caused by a "retention" prob, since cured by a miracle drug called Flomax. If you have trouble “evacuating,” ask the vegetarians, aka Adventist Hospital, for Flomax.

THE WAITING ROOM — this was in Marin — was a study in diversity, heavy on senior males, all with problems with their repro apparatuses. There were several geezers in wheelchairs, their attendants at the controls. There was a giant Sikh in formal whites, and a tiny, ancient Chinese gentleman in suit and tie, a virtual United Nations of penile dysfunction.

I GAZED at a poster featuring an illustration of a carrot with a bend at the small end. “Is this your problem?” No, and it's a problem I've never heard of, but given the obvious decrepitude of my fellow patients I instantly radiated a respect vibe not only to healthy carrots but to the doctors who not only had to examine all these one-eyed monsters but get them working again. There's a job for you!

“NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.” I am sooooo tired of that one which, natch, is constantly invoked in the wake of the Orange Monster’s frame job in New York on charges no other agency would bring so the indictment had to be created. Don't get me wrong. I don't like Trump. I think it's obvious he's leading the Magats over the side and US with them, but fair is fair, even for him, the last guy the libs should want to make a martyr out of.

EXPLAIN to me real slow and real clear how a Trump payoff to a prostitute was parlayed into 34 felonies? As mentioned, Charles Manson was convicted of a mere seven felonies, all murder or murder-related. And Trump gets 34 with 99 pending felony charges? It strains credulity, or should.

ABOVE THE LAW here in Mendocino County among everyone with an annual income greater than a hundred grand, count the Anderson Valley wine people whose frost fans annually violate noise statutes.

POOR OLD JOE, an international symbol of elder abuse and our pretend president. Today's Wall Street Journal has a long, scrupulously bipartisan account of the Washington consensus that the old boy is now so obviously past it that even the DNC is worried that they can no longer plausibly shove him out there before the teleprompters, let alone duel with the orange beast.

BUT WHO do the Democrats have, assuming they can mothball Biden? As of right now, Trump is a shoo-in, and the Great Slide into chaos will accelerate.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, June 5, 2024

CHRISTOPHER ASHURST, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

THOMAS COOK, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury.

AMANDA DUMAN, Ukiah. Acquisition of access card with intention to sell, failure to appear, probation revocation.

TIMOTHY EISEMANN, Little River. DUI.

ALEXANDRA GATI, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery.

MINDY GONZALEZ, Ukiah. Acquisition of access card with intention to sell, false ID, probation revocation.

BRITTANY KOHLMANN, Ukiah. Domestic abuse.

DEMETER MCFADIN, Ukiah. Kidnapping, disorderly conduct-alcohol & loitering.

JAVIER MEDINA, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

RACHELLE MUNOZ, Covelo. Domestic abuse, failure to appear, probation revocation.

PAUL SCHOCK, Philo. Controlled substance, organic drug for sale, more than an ounce of pot.

IN OUR NEW MILLENNIUM

Just like autofill
AI will finish our thoughts
Before we get to

— Jim Luther

THE ALL-TIME COMMENCEMENT SPEECH:

“Every year thousands of you kids put on these silly, fucking hats to hear some other kid in a silly, fucking hat tell you that you are the future. But there’s not enough future to go around. If you want to know your real future, look at your folks in the stands. Fat butts and sagging tits, that’s your future. If you had any sense you’d give back your diplomas and silly hats and stay 18 the rest of your lives. You don’t want the future because the future sucks! Hell, most of you assholes can’t even read!”

— Bruce Dern as “Bobby Lee Burnett” giving a commencement address to a Texas high school in 1980’s “Middle Age Crazy.” (Screenplay by Carl Kleinschmitt who died in December of 2022 at the age of 85.)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

On and on and on and on. The people drone. Same old same old. Shit is not gonna change. Maybe in years but the status quo is firmly entrenched. I just came back from a road trip. The trucks, campers, boats, beach houses are crazy. Money is no object. I took the catamaran to Nantucket. I did it for the cool boat ride. Wandering around I saw $12 for a double scoop cone {chocolate chip, Potatoheads favorite). 1500 sq. ft. house. One week rental $30,000 and they’re booked solid. Who is paying these prices? I can’t figure it out. Not even on the water, purchase price maybe 4-5 Million.

TRUMP'S SHOW TRIAL

Editor:

I am sure you will be deluged by letters about the verdict in Donald Trump’s trial. I hope they are like mine, and I want you to know that I would be just as upset at the outcome if Joe Biden was the one on trial. I woke up May 30 in the U.S.; that night I went to bed in the old Soviet Union, having witnessed Trump being convicted in a show trial that ignored his civil liberties for unspecified charges. The true verdict will be rendered on Nov. 5 by the voters. Wake up, America. If a former president can be the victim of a weaponized legal system, it can happen to anyone reading this letter.

June Keefer

Santa Rosa

RETRO FRISCO, RETRO MANKIND

by Jonah Raskin

To call it “Frisco” is in and out itself a retro act of defiance. I don’t know anyone today who calls it Frisco, though Jack Kerouac, Mr. On The Road, did decades ago. Go to Google, type in "Frisco" and you get Frisco, Texas, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. Type in Frisco, California and you get San Francisco. Columnist Herb Caen, who coined the word “Beatnik” soon after Sputnik went into orbit, insisted that no one call it “Frisco” or pronounce the name “San-Fran-Cis-Co.” Herb’s words were the law.

Not long ago when I was writing for The Examiner, back when Tamara Straus was an editor, and published almost everything I sent her, San Francisco was referred to in print as “The City.” Both words capitalized and as though it is, was and always will be the one and only city anywhere.

The City, or alternatively the city, is a retro kind of place that tends to inhabit the past, perhaps because it doesn’t like its present, and doesn't care for its current Black mayor, London Breed, who might not be reelected in November when citizens go to the polls to vote. Indeed, they can choose from seven other candidates, including Aaron Peskin, the current president of the SF Board of Supervisors with whom I have had only one significant interaction. Years ago, when I asked him to please pass a resolution declaring June 3, “Allen Ginsberg Day” he kindly obliged. That was a retro move on my part and on Peskin’s, too. Allen Ginsberg lives on and on.

City Lights Bookstore sells current best sellers, but it is best known for keeping the Beat flame burning brightly. The alley, named after Kerouac, that sits behind City Lights separates it from Vesuvio, a retro bar if ever there was one, though it is not the oldest bar in the city. That designation belongs to Old Ship Saloon founded in 1851 and that’s still in business. My brother, Adam, a San Francisco private eye, who models himself after Dashiell Hammett’s retro detective, Sam Spade, took me to the Old Ship where we knocked back a few boilermakers, which apparently originated in Montana in the 1890s and that has not lost its popularity in Frisco.

Adam has been in the business of finding lost souls and tracking down criminals since 1980. He’s a rather retro character and also my landlord at Ocean Beach, a neighborhood with no big box stores, no Starbucks, and no Subway, though it doesn’t have Playland anymore, either. That amusement park opened in 1928 and closed in 1972. Not every ancient building or every historical site has survived the passage of time, though the Cliff House, once a popular destination for locals and tourists, still sits on the cliffs just north of where I live, and inside Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Closed since 2020, it’s supposed to reopen soon. The retro building has had too much glamor associated with it to be left unoccupied and unclaimed as a place for nostalgia to take root and flower.

Indeed, when you stop and think about it, you realize that Retro with a capital R is a kind of brand that some people sell and other people buy. It’s built into the capitalist system and maybe into every political and economic system that has ever walked the face of the planet. After all, to long for a lost paradise is part of the human condition. Retro is us. I’m told that in Russia, comrades are nostalgic for the days of Stalin, and that in Germany neo-Nazis are eager to bring back the wonderful days of Hitler. In Dixieland, some white southerners want to revive the Confederacy, lynch a few Blacks and make slavery rise from its ashes. Even a little nostalgia is a dangerous thing.

(Jonah Raskin is the author of the retro novel, Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955.)

DEMONSTRATORS JAM VALENCIA STREET IN SF’S MISSION DISTRICT TO PROTEST KAMALA HARRIS FUNDRAISER

by Ida Mojadad & Joe Garofoli

Dozens of demonstrators jammed the 700 block of Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District on Wednesday, a protest intended to coincide with the arrival of Vice President Kamala Harris for a fundraiser at the Chapel concert venue.

Police were allowing only residents to pass through a barricade on Valencia Street between 18th and 19th streets.

Protested chanted “Free Palestine, free Palestine” and held signs decrying “Israeli apartheid.”

Some of the unrest followed Harris into the venue. Protesters shouted “Shame on you!” to attendees as they walked inside.

Avalon Edwards, who entered with a ticket that was given to him, said he shouted out about the deaths of Palestinians as Harris began speaking. Edwards was escorted out of the room as other attendees chanted “Four more years!”

Harris continued, “What we’ve seen in Gaza is far too many innocent civilians being killed. Humanitarian aid being denied in many cases. The president and I have been very clear: This war must end, we need a cease-fire, we need the hostages out, we need aid going in, and we need to be committed to a two-state solution.” The crowd erupted in applause.

Harris spoke for 13 minutes and finished her remarks at 2:31 p.m. She swiftly headed to the motorcade.

The scene was far calmer for Harris earlier Wednesday during a fundraiser at a private home in the Oakland Hills. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators were several blocks away, outside the security perimeter in the Upper Rockridge neighborhood. They could not be seen or heard from the site of the fundraiser.

Before 60 guests who paid $5,000-$25,000 to be there, Harris’ 11-minute speech was light on policy and more focused on encouraging supporters about the importance of the election. (She took questions from the guests after the media had been cleared from the residence, which is the custom at most presidential campaign fundraisers.) In attendance were California Attorney General Rob Bonta and his wife, Oakland Assembly Member Mia Bonta.

Harris told the audience that she has met with more than 150 world leaders, many of whom are concerned about the election.  During her recent trips, Harris said, “World leaders came up to me and said, ‘Kamala,’ they said — we’re on a first-name basis — ‘I hope you guys are going to be OK in this election.’ And understand that when they raised the point, it was purely out of self-interest. Because, you see, people around the globe fully understand the consequences of this election to their own countries, much less to us.

“And I share that to just put a fine point on the consequences and the permeations that will result from this election,” Harris said. “Everything is at stake.”

Harris did not mention Donald Trump at the Oakland event, his recent felony convictions or the administration’s new border policy, which was announced this week. Nor did she mention anything about the Middle East during the portion of her speech that the media was allowed to attend.

Harris told the Oakland audience, “Do not despair. This is not a time to despair and throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. We have 153 days left to get this done. And we are up for it, and we are going to win,” she said as the audience cheered. “We may have bloody knuckles at the end of it, but we are going to win because it’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be easy.”

(SF Chronicle)

ISRAEL SAYS THE STRIKE TARGETED HAMAS, WHILE PALESTINIAN NEWS MEDIA SAYS DOZENS OF CIVILIANS WERE KILLED.

An Israeli airstrike hit a school building in central Gaza early Thursday in an attack that Israel’s military said had targeted Hamas operatives and that Palestinian news media said had killed dozens of displaced civilians who had been sheltering there.

At least 32 people were killed in the predawn strike in Nuseirat, according to Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency. Dozens of others were injured, the agency reported.

A spokesman for Israel’s military said fighter jets had attacked the compound to target members of Hamas who had taken part in the Oct. 7 assault on Israel and continued to operate out of the school amid civilians. The military said it had taken measures to reduce harm to civilians, including aerial inspections, but did not detail what those steps were.…

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/06/06/world/israel-gaza-war-hamas#israel-says-the-strike-targeted-hamas-while-palestinian-media-says-dozens-of-civilians-were-killed

ONE THING WE CAN AGREE ON

Editor:

When 70 million Americans lose faith in democracy, nothing’s gained by calling them misinformed, stupid or cult members. Such charges deflect attention from legitimate grievances, which unaddressed worsen into lack of respect for norms and laws.

One thing most people could agree on is money plays too big a role in our politics. It distorts the concerns of every legislator who must calculate whether a vote will threaten the cash required to remain in office. Let’s not pretend it doesn’t. Name a single legislator who ever publicly declared, “This system pits our self-interest against the common good.”

Voters could demand three changes to sever this Gordian knot blocking solutions to most problems in America — gun deaths, drug deaths, climate change, health care costs, overcrowded schools and fairer taxes. They are:

Full federal funding of elections. Taxpayers fund every candidate equally. No private contributions allowed.

Prohibit corporations from contributing to campaigns. They are serving their shareholders, not the public good.

End contributions from lobbyists to legislators. If legislative salaries must increase, we should do it. But legislators must work for We the People, not We the People with cash.

Remember this next time you hear someone say, “There’s nothing we can do.”

Peter Coyote

Sebastopol

N.Y.P.D. MOVES TO REVOKE TRUMP’S LICENSE TO CARRY A GUN

Former President Donald J. Trump had a concealed carry license and had three pistols.

by Lola Fadulu & William K. Rashbaum

The Police Department is seeking to revoke former President Donald J. Trump’s license to carry a concealed weapon after his conviction in his New York hush-money case, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Mr. Trump had a concealed carry permit in New York and had three pistols registered under the permit, the people said. Two of them were turned over to the Police Department’s License Division around the time Mr. Trump was charged in April 2023 with 34 counts of falsifying business records, according to the people with knowledge of the matter. The third pistol had already been legally transferred to Florida. It is unclear whether it is still in Mr. Trump’s possession.

Under federal law and state law in New York and Florida, people with felony convictions are barred from possessing a firearm.

The Police Department will complete an investigation that is likely to lead to the revocation of Mr. Trump’s concealed carry permit, according to the people with knowledge of the matter. Mr. Trump has the right to file a challenge to the move.

The department’s actions were first reported by CNN.

In a statement, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, did not directly address the possibility of Mr. Trump’s permit being revoked, saying, “Biden’s cronies in the Democrat Party are panicked and have chosen to continue to abuse our once great justice system to pursue their number one political opponent and interfere in the coming election.”

The Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TRUMP IS A RACIST? GEE, WHAT A SURPRISE!

As if any more proof was needed, a former producer for The Apprentice just revealed the depths of Donald Trump’s racism.

Recently freed from a 20-year nondisclosure agreement, Bill Pruitt, who worked on the television show that christened Trump as America’s Boss and arguably shaped the savvy businessman persona that he rode to the presidency in 2016, told the story of The Apprentice’s early days for the first time for Slate.

Most notably, he recounted a 2004 incident in which Trump refused to hire Kwame Jackson, the Black finalist on the series’s first season. His reason, according to Pruitt?

“I mean, would America buy a n— winning?” Trump reportedly told the show’s producers.

The comment was reportedly caught on tape, though Pruitt said he’s sure the evidence will never be found.

It’s the most incendiary, if not exactly surprising, moment in a story full of characteristic details of the former president’s deceptive and crooked behavior: requiring NBC to rent out Trump Tower space for the set at a premium because his actual office was “cramped” and with “chipped or peeling” wood furniture; stiffing the architect of Trump National Golf Club, who realized legal fees to sue Trump would exceed the financial reward; and rambling incoherence retouched into slick boardroom operating in NBC’s editing room.

It also comes in the wake of Trump’s rally in the South Bronx last week, held in an effort to “woo” Black and Latino voters.

That Trump is an anti-Black racist is hardly revelatory: a lifetime of discriminatory housing practices, advocacy for the execution of the exonerated Central Park Five, attacks on kneeling NFL players, and many refusals to condemn white supremacists indicate as much.

Still, the remark, stripped of the gloss of plausible deniability his public dog whistles often possess, is alarming.

(The New Republic)

SUSPENSION OF A'S PITCHER MICHAEL KELLY SHINES A LIGHT ON MLB'S GAMBLING HYPOCRISY

by John Shea

The only big-leaguer among the five baseball players suspended Tuesday for gambling played for the team with an owner who wants to relocate to Las Vegas, the gambling capital of the world.

While Oakland Athletics owner John Fisher hopes to pocket untold millions by playing games on the Las Vegas Strip, one of his most effective players was suspended by Major League Baseball for making bets three years ago totaling $99.22.

Reliever Michael Kelly’s belongings were cleared out of the A’s clubhouse on Monday, a day before MLB announced his one-year suspension. Manager Mark Kotsay said he was informed of the news late Monday afternoon when he got a call from general manager David Forst.

Kotsay held a meeting before Tuesday night's A’s-Mariners series opener with players and staff for one main purpose.

“I just reminded them of the rule,” Kotsay said.

Major League Rule 21 is posted in every clubhouse and specifically points out that betting on baseball games in which a player, umpire, league official or team employee has no duty to perform merits a one-year suspension – and that betting on a game in which the person has a duty to perform results in a lifetime ban.

“It’s a tough overall situation,” said Zack Gelof, the A’s second baseman and player rep. “It’s a big deal for his life. It’s really tough to see, especially when it was that long ago, and it seems like a small amount. Yeah, tough all around. I feel bad for him.

“The policy’s the policy. You can’t bet on baseball. You feel bad for him. At the same time, we were just reminded today (in Kotsay’s meeting). No ifs, ands or buts, you can’t bet on baseball.”

MLB is walking a fine line. On one hand, it needs to be strict on players and staff when it comes to betting on its game. On the other, it continues to embrace lucrative sponsorship deals with casinos and betting sites.

The A’s played Tuesday’s game in front of a giant advertisement on the right-field wall for Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino. In fact, when A’s radio broadcasters run down the scores from the out-of-town scoreboard, located just above the billboard, they say the moment is sponsored by the casino.

On the TV side, during NBC Sports California pregame and postgame shows, analysts discuss gambling odds, a segment called the Edge that’s sponsored by Graton Resort & Casino.

Betting on baseball is extremely easy, and MLB makes it easier than ever, a fact that served as a powerful backdrop to Tuesday’s suspensions, perhaps even bordering on hypocrisy. Yes, anyone who bets on games deserves a suspension, to preserve the game as genuine and authentic, but MLB leaves itself open to criticism – and more player suspensions – with how it has jumped into bed with the gamblers.

“You’re talking about MLB mandating that rule and the can of worms it can open if you allow anybody affecting the outcome of a game or potentially throwing a game,” A’s pitcher Ross Stripling said. “You can’t let that into the game at all. But at the same time, the gambling and the FanDuels and the DraftKings are massive parts of sports world now. We’ve got to keep those relationships, knowing how good they are for the sport, but also keep our stuff separate.”

According to MLB, Kelly was a minor-leaguer in the Astros’ system when he wagered $99.22 on 10 bets involving nine MLB games from Oct. 5 to Oct. 17, 2021, three of which were Astros games. Kelly joined the A’s on a November waiver claim and made the Opening Day roster, posting a 2.59 ERA in 28 outings.

“You never wish that on anybody,” A’s closer Mason Miller said of Kelly. “He was an integral part of our group. It’s sad to see it. He’s been on all sides of it for us. He pitched in games at the beginning of the year when we were down by a bit, and he worked himself into a leverage role. It sucks to see. It’s a shame. It happened three years ago, and it comes back to light now. The rules are the rules. You have to live with that.”

A teammate and friend suddenly vanished, and it was tough to accept inside the A’s clubhouse.

“You hate it for him,” Stripling said. “Everyone makes mistakes. Don’t get me wrong. Not a smart mistake. We know that. That’s ingrained in us. Even in college, they tell you about this. So when you’re doing something like that, you know what you’re doing. But you hate it for him because he seems like such a good guy.

“It’s one of those things that stinks about this (baseball) life, you see him every day, you are good friends, brothers to an extent with what we go through together, and now there’s a world where I might not see Michael Kelly again in my life, which is a crazy thing to think about.”

Kotsay spoke briefly with Kelly and said he wished him the best going forward. Asked if he believes Kelly could get another opportunity to pitch in the majors, Kotsay said, “I do believe in people being given a second chance.”

Meantime, Fisher continues to look ahead to life in Las Vegas and opening a ballpark on the Strip as early as 2028. Broadcasters and analysts continue to pump up the casinos and betting sites. And players continue to be told to stay away from it all.

Playing baseball is tough enough, mixed messages or no mixed messages.

(SF Chronicle)

Bo Jackson hit a hard one-hopper back at Nolan Ryan, and it hit Nolan in the face. It put a 2-inch gash in his lip that required six stitches. He continued to pitch, September, 1990

THE UGLY DISCOURSE SURROUNDING CAITLIN CLARK

by Candace Buckner

We should all protect Caitlin Clark. She is the white knight galloping in to save the Dark Continent known as the WNBA, the singular star uplifting an entire women’s sports movement that only now matters because men are watching. She is the No. 1 draft pick learning the rigors of a professional league, but doing so with the same lean and slightly sinewy 152-pound frame from her college days - every time she’s double-teamed and trapped by grown women who refuse to view her as anything other than a scoring threat, the physical contact takes on a greater meaning.

And that’s mostly because she is a minefield, whose explosions are triggered by our worst inclinations. Although she has unprecedented power, Caitlin Clark, somehow, is the one in need of our protection.

Every time the Indiana Fever takes the floor, it seems, Clark is a target. Which would be expected, because her range starts from the moment she enters the arena, and any opposing guard smart enough to have pored over Clark’s college highlights knows that she better play defense for all 94 feet. And yet, when Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter committed a flagrant foul by shoulder-checking Clark on Saturday, she became the subject of an ugly discourse that assumes Clark’s frailty - and accuses her rivals of villainy.

The competitive, one-point win by the Fever over the Sky was overshadowed by the physical and verbal back-and-forth between two players. The sequence eventually ended with Carter shedding her good sense and pulling a move that Draymond Green would probably scoff at as lightweight. The fourth-year guard out of Texas A&M did cross the line of fair play. Ever since, however, the moment has been presented as proof that WNBA veterans don’t like Clark and are intentionally roughing her up.

But that’s an insincere way of putting it. Since the usual suspects would prefer spewing their coded language, let’s be more specific: The moment is being magnified as incriminating evidence that brutish Black women are jealous of the league’s supposed savior, and therefore would rather manhandle her than show appreciation.

Every layer peeled from the Carter-Clark episode reveals not only the shallowness of sports commentators when they’re forced to discuss women’s sports - Uh-oh! Catfight! Rarrhhh rarhhhhh! - but also the divisiveness so quickly seized upon in our society. Clark can’t simply be a rookie going through her Welcome to the WNBA phase, something that even the league itself leaned into with its tongue-in-cheek commercial aimed at its newcomers, both the ones on the court and those in front of television screens.

Because Clark is the linchpin drawing sellout crowds and groundbreaking ratings - the marketable star with the agreeable skin color and sexuality - her plight carries a sympathetic bent with her most loyal audience.

They don’t view her as the incredibly fierce woman who has no problem imploring a ref to “call a f---ing foul!” Nor simply as the deserving honoree of the WNBA’s rookie of the month, who despite leading the league with 5.4 turnovers a game and posting one of the lowest field goal percentage at .357, has still put up an impressive offensive line of 15.6 points and 6.4 assists per game. Her most compulsive fans have treated her struggles as cause to protest. Clark is only getting to the free throw line 4.4 times per game, and now they would really like to speak to a supervisor.

I learned how swiftly the “Clarkies” can turn an innocent observation into an offense, and how dicey it can be to cover Clark when she has a subpar game. After Clark’s much-hyped professional debut, I wrote that Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington, a Black woman, “stripped her clean at half court.” Yet a male reader corrected me in an email that no, no, Clark was instead “cross; checked [sic] by a so-called top defensive opponent like in the NHL.” Another reader accused me of being “racial” - which I assume is better than being “racist” - because I dared to note Carrington’s defense.

Carter’s flagrant foul, upgraded by the league the next day, only inflamed the hysteria from those either blinded by their affection for Clark, or too ignorant to understand how heated competition works.

The argument that Fever teammates should stand up for the rookie is at least based in the realm of sports, like Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen needing a Mitch Morse to body-slam anyone who messes with the franchise, or the entire Edmonton Oilers roster getting called out for not protecting superstar Connor McDavid. However, those piggybacking on Charles Barkley’s ramble that fouls against Clark somehow prove that players are being “petty” are better off sticking to (male) sports.

Consider what that argument implies. That Clark has elevated the league so much that competitors, paid professionals, should send Clark thank-you notes before every tip-off, then spend the rest of the game ushering her to the paint for open layups. How many other athletes, in the history of mankind, have ever been criticized for competing too hard? And who on Earth would consider Barkley, who once told a female reporter, ‘I don’t hit women, but if I did, I would hit you,’ a thought leader on women? Or as he called WNBA players, “these girls.”

Others have uttered worse. Across social media, Carter has been called a “thug,” her appearance lampooned and her shoulder check viewed as not simply a flagrant foul committed on a basketball court in downtown Indianapolis, but an “assault” perpetrated on the southside of Chicago.

Clark’s fans are engaging in these bigoted narratives, but so are the alarmists who have nothing better to do than to ruin women’s basketball. It would be naive to think that Clark hasn’t noticed this messiness swirling on social media and in major news outlets. She’s a pro, she has agency. And power. She is not a minor, but rather an adult woman. And if this narrative that pits her against her Black peers makes her uncomfortable, then she needs to speak up and say so. Same goes for the Fever organization - as soon as those in charge are done using their platform to complain that their golden ticket is getting bruised up.

They’d rather paint Clark as the victim of a silent whistle, allowing a growing cult of casuals to scream while storming the court and trashing up the conversation. The angriest of these fans are not here for the basketball, they just want to protect Caitlin Clark.

Just like we all should, apparently. Those in media who create lazy headlines, desperate for your clicks; the male pundits who suddenly want to share their passionate opinions about the WNBA; and the players, in a predominantly Black league, who are being asked to show deference to this White rookie’s popularity. But Clark doesn’t need to be coddled, especially when her army of supporters are the ones throwing a tantrum.

(Washington Post)

HE SOLVED A MATH PROBLEM THAT STUMPED STANFORD PROFS.

What became of a Bay Area prodigy

by Jill Tucker

Even among the most gifted of child prodigies, Evan O’Dorney stood out.

At 13, he won the Scripps National Spelling Bee and, four years later, garnered the top prize in the Intel Science Talent search — each a mind-boggling feat, but combined, a singular achievement.

After spelling the word “serrafine” to win the bee in 2007, Evan added some of the world’s most prestigious academic awards to his resume, including two gold medals at the International Math Olympiad, where in 2010 he posted the second highest score among the most impressive high school math minds on the planet.

A year later, he found the simple solution to a previously unsolved math problem that had stumped Stanford University mathematicians, which he published in an academic journal and submitted for the Intel prize.

That’s when I met Evan at his home in Dublin, as he prepared to head to the competition, where he would meet then-President Barack Obama and bring home the $100,000 prize for that mathematical solution that predicts whether a fraction will accurately predict irrational numbers like square roots: 4d{+2}/k-d{+2}.

The homeschooled teen was shy and awkward as I interviewed him for a Chronicle story, but also funny — determined to find time between his academic achievements and composing musical scores to take driver’s education to get his license.

I left him that day thinking I had just met a genius, and I wondered what would happen to him. Not all story subjects leave lasting impressions, but Evan was obviously extraordinary, someone who arguably had more potential than the vast majority of the human race. What would he do with it?

Spring is the season of child prodigies, with the various academic competitions as well as college acceptances highlighting innovations, scientific discoveries and entrepreneurialism among the small pool of stratospheric achievers.

Spring reminds me of Evan.

At 17, he was an outlier among outliers. But it was clear then as now that success is never guaranteed for exceptionally gifted children who can struggle with the transition to adulthood, suffering burnout, mental health issues or in some cases, an existential crisis when they land at elite universities where they are no longer the only exceptional person in the room, experts say.

“We see a fair number of these prodigies come through Harvard and it doesn’t always work out,” said Harvard University math professor Joe Harris. “Outliers who come to Harvard and find out they’re not alone — not everybody embraces that.”

The fate of this year’s prodigies remains to be seen. Evan won the spelling bee 17 years ago. He is now 30.

It wasn’t hard to find him. He has his own Wikipedia page. We arranged a virtual meeting.

His face popped up on Zoom last week. He looks nearly identical to his teenage self: similar glasses, similar haircut, the same smile, with a voice and manner of speaking that has a Mr. Rogers quality — a patient, thoughtful drawl.

He is, as he predicted, a mathematician at a university, teaching and solving previously unsolved math problems.

“So yeah, I’m a postdoc at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) right now,” he said.

He’s a number theorist, which is “the oldest and deepest branch of mathematics,” or “the study of the counting numbers, the integers,” he said.

“I just recently finished a paper on reciprocal polynomials that asks questions like, if you take an algebra problem, you know, like x to the fifth plus five x equals 10,” he explained, “and you make it with random numbers for the coefficients, what’s the probability that the problem will have a solution that you can write down like x equals four, that you can write down exactly.”

Evan was eager to talk about his work and his music, which is still a big part of his life. It was harder for him to explain how he won the spelling bee or solves math riddles, other than to say he sees patterns.

As a child, Evan said tests showed he was “profoundly gifted,” with autistic behaviors, although he’s never been formally diagnosed. “I think I do have a gift, and it’s above and beyond what I usually encounter,” he said.

“I’m skeptical when people claim that I have a photographic memory or an eidetic memory,” he said, using another term for instant recall of images. He explained, rather, that his memory is based on rules and exceptions. He has below-par memory for facial recognition, he noted.

He does have perfect pitch and the enviable gift of hearing in his head the sounds of a choir or orchestra from the notes printed on sheet music, which he brings to the gym to read on the treadmill, slowing or speeding the music to his pace, no earbuds required.

I finally asked him the question I’d carried for 13 years: Is he a genius?

Actually, the term has no agreed-upon definition, sometimes based on an IQ test score of 130 or 140, but increasingly more on what someone accomplishes in life, reflecting far less than 1% of the population, said Dean Simonton, a UC Davis professor of psychology and expert on genius and creativity.

By the latter concept, according to Simonton, a genius makes “original, exemplary, and enduring contributions to domains of achievement that are both intellectually demanding and culturally valued.” Based on that definition, the best way to identify genius is posthumously, he said.

As a child, Evan said tests showed he was “profoundly gifted,” with autistic behaviors, although he’s never been formally diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental condition. And he’s never taken an IQ test, so he demurred from the label.

“I think I do have a gift, and it’s above and beyond what I usually encounter,” he said.

Indeed, his path since I first met him reflects the “above and beyond.”

At 18, Evan left for Harvard. There, he was so advanced in math, he skipped undergraduate courses and started graduate classes as a freshman, his story making it into the college newspaper.

Evan thrived at Harvard, where advisers helped him integrate into college life through music programs, and he found an additional outlet of support in the Catholic community.

At age 19, he said, he made his first real friend.

“It took me a long time to be interested in making friends with my peers, but eventually I did get competent at that art,” he told me.

“It never was quite natural. And so it took a lot of struggles,” he added. “Everybody struggles with something. And it took a lot of faith that normal people, even if they seem less intelligent, are worth getting to know as well.”

Evan laughed as he made the last point, which likely fell somewhere between a joke and the truth.

He graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, the highest honors, before heading to Cambridge University in England on a prestigious Churchill Fellowship. He then earned a doctorate in mathematics at Princeton, followed by a two-year postdoc at Notre Dame before his current three-year postdoc at Carnegie Mellon.

Most prodigies — by definition those who achieve excellence in something by age 10 — are unable to sustain their trajectories, said David Henry Feldman, an expert in child prodigies. Evan, shown here, “is pretty rare, maybe one of a kind.”

His next step is likely a tenure-track position at a university where he can continue his research on number theory, a field that can have practical applications, including cryptography. But Evan’s love for math is founded in the beauty of it, the reliability of it and the search to solve the mysteries in it through creativity and painting pictures, albeit ones created with mathematical symbols unintelligible to most.

“I certainly see myself as an artist, more so than a scientist,” he said.

What heights Evan will achieve remain to be seen.

“I think he has very high potential,” said professor Eric Reidl, Evan’s mentor at Notre Dame, adding the caveat that there are no guarantees of success in research. “There’s a lot of luck when it comes to scientific discovery.”

Already Evan is in rarified air, said David Henry Feldman, a child development professor emeritus at Tufts University and expert in child prodigies.

Most prodigies — by definition those who achieve excellence in something by age 10 — are unable to sustain their trajectories, he said.

They have the highest level of mastery, but “rarely do anything remarkable creatively,” he said. “Among the cases I’ve known, (Evan) is pretty rare, maybe one of a kind.”

After an hour of conversation, Evan and I wrapped up our Zoom conversation. I told him to take care. He told me to enjoy my day.

I don’t know if I met a genius 13 years ago. I’m not sure Evan knows, either. But he left me with a parting thought that indicated he might have an opinion.

“I haven’t met my match in Bananagrams,” he said.

(SF Chronicle)

MY FATHER’S COURT

by Molly McCloskey

One night, when I was a sophomore in college, my father came to see me play basketball in Philadelphia. It was 1984. I was on the team at St. Joseph’s, and he was the general manager of the Detroit Pistons. He and my mother were long divorced, and I saw him only two or three times a year, when he came to town for a Pistons game or to scout a player. I had lost my starting spot at the beginning of the season, and that night I didn’t play much or particularly well.

My father waited for me after the game, and as soon as I saw him I burst into tears. I can still see his expression, tender and somehow unsurprised, even though we both knew that my performance was irrelevant. I had landed a full scholarship, but it was clear that I wasn’t going to develop into a college player of even minor significance. Something else was at stake, and I think we knew that, too. The game was the language he spoke, and I was losing my fluency.

I grew up the youngest of six, all of us obsessed with basketball. My oldest brother, Mike, was on the freshman team at Duke; my first team was called the California Fancies. I was four, my brother Roman was six, and our basket was an iron pot set on the coffee table in the rec room of our house in Winston-Salem. As “Kip Reynolds” and “Mike Jetson,” we routed a series of make-believe opponents. My father was then the head coach at Wake Forest. Every fall, the team came for brunch, and our house would fill with his other family, giants who scooped me up and set me on their shoulders. I was captivated by them, and named my imaginary friend Walker, after the co-captain Dickie Walker.

There was a feeling of fun, of constant tumult, in our house, but my father could be a hard-ass, too. He’d grown up in eastern Pennsylvania—his father and grandfather were coal miners—and in the Second World War he had skippered a landing craft off Okinawa, a vessel that transported troops and tanks between larger ships and the shore. He had no tolerance for the spoiled, the entitled, the soft. His pitiless code of masculinity meant that my brothers got the worst of it; he might call them “Mary Jane” if he thought that they seemed weak or inclined to quit when things got challenging. Above all, he hated attitude. What finally brought him to the pros—in 1972, he got a job coaching the Portland Trail Blazers, and my family moved across the country—was an inability to keep sucking up to high-school recruits. One day, he went to see a star senior in New York. The kid was spinning the ball, acting cocky. “Hey, Coach Jack,” he said, “what’s Wake Forest gonna do for me?” My father pondered this. “You know what we’re gonna do?” he replied. “We’re gonna stick that ball right up your ass.” Then he walked out.

Things got off to a bad start in Portland. The Blazers had the No. 1 pick in the 1972 draft. My father wanted Bob McAdoo, but the Blazers’ owner chose LaRue Martin. McAdoo went on to win Rookie of the Year at Buffalo en route to the Hall of Fame, while Martin is still widely regarded as the worst first pick in N.B.A. history. My father clashed with the star forward Sidney Wicks. Losses piled up. At my new school, boys taunted me: “Your dad sucks!” I never said a word about the teasing at home. I somehow knew that my job was to bear the ridicule on my father’s behalf.

After two years with Portland, my father was fired. By 1976, he was floundering, trying to sell time-shares in Hawaiian condos from a rickety desk in our den. And then, that spring, my parents got divorced. My father had fallen in love with someone else. He rented a grim little apartment in a Portland exurb, where my brother Roman and I, still young enough to be living at home, visited him. I remember depressing Friday evenings with takeout burgers, limned, for me, with the frightening realization that the bottom could drop right out of the most solid-seeming things. But within months my father was gone from Oregon altogether, having returned to the N.B.A. fold when the Los Angeles Lakers’ coach, Jerry West, hired him to be his assistant.

My mother got a part-time job at a weekly newspaper, and we moved to a house in a cheaper part of town. Then we set about what she called “raising each other”—trying to navigate our new reality without the ballast of my father.

His first year in L.A., he got remarried, making a new home with the woman for whom he’d left my mother. Roman and I visited them twice. I don’t remember much of those stays, apart from sunshine, palm trees, and Jack Nicholson at courtside. It felt to me as though my father had stolen away to a glamorous new life; to my continuing shame, I told my mother I wanted to live with him, an idea that no one but me found appealing. Indeed, for reasons that were never articulated, my father would not invite me to visit him again for another twenty-five years, by which time we were as good as strangers.

His job in L.A. was short-lived. When West moved to the front office after three seasons, my father was passed over for the head job. He went to un-glam Indiana, to be an assistant with the Pacers, and finally to Detroit, which was then home to the worst team in the league.

I was a sophomore in high school, in 1979, when my father—a “rumpled, graying, mostly unknown . . . old basketball man,” as one sports blogger has described him—took the Pistons job. Throughout high school, Roman and I would meet him at his hotel when he was in town for a game against the Blazers, and he would take us to dinner, awkward outings that only underscored our growing estrangement from him. We would go to the game, feeling briefly like V.I.P.s with our complimentary tickets, and then he would be gone again.

One of my father’s visits to Portland coincided with a meeting I had during my junior year with my high-school coach and the principal after I had been caught drinking. My mother, weary from parenting two teen-agers alone, insisted that my father go with me. I was nervous. The coach, after reminding me of everything I stood to lose if this sort of behavior continued, benched me for four games. Once we were outside, my father, who’d been serious throughout the meeting, laughed and elbowed me, as though we’d pulled off a caper. I was relieved—no sign of the hard-ass—then disappointed: what became of me seemed of little consequence to him.

By my senior year, my team was heading for the state tournament and I had begun attracting attention from small Division I schools. I sent my father newspaper clippings from our games. I wasn’t playing basketball to win his attention; I played because I loved it and I was good, but I wanted him to know that I was good. I don’t remember him ever coming to any of my high-school games. (He must’ve seen me play sometime, because I can still hear him scolding me: “You’re yanking the chain.” He meant that I was pulling back on the jump-shot follow-through—the extended arm and flexed wrist that are the mark of proper form.) It never occurred to me that he might go out of his way to see me play, or that I might be entitled to ask him to—that I might be entitled to ask him for anything at all. Within the world of sports, he was becoming famous and important. A couple of times a year, he breezed into town. He was more dashing and elusive than the bland, ploddingly present fathers of my friends, but the thrill was fleeting. I made do with a kind of phantom, those moments he manifested on the television or in the excited chatter of boys and men I knew, and it would be years before I admitted to myself just how much I had needed from him, and how little I got.

One night, I played against the daughter of Jimmy Lynam, who had left the head job at St. Joseph’s to be an assistant with the Blazers. Jimmy was at the game, and afterward he told the women’s coach at St. Joseph’s that he ought to have a look at me. The school was nearly three thousand miles away, but my parents were from Pennsylvania, my siblings and I had all been born in Philadelphia, and my father had coached at Penn. Philadelphia basketball felt like family, a return to the unsundered past.

Meanwhile, my father was building his team in Detroit. He made thirty-eight trades in ten years, earning him the nickname Trader Jack. He started with Isiah Thomas, whom he drafted in 1981. Isiah wanted to play in Chicago, his home town. He told my father, “You don’t have anybody I can pass to.” My father said he’d bench him before he’d trade him, and promised to get him some better teammates. My father had a knack for spotting overlooked talent, and he wanted players as obsessed with winning as he was. The center Bill Laimbeer, whom he plucked from Cleveland, had been drafted a lowly sixty-fifth. According to the coach Chuck Daly, who would soon join the Pistons, Laimbeer couldn’t jump over a piece of paper, but my father had seen him battling to the final buzzer in hopeless games, and knew he wanted him. My father drafted the future Hall of Famers Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman as Detroit’s eighteenth and twenty-seventh picks. Even the owners of the Pistons were mystified by Dumars: “Who is he?” My father loved him from Day One, inviting him home for Thanksgiving his rookie year. Dumars told me recently that, as the new guy, he’d been holding back on the court. One day, my father said, “You don’t have to wait to be great. You’re ready. Go ahead and do it.” That night, Dumars put in an explosive performance: “He cleared the way for me with that conversation.”

Rounding out the front court were the power forwards John Salley and Rick Mahorn. Salley was charismatic and all smiles, while Mahorn was an enforcer, known as McNasty when he’d played for Washington. Vinnie Johnson, dubbed the Microwave because he heated up so fast, was the third guard. When my father traded Adrian Dantley, beloved in Detroit, for Mark Aguirre, who had a reputation for being selfish and spoiled, Pistons fans were angry. But Aguirre blended in beautifully, and all the shuffling finally paid off. In 1989, my father’s tenth year with the team, the Pistons swept the Lakers for their first championship. They won the title again the next year in Portland, on a sweet jumper by the Microwave with .7 seconds on the clock. Both championships were won against teams that had let my father go, which must have been particularly gratifying.

By then, the Bad Boys were legendary. The moniker had gained traction after CBS used it during a 1988 halftime feature about the Pistons and it got picked up by the league for its end-of-season video on the team. The players embraced it. Detroiters loved the Bad Boys with a crazy love, but just about everywhere else they were reviled. I still meet men who, when they learn of my connection, hiss, “I hated that team.” The Bad Boys were extremely physical—some say dirty, not averse to hard fouls or provoking brawls—and were viewed by many as undeserving upstarts who brought something ugly to the sport. It wasn’t just the will to win but the way they won, the emphasis on grind over dazzle. The sportswriter Keith Langlois compared the players to “a bunch of hard hats swinging picks and wielding shovels.” My father’s truculence and competitiveness clearly set a tone. Years earlier, when Pat Riley accidentally broke the coach Stan Albeck’s nose during a casual three-on-three game in L.A., my father had wanted to fight him over it. At sixty-two, my father went one-on-one with Mahorn, to see if Mahorn was ready to come back after an injury. “I was, like, this old motherfucker? I kicked his ass,” Mahorn told me recently, laughing. “But he was out there playing hard.”

Sports Illustrated ranked the Bad Boys among the most hated N.B.A. teams of all time, describing them in apocalyptic tones: “Between the joy of Magic and the majesty of Michael was the dark and frightening rise of the Bad Boys.” The Chicago Tribune writer Sam Smith called them “as cunning as Satan.” Laimbeer was the most despised Bad Boy of all. Once, at halftime of a playoff game in Atlanta, a fan went on court with a chainsaw and a cardboard replica of Laimbeer’s jersey and sawed it to pieces. (Those were the days when you could bring a chainsaw to an N.B.A. game.) Laimbeer welcomed the animosity. They all did, to varying degrees, using it to throw opponents off their game. My father believed that a lot of other G.M.s, not to mention the N.B.A. commissioner David Stern, blamed him for the Pistons’ style of play. In an e-mail to me, he wrote, “The commissioner did not like our team for being so rough—I call it competitive so he also did not care for me.” Jerry West, with whom he’d coached in L.A., would later observe that my father assembled a team that reflected his character. He meant it as a compliment. “We embodied his damn personality,” Mahorn told me. “A bunch of average kinda dudes that just had badass attitudes.” Dumars agreed: “We were take-no-prisoners, and that was Jack.”

Just how good the team was can get obscured by all the Bad Boys mythology. Isiah was one of the most talented point guards in N.B.A. history, and Michael Jordan would call Dumars the best defender he ever faced. Laimbeer, a star rebounder, was one of the first big men who could consistently hit the three. Rodman had a contained maniacal energy that made him a stunning defender and rebounder. And they were deep—during both championship seasons, no player averaged more than nineteen points per game.

I missed a lot of that era. In 1989, two months before the Pistons’ first championship, I moved to Ireland. I was twenty-three. I’d gone for what I thought was a few weeks’ visit but had instantly loved it and ended up staying twenty-five years. For a few of those years, I played on a local club team, practicing in cold, rural gyms, the game being the only thread of connection I still felt to my father. He visited me the first summer I was in Ireland, and never again. Five years passed in which I didn’t see him at all.

But, in the early two-thousands, he started urging me to visit him. Every other summer, I would go for a few days to Skidaway Island, off the coast of Savannah, where he’d retired with his wife. For the first hour or so, he seemed delighted to see me, but by evening I would feel as though I were underfoot, and that he was waiting to get back to whatever it was I’d interrupted. There were moments of affinity, though. One day, he drove Roman and me around Skidaway in his convertible blasting “Spirit in the Sky,” and you never saw three people sing so joyfully about dying.

Not long after I reëntered his life, my father began to drift away again, but in a different manner. In the summer of 2012, I went to Portland for a family wedding that he was also attending. I had just published a book, and, as it happened, would be reading from it at an event the following day. At the reception, my father and I were chatting, and he mentioned that he’d be going to his daughter’s reading. He was clearly proud. And then he said, quite sweetly, “Now, who are you?”

One night, soon after I moved back to the U.S., in 2014, I settled in to watch “Bad Boys,” a recent installment in ESPN’s sports documentary series “30 for 30,” which began as a look at the biggest stories from the network’s first thirty years on the air. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. While the segment was ostensibly about basketball and winning and being the baddest boys ever, the word “family” came up repeatedly. John Salley said he’d thought it was a crock talking about family in the context of professional sports until he joined the Pistons. “And then I had to readjust myself,” he said, “because we were a family.” When Rodman wept at the podium after winning Defensive Player of the Year, my father put a hand on his back to steady him. Isiah explained, “That type of family unit that we had was ideal for [Dennis] at a time he really needed it.” Dumars remembered, “It was us against the world.”

The moment that struck me most was the Hug. It took place in 1991, after the team’s loss to the Chicago Bulls in the Conference Finals. Technically, it wasn’t after the loss, because there were still about eight seconds on the game clock when most of the Pistons walked off the court, right past a stupefied Michael Jordan, their final act as champs a refusal to pass the torch graciously.

As they headed for the tunnel, my father emerged from the opposite direction. He hugged Laimbeer, then Isiah. The camera zoomed in on his face. He was crying, holding Isiah tight. I’ve rerun that moment a dozen times. I even found a longer version of it that shows my father pulling away in the direction of the court and Isiah steering him back toward the locker room, talking in his ear, consoling him.

Eventually, I realized why the image hit me so hard. It wasn’t just that this was my father at his very best: loyal, vulnerable, utterly invested. It was because it made clear that there were two things I needed to forgive him for: not having been there for me, and having been there for others.

Before my father succumbed fully to dementia, he apologized to me. We were sitting at his breakfast table, and he said quietly and with no preamble, “I’m sorry we weren’t closer when you were growing up.” I could tell that he had rehearsed this declaration, and I can’t say I was unmoved. But he made our estrangement sound like a mutual failing. I was also dismayed by what came next. I had always believed that he kept his distance from me when I was young because going in and out of my life was too painful. But it wasn’t that. “I was just so wrapped up in basketball,” he said.

I mumbled something about also being sorry—as in, Yeah, it’s too bad. Then I took my dishes to the kitchen, leaving him there alone.

As the Alzheimer’s progressed, my father began phoning me. His vocabulary was ransacked by dementia, but his utterances rang strangely true.

Once, he said, “It’s so cold on this ship.”

Another day, he told me, “I’ll be leaving the area soon.”

He died at ninety-one, on the opening day of the 2017 Finals. Isiah Thomas was providing commentary on NBA TV and paid tribute. “He fought for us in a league and in a time where it was all about the Lakers and the Celtics,” he said. “We never would’ve been the type of team or people that we became had we not met [him] . . . I can sincerely say that we loved Jack McCloskey.”

A month later, after the memorial service, I sat in my father’s kitchen talking to Isiah. I mentioned the apology. “If you could change one thing,” he asked, “what would it be?” I said that I wished my father would have allowed me into his life when I was young. “Everybody would like a do-over,” he said softly. Then he added, “How many happy love songs are there?”

I asked if I could call him sometime to talk about my father, and he gave me his number. When we spoke, not long afterward, I mentioned the Hug. “I’ve had three great hugs in my life—my mom, Jack McCloskey, and my wife,” he said. “That’s an embrace I’ll never forget. We had given all that we could possibly give. There was nothing more to do with that team than watch it die and be a part of that.” I envied the two of them, the bond on display in that moment. But there was also something unexpectedly reassuring about seeing my father in a better light, through someone else’s eyes.

I began seeking out other people who had known my father, tracking down Bad Boys, rival coaches, a former Sports Illustrated journalist who once interviewed him. I was greedy for details, as though my father were a cold case I might yet crack.

I phoned the ex-Piston William Bedford at the car dealership where he was working. He let out a low whistle when I identified myself, and said, “Oh. My. God,” as though I were a long-lost sister. Bedford had been drafted sixth in 1986 by Phoenix; by the time my father traded for him, the following year, he was known to be struggling with a drug problem. He told me my father had gone to twelve-step meetings with him. “It was unbelievable to have a G.M. like that,” he said. “Jack was in my corner a hundred per cent.”

I was glad to hear that my father had come through for him, but I was also well aware that this was during a period when two of my siblings and I were dealing with alcoholism. It wasn’t the first time during my investigations that I’d been conscious of an ignoble impulse: the desire to set someone straight. When people waxed rhapsodic about my father—what a straight-up guy he was, a man you could count on—I would think of the day he walked out on us, the years I wasn’t welcome in his home, my mother getting by on her own.

During the height of covid, I bought myself a blue basketball, and went shooting in the park near my house on a few quiet mornings. I hadn’t played in years, but it came back easily. Elbow in. Follow through. Don’t yank the chain. I didn’t learn much from my father about the fundamentals of the game, or about life, really. But he modelled one thing I did have to admire: the art of keeping going.

Last year, I gathered all my father’s letters and e-mails to me and read them through. I had begun wondering if there were dimensions to him that my resentment, or the vagaries of memory, had obscured. One note from 2002 came with the clippings I had sent him from my high-school games. “It is not that I don’t want them, but you never know how long one is gg to be here, so I felt you would like to have them,” he wrote, then added, “You did not get everything.” He was referring to the fact that he had held on to a sketch I’d made, as a child, of Charlie Davis, who was my father’s star guard at Wake Forest, the first player who really stole his heart.

Finally, I dug out an envelope of photos and letters I had collected the spring after his death. A few of my siblings and I had gone to the house on Skidaway to claim mementos, and the envelope had sat in my closet ever since. I thought I knew what it contained—hadn’t I filled it myself?—but there were surprises. A photo of my grandfather, shockingly handsome, before black lung and Camel cigarettes ravaged him. A pocket diary my father kept while on Okinawa after the war: fuel dumps, bomb disposal, the names and Stateside addresses of his men. And a photograph of me. I am four years old, standing in the back yard wearing shorts, no shirt, and a baseball cap and glove. A few years later, I became embarrassed by my tomboyishness and ripped the photo up. But here it was. Scored this way and that, like a cracked mirror. On the back, written in my father’s hand: “Molly—she tore this pic, but I saved the pieces & had it restored as well as they could.”

Like that moment at the wedding—Now, who are you?—it was us all over, a string of botched attempts that, in the end, maybe did amount to something.

(The New Yorker)

TAP-DANCING OVER THE ABYSS

by James Butler

If Tuesday night’s ITV debate between UK Prime Minister Candidates Rishi Sunak (Tory) and Keir Starmer (Labour) was exceptional, it was only for its inanity. Two men, neither of them with much stage presence or prone to thinking on their feet, traded prepared barbs and crowbarred in their key messages. Each made sure to name audience members, Janet – or was it Paula? – as an empathetic consolation prize for dodging their actual questions. Be honest about when – or if, or how – we’ll fix the National Health Service? Not on your life.

All modern politics is stage management. But the debate’s structure and leaders’ charmlessness made this an exceptionally airless event. Sunak seemed desperate, Starmer stolid. The format is designed for people who aren’t interested in politics and don’t know anything about the candidates: the host presses for one-word answers and 45-second responses; the candidates cram in their various totems (toolmaker Dad, NHS, fourteen years of failure v. NHS parents, tax, tax again, trust my plan, it’s really good). This might have been plausible in the era of linear TV, but the truth is that nobody except political obsessives and the professionally obliged watch the debates, which accounts for their aura of futility. Solid performances make little difference: only disasters count. The snap verdicts called it a dead heat, though it felt closer to the heat death of the universe.

There were a few ominous gleanings for the attentive viewer. Starmer’s first real jab was to wonder why Sunak had called an election now. His implication was that it was desperate and self-serving, targeted at the short window before the Rwanda scheme collapses in ignominy and both energy costs and inflation rise again. But this ought to worry Starmer, too: the cost of energy, and associated inflationary pressure, is a structural feature rather than a consequence of mere Tory mismanagement. It will bear down on a government of any political hue.

This is a minor instance of a key political problem for the 21st century: ecological crises present themselves as exogenous financial shocks, where the cheap bases of prosperity – food supply and energy above all – are increasingly unreliable and interrupted. Political instability and conflict ensue. Solving this problem will take staggering focus and ambition: even the first steps (in the UK) would require reform of the cartel pricing system in energy, massive investment in domestic non-fossil power, and getting serious on retrofitting and waste. Ambition was not in abundant supply Tuesday night.

Perhaps it is unfair to expect ambition from such a trivial and frustrating affair. But the format is so trivial it becomes mendacious. We are assured that both parties will have a full plan for social care, as if it were an easy matter that previous administrations simply had failed to get round to. Instead of having strikes, we would not have strikes. Instead of things that don’t work, we should have things that do work instead. Instead of the economy doing badly, it should do well. I can’t have been the only person providing an increasingly hysterical chorus of “yes, but how?” in their living room.

Both leaders avoid the “how” because the only real answer is by spending more money. Nobody really believes that the next government will be able to avoid it. There is no magic reform that will deliver more teachers to schools, more doctors to hospitals, or indeed schools and hospitals which are not at risk of falling down. In the last general election, in the guise of “levelling-up,” at least the issue was recognized – though the victor had little real plan to do anything about it. (Has anybody seen those 40 new hospitals?) Since then, the British media seem to have decided that honesty about this problem amounts to political suicide, and so we are left with politicians sedulously ignoring the chasm in our foundations and tap-dancing over the abyss instead.

Government will be difficult. Starmer will inherit a broken state, a shattered economy, a despairing populace and an unstable world. He will long for the kind of boom that cushioned Blair’s arrival. Reality was asserted, perversely, only through Sunak’s smear that Labour would cost each household an extra £2000 – headline material for the right-wing press this morning. The figures are dodgy, and it’s also an oblique acknowledgment that the government has so wrecked the state that doing anything to fix it will cost money that’s been siphoned off to their cronies in little bouts of corruption or tax breaks. Starmer let Sunak repeat the smear over and over, and his rebuttal was bloodless and technical. Sunak’s aggression – typical of his debating manner – may have masked quite how evasive Starmer was on the numbers. As perhaps the only remaining Tory lifeline, it is an argument bound to recur.

Other miserable moments followed: an Atlanticist fug descended in eulogies for the special relationship. Both men nearly broke out in a military tattoo. The debate on migration and small boats was especially noxious, with Starmer repeating his line that Sunak is the “most liberal” prime minister on immigration and asserting his openness to third-country processing. He rounded it off with a bid to be considered the true heir of Churchill. What would the debate have looked like to someone with no knowledge of the political history and affiliations of the people in front of them? There were differences: one man likes to talk about “the workforce” more, the other “freedom,” which mostly seems to be a euphemism for not paying taxes. Yet a Martian viewer might have been more struck by how often their answers converged, and the strangeness of a political system that produces such similarity between putative adversaries.

Martian analysis isn’t everything. It can capture the surface-level exhaustion of politics while missing the gap between rhetoric and reality, or the interests to whom each politician or party owes their allegiance, or simply the evidence of history. It can’t take into account what’s happening off-camera – whether Labour’s internal purges or Sunak’s cratering poll numbers. The biggest political news stayed mostly off-stage: the late return of Nigel Farage to the leadership of Reform, the announcement of his candidacy in Clacton, and the tiresome media orgy that follows. In the land of the bloodless technocrat, the pub bore is king.

There is much that is still unpredictable about Farage’s candidacy. The new statistical methods behind MRP polling models don’t handle such anomalies as famous independents very well (true in the cases of Galloway and Corbyn, too); constituency polls will doubtless arrive soon. Liberal commentators bring up Farage’s serial failure to win a seat. But his successes have never relied on electoral victory so much as the effects he has on the entire political field, and the issues – nationalism, migration, general chauvinism – and resentments he forces into national salience. He ratchets everything to the right. The animating neuroses of the Conservative Party, the lines along which it will fracture in defeat, are largely of his making.

A Farage-dominated campaign could easily turn a Tory rout into an apocalypse. Analysts reaching for comparisons turn to the Conservative annihilation in Canada in 1993. That is why Sunak’s final speech explicitly implored his voters not to be tempted away: a vote for any other party, he argues, is really a vote for Labour. He is right about the perverse consequences of a first-past-the-post electoral system. CCHQ must be wondering if Farage can be bribed, seduced or forced into a pact. It doesn’t seem likely.

The lingering impression of last night is how mercilessly volatile politics can be. Sunak was chancellor in a government with a powerful majority, dolled up as a superhero by BBC news. Five years later, at its head, he has seen all that vanish like fairy gold, all the political capital squandered, without any major achievements save for a few squalid advances in authoritarianism. He has only smears left. Starmer, in the ascendant, seems brittle. Perhaps he knows the magnitude of the problems he’s leaving off-stage. And perhaps he fears that five years from now, he could all too easily be in Sunak’s place.

(London Review of Books)

23 Comments

Bob A. June 6, 2024

After reading through today’s edition at 7:54AM, I’m wondering if the 2AM club could make an exception and serve me up a double Rye on the rocks?

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar June 6, 2024
  
  Add me to the Rye list–This comment by our sagacious editor made me shudder : “As of right now, Trump is a shoo-in, and the Great Slide into chaos will accelerate.”
  
  I admit I go there at times, but still have some hope–remote hope, that is.
  
  Reply
Ted Williams June 6, 2024

“I am looking forward to Bernie being on the Board of Supervisors and hopefully his knowledge and proven track record will convince at least two more Board members (Madeline Cline and Ted Williams) to vote to change direction and adopt the Fort Bragg model.”

No convincing necessary, I’m ready to vote yes on The Fort Bragg model. I had sponsored an overview to the BOS on Sept 12, 2023:

https://youtu.be/-veMmP_0gBg?si=4LRi4k5RLnzZv1P3&t=9201

… and it’s why I asked at a recent meeting for direction to verify with the state we can use 1991 realignment for augmenting resources under the Sheriff, so long as the efforts meet criteria. We already know the answer is yes.

Reply
- Call It As I See It June 6, 2024
  
  Why are you waiting for Bernie? I believe you have been a Supervisor for two terms, and yet the homeless issue has gotten worse. It’s not 23% down as Mo likes to quote, a flat out lie. The real number is, it’s up over 400%. If it’s down in any part of our County, you guessed it, Ft. Bragg.
  
  Here are some of the reasons Ted it has spiraled,
  We give services
  City and County officials do nothing
  Other cities give a choice to homeless when they commit crime, be arrested or accept a bus ticket to Ukiah. Just ask Santa Rosa, Windsor and Healdsburg.
  Humboldt County has a one way bus that drops off at the Pear Tree Center.
  Business owners are not heard, taxpayers
  Ted.
  You have a 2nd District Supervisor who attends meetings with private groups who want to address the issue and she tells them it’s their fault
  The whole enforcement system blames each other
  Frequent Flyers are released from jail in less than two hours
  Encampments are tolerated
  Planning departments make it so hard to open businesses that it creates empty buildings, EMPTY BUILDINGS ATTRACT HOMELESS.
  
  When you want to tackle these issues, maybe we’ll see some positive impact.
  
  Reply
  - Ted Williams June 6, 2024
    
    “Why are you waiting for Bernie?”
    
    I’ve been pushing for a county-wide CRU-like model. Invest in what works. Fort Bragg has outcome data showing success, especially relative to dollars spent. I’m not waiting, but it takes three to get anything done.
    
    The status quo is unacceptable. Perhaps there are some government statistics showing improvement, but from my perspective, I can only see decline.
    
    Reply
    - Call It As I See It June 6, 2024
      
      You’ve never had a problem getting McGourty and Mulheren to vote with you, until now. Is there trouble in Paradise, Ted?
      These public comments you make are for political reasons. It’s why another post is telling Bernie to watch his back since you appear to on his side.
      Think about that, Ted. I’m hard on you and people can say I have an axe to grind, I’m not, just tired of all the lies and watching you and your fellow Supervisors ruin this county. Now back to my original point, doesn’t it bother you that when I post, others post comments, like watch your back when dealing with Ted?
      
      Reply
      - Ted Williams June 6, 2024
        
        I cherish your free speech, so no, it doesn’t bother me. Each debate is separate. We can disagree on one topic and find common ground on another.
        
        I’ve voted with and without McGourty and Mulheren. This Tuesday, I was the odd one out, a 4-1 on budget approval.
        
        Reply
        
        Call It As I See It June 6, 2024
        
        Glad to hear you cherish free speech. But the question I asked you was about character.
        
        Reply
- Norm Thurston June 6, 2024
  
  Using the 1991 realignment funds to augment the Sheriff’s efforts in dealing with homeless and behavioral health issues is an excellent idea. There was a time when those funds seemed to be used at the complete discretion of social services administrators.
  
  Reply
  - Ted Williams June 6, 2024
    
    The board allocating some realignment dollars to Sheriff’s discretion would get more boots on the ground and augment the types of professionals available for timely response. Cross department collaboration is always important, but some amount of resources need to be under the direct control of Sheriff if we’re to better address mental health on the street.
    
    Fort Bragg’s Police Chief Neil Cervenka arrived with vision and fortitude. Their city is becoming more attractive as a result.
    
    Reply
    - MAGA Marmon June 6, 2024
      
      Ukiah is attractive too, but for the wrong people.
      
      MAGA Marmon
      
      Reply
  - Old Hickory June 6, 2024
    
    What about 2011 RE?
    Sheriff would have to assign staff to SS/MH to claim 1991 RE and be subject to time studies, or direct to program costing (via inter departmental contract) on SS or MH expense claim schedule. What does SS or MH think about giving up funding? You can only transfer 10% from any subaccount.
    
    MH allocations: https://www.sco.ca.gov/ard_payments_realign_fy2324_mental.html
    
    CSAC Info: https://csacinstitute.org/CSACInstitute/Knowledge_Student_Center/Realignment/CSACInstitute/Knowledge_Student_Center/Realignment.aspx?hkey=44e88332-e293-4e9f-b93f-145facb2f338
    
    2018 LAO Overview of 1991 Realignment: https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3886#Realignment_Basics
    
    Reply
    - Norm Thurston June 7, 2024
      
      Under the last link, the LAO lists this as one of the four Realignment Principles:
      “Flexibility to Respond to Changing Needs and Requirements
      Funding allocations should be sufficiently flexible to allow counties to use funding where it is most needed.”
      
      I believe the current homeless and behavior health services needs, including those provided by the Sheriff’s Office, would qualify under this principle. I am not alone in thinking that current and past spending in these areas has not been effective.
      
      Reply
- MAGA Marmon June 6, 2024
  
  I’ll say the quiet part out loud. The Fort Bragg City Council and Police Department basically told the Mendocino County Homeless Services Continuum of Care (Non-Profits and Churches) to “go screw themselves”. There’s an old saying, “If nothing changes, then nothing changes”.
  
  MAGA Marmon
  
  Reply
mark donegan June 6, 2024

10-4 on the Flomax good buddy! lol!
Good on you Ted. I took the word to Ukiah City Hall last night.

Reply
Harvey Reading June 6, 2024

“EXPLAIN to me real slow and real clear how a Trump payoff to a prostitute was parlayed into 34 felonies?”

Would 17 have been a better number? I suspect the bum is guilty of far more felonies over his putrid, born-to-wealth lifetime, for which he will NEVER be held accountable. The guy is a brainless rat, but will probably be prez again, given the sad state of this yuppie-mentality country, with its MAGAt morons patrolling the streets, AR 15s (remember to clean them reguarly, MAGgies) dangling from slings as they ride their hogs or drive their over-sized, noisy pickups, spinning their rear tires at each opportunity…

Reply
Harvey Reading June 6, 2024

IN OUR NEW MILLENNIUM

For those who actually have thoughts of their own? Most of our thoughts are, and have been for decades, gleaned from movies, TV shows, and nooze readers and writers. We won’t even know the difference, since they’ve been peddling artificial intelligence on behalf of our dear leaders for far longer than I have lived.

Reply
chris skyhawk June 6, 2024

Uh Oh, Ted praises Bernie Norvell,: on behalf of everyone who cares about our County, and everyone who actually pays attention to how it is functioning, and a man with personal experience with how Ted conducts his political affairs , i hope Bernie watches his back!

Reply
- Ted Williams June 6, 2024
  
  that’s all good and well Chris, but can we count on you as a supporter of a county wide program modeled after Fort Bragg’s Care Response Unit?
  
  Reply
  - chris skyhawk June 7, 2024
    
    Oops after sleeping on it, I remembered the name; Marbut…..; I see my advice to Bernie about “watching his back” has raised some eyebrows; while admittedly quite cryptic, you and I BOTH know why I said that,,,,
    
    Reply
- Bernie Norvell June 6, 2024
  
  Supervisor Williams and I disagree on plenty. That being said neither of us have ever hesitated to reach out and discuss items. when we do disagree on an item we discuss how to reach common ground without letting feelings get in the way. Thinking is different that is why most people judge
  
  Reply
  - Bernie Norvell June 6, 2024
    
    Apologies for the typo. “Thinking is difficult “
    
    Reply
  - chris skyhawk June 6, 2024
    
    Yes! you can; I am most certainly pleased that Bernie is on the Board, as you probably remember, the Marmot report was on the table in 2018, when we were both up for the 5th district seat its been many years and admittedly my stroke addled brain has probably lost a few details but the report was greatly anticipated, and had several specific recommendations; for dealing with the unhoused ) since then it appears the County has done nothing to implement its recommendations, despite spending a LOT of money on it; Fort Bragg did, so yeah if Bernie being on the Board gets things moving I’m in favor!
    
    Reply

Mendocino County Today: Thursday 6/6/24

23 Comments

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