Off the Record 8/25/2024

CANDIDATES FOR LOCAL MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS IN NOVEMBER.

The County Elections Office has certified the nomination papers for five candidates to fill two vacant four-year seats on the Fort Bragg City Council this November. The candidates are: Bethany Brewer (personal trainer), Ryan Bushnell (coach & volunteer firefighter, listed as “equipment operator”), Scott Hockett (fishing boat/business owner), Lindy Peters (incumbent), and Melissa ‘Mel’ Salazar (listed as “talent manager/mom”). Incumbent Bernie Norvell will not be seeking reelection since he was elected Fourth District Supervisor. As far as we know, Norvell has not endorsed any candidate(s).

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There are two seats up for election on the Ukiah City Council: Josefina Duenas and Douglas Crane, incumbents. Both are running for re-election. New candidates are: Kris Mize (former Anderson Valley elementary school teacher, former curriculum coordinator at River Oak School in Ukiah, listed as “business owner/mother”), Heather Criss (Mendocino County Public Health administrator), John Strangio (Ukiah firefighter, listed as “self-employed”), and Jacob Brown (former candidate for Second District Supervisor, listed as “educator”).

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In Point Arena, the three incumbents, Jim Koogle, Jeff Hansen, and Dan Doyle, are running unopposed for their seats.

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In Willits, three seats are up for election, those of incumbents Saprina Rodriguez, Gerardo ‘Gerry’ Gonzalez, and long-time Councilwoman Madge Strong. Rodriguez and Strong are not running for re-election. So Incumbent Gonzalez will run to retain his seat along with Robin Leler (teacher), Michael Alaniz (“teacher/educator”), and former Sheriff/realtor Tom Allman. If Gonzalez and Allman were to be elected, Willits would have two former cops as city councilmen.

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Three people are running for three seats on the Anderson Valley Community Services District, Incumbents Valerie Hanelt, (appointed) incumbent Steve Snyder, and Structural Engineer Sash Williams. Incumbent Francois Christen is not running for re-election. So that probably means there will not be an election for the CSD seats. Mr. Williams has been involved in the District’s pending skate park project.

THE COST OF THE RIDICULOUS, UGLY NEW COURTHOUSE is now estimated at $150 million for seven courtrooms and associated offices.

For comparison, one of the largest County construction projects, the gold-plated 16-bed, construction Psychiatric Health Facility on Whitmore Lane to extremely strict hospital and seismic specifications was recently bid at less than $13 million.

The gold-plated new high security, high-tech jail wing is now expected to come in at around $40 million — after several cost estimate increases.

How could the new courthouse possibly cost $150 million? That’s an average of over $21 million per courtroom (some of which is for the auxiliary offices like the jury assembly room, collections, clerks, etc.) And that doesn’t even include the land. What in the hell kind of palace are they bulding for themselves? (Mark Scaramella)

THIRTY YEARS AGO, the Sonoma County Water Agency warned Sonoma County officials that the Russian River was tapped out and that the water table in many areas of the county where residents depend on water from private wells was dropping every year because of ever greater draws on it.

BUT Sonoma County and the incorporated cities and towns comprising it have continued to issue building permits as if water is an inexhaustible resource, thus ensuring what the county’s own water agency said would inevitably result in building moratoriums and rationing. How and why the moratoriums haven't occurred is, to me anyway, a mystery.

SOCO'S WATER AGENCY said that the only practical solution to the county’s finite water sources was the untapped waters of Lake Sonoma, but drawing from it would require an expensive pipeline to carry it to Sonoma County’s primary distribution site near Forestville. Such a pipeline, which would cost many millions to build, is not planned at this time. Sonoma County presently takes 25 billion gallons a year from the Russian River; the federal government is about to reduce the annual flow into the Russian River from the Eel River via the Potter Valley diversion, thus capping Sonoma County’s annual draw at its present allocation.

IN SHORT, if the Eel River isn't diverted at Potter Valley, or if the diversion is significantly reduced as seems likely, Sonoma County will be forced to stop its building boom and begin water rationing.

THE FOLLOWING letter once appeared in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Editor: I want you to know that after 30 years of readership, my family and I will no longer buy your paper. In the September 21 Sunday edition, the Parade magazine featured and promoted the views of Bill O’Reilly, a man known for his vicious hate-mongering and bigotry. Shame on you for supporting such garbage. I will urge everyone I know to boycott your paper so long as you carry this magazine. I don’t want my kids or grandchildren exposed to such sick thinking. Alice Chouteau, Mendocino.”

LIKE MOST LIB-LABS, I pay little attention to conservative media. I’d never heard of Ann Coulter until her moronic book popped up on the bestseller list. I haven’t read it, but I’ve read around in it enough to know that she’s either nuts or she’s some new kind of idiot savant. I did read the paragraph where she says people like me are “traitors.”

I WANT all of you reading this to stand at attention while I recite my patriotic credentials. Maestro, the National Anthem, please, while I do my voice-over, which is: Eight years active and reserve time in the Marine Corps, honorably discharged; three years in the Peace Corps where I and my Americano colleagues successfully introduced softball to the country of Sarawak, among our many notable achievements; and 40-plus years in active defense of democratic principles as editor and publisher of the Anderson Valley Advertiser!

WHICH brings us to James Kunstler, to whom some of you have taken aggressive exception, even to the point of demanding that I remove him from Mendocino County's lead daily on-line newspaper. I don't understand the desire to banish opinions one finds objectionable, so, of course, Kunstler stays. Of the conservative writers I am aware of, he's by far the best writer and often very funny. The rest of them are prose and opinion interchangeable and boring as hell.

THE CONSERVATIVE PUNDITS I'm aware of are such boring, witless writers, reading them is the equivalent of a chloroform rag suddenly placed over one's intake apparatuses. Which is also true of most liberal writers, defining liberal here the way the mainstream media define it — David Brooks and the rest of the hacks and hackettes who write for the New York Times and the Washington Post. Maureen Dowd of the Times is the only one I can read; she writes a zippy prose and is often funny.

BUT THE CONSERVATIVES, aside from being wrong about everything, are really, really boring. George Will’s phony erudition, Cal Thomas’s nutty fulminations, the utterly unamusing and predictable Limbaugh, awarded the Medal of Freedom by Trump of course before he met his reward, the stupid and nasty Savage, and so on throughout their dreary ranks, wondering why anyone would read or listen to any of them; there’s no there there.

MS. CHOUTEAU’S vehement but vague denunciation of Bill O’Reilly made me curious enough to watch him one night to see what the old girl was so upset about. I’d seen bits and pieces of O’Reilly but seldom watch television, and even more seldom do I turn to the Fox Network where he was a big draw at the time.

O’REILLY is a mixed bag, politically considered, off the evidence of that one show, the only one I’ve seen. He was liberal on some issues, conservative on others. Maybe I caught him on one of his good nights, but he led off with an editorial opinion that complained about the LA Times suspiciously tardy “reporting” on The Terminator’s serial sexual batteries. “They bring it up a week before the election?” O'Reilly wondered. (The Terminator was running, successfully, for Governor, and O'Reilly and the Fox Gang were naturally for him.

O'REILLY said the California election was a choice between “a corrupt Democratic Party machine and its incompetent governor — Davis — and a deeply flawed candidate in Arnold Schwarzenegger. He then discussed the LA Times role in the Davis recall election with a liberal law professor named Susan Estrich. Both agreed that the LA Times was a tool of the Democrats and working “hand-in-glove” with Davis people. O’Reilly asked Estrich, “What will happen if major news organizations use their power to influence elections?” I almost fell backwards out of my chair. Is this guy this naive? What major news organizations don’t try to influence elections?

SEGMENT TWO was an interesting dissection promo-ed as “Real Racism?” Abington Memorial Hospital in or near Philadelphia, had ordered its black employees not to treat a woman in labor because both she and her husband had ordered black workers to stay away from them and stay out of their room. Hubby had threatened the black workers with violence. O’Reilly said he would have called hospital security and “thrown the guy out of the hospital.” A “bio-ethicist” replied by saying, “Lots of people go a little bit crazy during childbirth. The couple probably didn’t mean it.” O’Reilly, incredulous, insisted that the hospital should have stuck up for its black workers and had the husband arrested.

SEGMENT THREE was a tedious re-hash of a Las Vegas episode wherein a tiger had attacked Roy, of Siegfried and Roy, a circus act. O’Reilly seemed to sympathize with the tiger. (Me too.)

SEGMENT FOUR was an argument between O’Reilly and a liberal male reporter for Newsday over appropriate justice for three high school football players in New York somewhere who’d sodomized three freshman players with a broomstick.This pathologically criminal behavior was described as “hazing” and “a long-time tradition” at the school. Apparently, public opinion in the town was running heavily in favor of the perps. O’Reilly, aghast, said he still thought the three young psychos who’d done it “should be treated in the juvenile system.” The liberal insisted they deserved to be tried as adults, given the physical damage they’d done to their victims and their subsequently boasting and threats directed at other teammates if they dared testify against them. (I wondered why the team’s coaches hadn’t been charged; they claimed they hadn’t known about it until one of the kid vics complained about it.)

SEGMENT FIVE saw two retro congressmen and O’Reilly all saying things like “Seal the border,” and “Militarize it!” as they kicked around an Arizona initiative on the November ballot at the time that would deny illegal immigrants certain welfare benefits. O’Reilly said “It’s the Democrats who are bending over backwards for illegals to get their votes. No one running for President will dare take this one on.”

SEGMENT SIX featured a former NYC homicide detective named Beau Dietl and O’Reilly lamenting the purchase of drugs from Pakistan by Dietl’s 9-year-old son. As an exercise in how easy the internet makes it to buy everything from synthetic heroin to ritalin, little Dietl filled out his application giving his name, his true age, height and weight and a couple days later a bottle of Prozac appeared at his door, special delivery. O’Reilly lamented that “It’s another good idea gone bad. There are legitimate companies trying to sell people who need them affordable prescription drugs and the bad guys jump in.” He closed off by listing a legit 800 number where indigents with valid prescriptions can get free drugs. ( 1-800 762 4636)

O'REILLY wrapped up with another editorial comment under “The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day” in which he whined about how a reviewer had “misrepresented” his new book in the New York Times while “smear books” like those written by Michael Moore get respectful reviews. He then announced the results of a viewer poll answered by some 20,000 persons that asked if Rush Limbaugh would be hurt by revelations he is apparently addicted to painkillers. 76% said No, 24% said Yes. The show closed with O’Reilly talking back to mostly hostile mail, often with self-deprecating humor.

EXCEPT for the recall election and the tiger attack, I hadn’t heard of any of the episodes discussed. And except for O’Reilly’s rabid comments on “illegals” and his sniveling about his bad book review, I agreed with him on everything else he said, and I’m a lib-lab.

O’REILLY moved things right along, he’d brought in a wide variety of people, he was often funny, and he’d conducted interesting, if too brief, conversations with liberal to conservative guests. (A friend tells me he saw Greg Palast, the radical journalist, get a respectful hearing on O’Reilly.)

MS. CHOTEAU’S characterization that portrays O’Reilly as a hazard to the well-being of her and her family was silly. In a world filled with perils far more dangerous than a Fox blowhard, she picks this guy? Like most of us, save the unique specimens of human perfection dominant among the Northcoast's professional Democrats, O’Reilly is a mixed bag, sometimes liberal, sometimes conservative, sometimes hair raising. But us lib-labs ought to at least try to make some basic distinctions among the characters on the political right. Some of them aren’t as bad as others. O’Reilly is no goose-stepper and, unlike some liberals I could name, not nearly the menace they are.

I HAVEN’T READ a novel in a long while. I seem to have abandoned fiction for THE FACTS, as found in an absorbing history of the Korean War by Stanley Weintraub called “MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero.” It’s the clearest history of “America’s forgotten war” I’ve read, and I’ve plodded through four or five of them over the years. I also recommend “The Silent and the Damned, the Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank” by Robert Seitz and Nancy C. Thompson, a riveting account of the murder of a 13-year-old factory girl and the subsequent framing and lynching of the Jewish owner of the factory for the murder, all of it occurring in 1913 Georgia. Also highly recommended is “OK, Joe,” by Louis Guilloux, a reconstruction from his World War Two diaries by a French novelist of his experience as a translator for the court martials of American soldiers, all black, accused of raping French women. “The military court was in session nearly every morning, and every time the defendant was a black man the accusation was the same. There were also times when several defendants were tried at once, and all of them were black. One morning, there were four of them. They didn’t say a word. Why were they silent like that, why did they all plead guilty? Eventually I asked Bob. ‘Because they are!’ he answered, throwing up his hands as if to show his surprise at such a question. As If I thought it wasn’t a matter of simple evidence. Guilty. They in fact were. They admitted it themselves. ‘But why always blacks, Bob?’ ‘Ah! Yeah, that’s a hell of a problem!’”

THE SF CHRON’S sports writer Scott Ostler on Greens: “The Green Party insists it was encouraged by its one percent share of the vote. Now the party hopes to expand beyond its main demographic — Marin County hitchhikers.”

THE FOLLOWING is from a fascinating story called “The Way Willits Was” by Mark Hedges based on an interview Hedges did with a Willits old timer named Charlie Ruelle:

The second World War brought blackouts to town, and Ruelle said that “everyone had to pull four hours a week looking for enemy aircraft.” He said he remembered a captured Japanese submarine being hauled through Willits after it had been seized in Humboldt Bay in 1942. “It was a two-man sub and the guys were dead,” Ruelle said. “It was 40 feet long and 8 feet wide. They had mannequins in it dressed in their uniforms.”

Ruelle can also remember the propaganda that was plastered on the sides of buildings, “telling us not to talk about military things, that Hitler and Emperor Hirohito were listening, telling us to watch the Germans and the Japs, and to not buy their products. There was quite a hatred back then, because the Japanese were cruel to our troops. … There was a lot of hard feelings. I remember them rounding up the Japanese.”

Ruelle said today's Broiler Restaurant at the foot of the Willits grade was then owned by people who had “a shortwave radio giving info to the Germans.”

“They arrested them and closed the place,” Ruelle said. “And then a Mr. and Mrs. Southworks bought the place from the government.”

A READER WRITES: “Following the death of a 97-year-old spinster, the funeral director read the instructions she’d left for her memorial service. ‘I don’t want any male pall bearers,’ the old lady wrote. ‘They wouldn’t take me out when I was alive, so I don’t want them taking me out when I’m dead’.”

FROM the Mendocino Dispatch-Democrat (Ukiah) of October 9th, 1903: “She Married A Prince. Last Tuesday Miss Harry A. L. Floyd, daughter of the late Captain Richard S. Floyd, and sole heiress to nearly a million dollars was quietly married by Judge Sayres at Lakeport to B.M. Gopchevitch, a Serbian nobleman of the princely house of Obrenovitch, who, up to the date of his marriage was a gripman on a San Francisco street car. The bride owns the beautiful summer home, Kono Tayee, on Clear Lake and property in half a dozen counties and in San Francisco. The acquaintance of the couple began on the car on which the groom was gripman.” Oh yes, Count Grabcashovitch, distant cousin of the Romanovs, hundreds, perhaps thousands of whom married wealthy American women.

ASSUMING that most people want game wardens, community colleges, parks, prisons for the truly dangerous, and Caltrans, there are lots of other state entities that could be tossed overboard tomorrow without anybody noticing, the tax money saved by dumping them funding the services people really want. The Department of Education and the State Senate, to name two expensive bureaucratic redundancies; they could go immediately with no detrimental effect to state functioning. Ditto for all the state commissions, beginning with the utterly ineffective pork barrel called the Commission On Judicial Performance. (If you want a look at the egregious opulence your state taxes support, check out the San Francisco offices of the state’s appellate courts and the unperforming offices of the judicial performance gang next time you’re in The City.)

CALIFORNIA’S innumerable appointed commissions are simply payoffs to the big donors of both parties, and to hand to termed-out officeholders. These entities either do nothing at all or serve as a rubber stamp for whatever state agency they theoretically oversee. Think of 3,000 county school boards, all of them with offices and staffs, with each member of each board pulling down a hundred G’s plus fringes, and you’ll begin to understand the true function of state commissions.

AND THERE’S PROP 13, the biggest swindle in state history. What Prop 13 did back in 1978 was to lock in property taxes at 1 percent of assessed value for both corporations and homeowners while simultaneously freezing annual property valuations at increases of no more than 2 percent. Best of all for big and small property owners, especially big property owners, assessments were freeze-dried in place in 1978. Local government could only raise money based on this 1978 formula. Although Prop 13 was sold as homeowner relief, in living fact it was a huge give away to corporate and private wealth at the cost of public services. California’s tax structure is way, way out of whack because the rich, corporate and private, don’t tote their share of the load. The state legislature typically “solves” budget crises by borrowing at exorbitant interest rates to pay certain bills while they rollover a bunch of other due bills for next year’s legislature to somehow pay. The state pays exorbitant rates for borrowed money because state debt is so much greater than the money coming in from sales taxes and Prop 13’s forever frozen rates that lenders fear they won’t get their money back; hence the usurious interest rates.

KITTEN ADOPTION SPECIAL

Special adoption fee of only $75 dollars per kitten. Special fees apply to kittens already spayed/neutered. Visit mendoanimalshelter.com to see animals available for adoption.

FRED GARDNER:

June in San Francisco (Pride Month), the Orpheum Theater presented “Mrs. Doubtfire. The Musical.” I assume it was true to the movie, which was untrue to real life. Sally Field plays a very successful interior decorator married to Robin Williams, an under-employed actor. They have three children. After 14 years of marriage, wife ditches husband. Because she can’t get home to her Pacific Heights mansion till 7pm, she hires a nanny –Robin in drag. That a man can get made up as a woman and become unrecognizable to his wife and children is the film’s basic absurdity, but there are more. That a 13-year-old girl, a 12-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl would hang out together after school. That yuppie kids would have no extracurricular activities or separate friends. That there are no nannies from Central America in San Francisco. That a father can have a “healthy relationship” with his children posing as a woman. That an unemployed actor would skip a meeting with the owner of a TV network offering the break of a lifetime.

ON THE OFF CHANCE you’re unaware how far to the political right this country has moved over the last 50 years, please accept this reminder: President Richard Nixon was for national health insurance; he founded the Environmental Protection Agency; Nixon was for much higher taxes on unearned income, i.e., stock dividends etc., and the Nixon-influenced 1972 Republican platform opposed corporate relocation overseas, then described as large-scale tax evasion, now known as savvy fiscal management.

“THE GREAT MALEFACTORS OF WEALTH” excoriated by Republicans from Lincoln on up through the first Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Eisenhower, and Nixon? Celebrated today.

THE TRUMP CULT wouldn't believe, and would likely mostly disavow what The Terminator, a Republican, said when he was California's governor: “The strong have to help the weak. The rich have to help the poor. That’s the way it is.”

THAT'S the way it’s supposed to be, but the only national political person I can recall saying something like it and meaning it was Martin Luther King Jr. Of course saying it and acting on the sentiment got King murdered, but Schwarzenegger was the last human-type being to occupy the governor’s office in this state, and here we are.

KAMALA is being widely denounced for saying she's for Medicare for all, national health care being long ago assumed by the civilized countries of the world as a human right. The rolling ignoramus at the top of the Maga cult — more deranged by the day — says Medicare for all is “socialism,” a term his cult views as equivalent to kryptonite. He also said, in the course of one of his usual semi-coherent stream-of-consciousness appearances, that price controls on essential foods is “communism” — double kryptonite to his lockstep blue collar legions as they pay outrageous premiums for private health insurance and struggle to buy food and keep themselves sheltered.

PRIOR to becoming a Senior Citizen, and thus fully covered by national health insurance, I went without because I couldn't afford it. On my 65th birthday magico-presto, full coverage.

SENIORS get lots of essential services because they vote, although a rational, not to say humane society, would make the young its priority. As a MediCare geezer, many thousands of dollars have recently been spent to keep me alive.

YEARS AGO I regretted my harsh critiques of the Vegetarian Medical Monopoly based in Ukiah because I had to turn to them for hernia surgery. One never wants to be on the wrong side of the anesthesiologist, or that masked Adventist brandishing a scalpel. I was hoping to put it off until I was 65 when my Medi-Care kicked in, assuming that the Bush Gang hadn’t “invested” it and Social Security with their friends on Wall Street, as the leadership of both parties at the time had discussed doing as if it was a swell idea.

I DIDN'T HAVE health insurance. Like half the people in the country I couldn't afford it. I exercised, ate lots of fruit and vegetables, stayed away from the nuts, edible and the two-footed type kind who come with the newspaper business, gave up drinking, never was a doper, smoked only briefly as a kid. So there I was with my 110 over 70 blood pressure, low-normal heart rate, almost zero cholesterol and hoping I wouldn't be recognized at the Ukiah Med Center for financial negotiations and a pre-op exam, cursing Bill and Hillary at every stop, noting as I went that a large number of hospital employees didn't seem to be particularly healthy themselves.

THANKS to the Clintons and their funder-buddies at the insurance combines, the drug monopolies, the HMO’s, and the senior sectors of the AMA, unlike the rest of the industrial world we still didn't have single-payer health insurance.

FOR THE Adventists to slice me open and stitch up a hernia in my upper gut it would cost me $18,000 if I paid it off in installments; if I paid cash it would cost me about $7,500. How many Americans have $7,500 laying around? Few — certainly not me.

THE KID who gave me the bad news kept saying, “It’ll cost about” and “It’ll be right around,” like he was pulling numbers out of mid-air, which he may well have been doing. Another kid filling out my forms got the info just about half right, not that I bothered correcting him. I always figure confusion might work to my advantage somehow, not that it ever has. Funny how bill collectors always have your correct address and phone number, and funny how their math errors always work to their advantage.

THE TRUE COST for this simple procedure was “right around” $7,500. The Pay or Die price was “right around” $18k. Another guy in the “intake” room was being informed that what he needed done to keep him upright he’d first have to drag himself a half-mile west to the welfare department and apply for Medi-Cal to pay for it. I'd hold the doc at gunpoint before I’d apply for anything, at the Mendocino County Department of Social Services where, of course, the applicant will likely die before he qualifies for even a number ten can of commodity peanut butter and a mound of government cheese.

FORTUNATELY FOR ME, I was able to borrow the money from a pot grower at much lower interest than the vegetarians charged for the hernia repair. As I peeled off the moldy cash my friend had unearthed from his buried stash, the kid at the adding machine was all “Gosh, golly, this doesn't happen very often,” and it was on with the show.

JIM SHIELDS:

It's impossible not to recognize the seemingly institutional dysfunction in the governing process of this County, not to mention our country.

Too many elected officials and “public servants” who are classified as department heads, middle management, and “staff,” go out of their way to create problems when their main goal and purpose is to provide services to the public and solve problems when they arise. Most people don't have lofty expectations of their elected representatives. Most would settle for an adaptation of the Physician's Oath, “First, do no harm.”

Recently, the CEO’s office sent out the following press release:

“Board of Supervisors Recess—The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors will observe its annual August Recess from August 1, 2024, to August 30, 2024. During this period, the Board will not hold Regular Board Meetings. This annual recess, implemented in 2022, allows Clerk of the Board staff to focus on essential behind-the-scenes tasks, including records filing, completion of annually required duties, and preparation for the upcoming year. While there are no Regular Board Meetings in August, the Members of the Board of Supervisors continue to hold/attend their other regularly scheduled committee and public meetings during the August Recess.”

Altogether, including the August “recess,” the supervisors will not meet in formal meetings for seven weeks. However, as the press release says, they will “hold/attend their other regularly scheduled committee and public meetings during the August Recess.”

A lot of folks are upset that the County is calling timeout for this “recess.”

Prior to the year of 2022 when this policy was first implemented by former County Executive Officer Carmel Angelo, the idea of a “recess” was unheard of. If the Clerk of the Board, who doubles as the CEO, can’t manage her staff so that they are completing “essential behind-the-scenes tasks, including records filing, completion of annually required duties, and preparation for the upcoming year,” the Supervisors need to find a new CEO, and perhaps a new staff, who can do their jobs and get their work done on time.

This is not a huge ask as in the past 50 years, previous Clerks of the Board and their staff never required a “recess” to do the their jobs.

Of course, during earlier decades, the Clerk of the Board was an independent position, organizationally under and reporting to the Board of Supervisors, not the CEO. As is the case with numerous governing process elements, procedures and policies were changed by the CEO, basically unchallenged by the BOS.

As I’ve said many times before, it never concerns me when our elected representatives take time off, no matter what the reason is. A congressman is gone on a two-week paid junket to the South of France, good for him, hope he has fantastic culinary experiences and plenty of five-martini lunches.

Here’s the deal.

Politics and the governing process are now so dysfunctional and unproductive, we are actually so much better off when politicians, including our Board of Supervisors, are absent from their august chambers because they are unable to make much mischief when they aren’t on the clock.

THE SANTA ROSA PRESS DEMOCRAT often runs tributes to Jack London, the famed Sonoma socialist who, to put it mildly, would not have approved today's Valley of the Moon (scaped). London probably would have approved of his posthumous association with Vichy Springs, the old brothel east of Ukiah that once offered its male-only guests a restorative regimen that began with whisky, continued with whisky and women, and ended with a dip in the ancient hot springs out back. Vichy Springs, I daresay, is much less invigorating today.

JACK LONDON had cursed tourists almost since the day in 1910 he bought the property that is now Jack London State Park. Day trippers were forever dropping by while Jack was trying to work. A ferry boat that ran from San Francisco to the sloughs near St. Helena made it easier to get to Sonoma a hundred years ago than it is now. The great Ambrose Bierce was also a regular commuter from SF to his unhappy home in St. Helena.

BUT DOES ANYBODY outside the Press Democrat’s fortified bunker in downtown Santa Rosa consider Sonoma County rural today? SoCo hasn’t been rural since 1950, was already suburban by 1960, urban by 1980, and post-modern bizarre by 2000, and hellish today.

AND THEN THERE’S LUTHER BURBANK, botanical genius and eugenicist whose modest home and gardens are lost in the sea of pavement and cancer-causing building that is the Rose City today. Burbank, incidentally, was a frequent visitor to the Anderson Valley where he visited a Philo botanical experimenter at what is today called Nash Mill. The old boy, like London, who also passed through Boonville, is sanitized today as one more tourist hook among the booze emporiums that are Sonoma County's primary draw.

BURBANK said that the world had had 13 Christs and he was most likely the 14th. He often said he was certain that the human mind, especially his, could influence plants. Burbank claimed he could heal by laying on his hands and, just before he passed on to the great grafting workshop beyond, declared that he wanted no part of a god who sent people to a burning hell.

WHAT DOES any of this have to do with anything? Nobody’s perfect, although the great figures of history are routinely sanitized to cash in on them by latter day chambers of commerce.

MARK TWAIN is easily the most misrepresented literary figure we’ve produced, being portrayed as a kind of Senior Center yarn spinner as his radical political views are ignored while his fiction is deliberately misunderstood by the professional multi-culturalists and damned by illiterate school boards who ban Huckleberry Finn, America's seminal literary work of art. As Hemingway put it:

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

BUT A COUPLE of big lies annoy me more than the others in the daily deluge of bullshit. Socialism, as applied to someone like Jack London, is viewed as, well, ha ha, idiosyncratic in an otherwise sound man because, to most media people, even the ones who know better — especially the ones who know better — socialists are the same as communists and both, along with harmless liberals like, say, our Congressman and Name Change Fort Bragg, are routinely described as “the left,” and often as “the extreme left.”

THE EXTREME RIGHT has always been strong in America, and not since Lindbergh have they had a powerful leader such as they have in Trump, an ignorant gasbag whose allure eludes half of US, but there he is and there they are, the red white and blue menace.

THERE'S certainly no “hard left” or “extreme left” the propagandists on the Fox Network rave about round the clock, but an updated socialism of the New Deal type — the government as employer of last resort, for instance — is the only way this country is going to save itself from capitalism.

AS THE MOTHER OF ALL RIOTS kicks off Monday in Chicago with the undemocratic Democrats, as the many thousands of patriotic young people outraged by the Biden Administration's funding and arming of the Israeli massacres of trapped Gazans make themselves heard, they'll be portrayed as “far left pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic terrorists” and versions thereof.

MARK SCARAMELLA ADDS: Albert Einstein was a socialist. Helen Keller was a socialist. Steven J. Gould was a socialist. James Baldwin was a socialist. Harry Belafonte was a socialist. Saul Bellow was a socialist. W.E.B. Du Bois was a socialist. Mia Farrow was a socialist. Yip Harburg (lyricist for the Wizard of Oz music, among others). Dorothy Parker was a socialist. Kurt Vonnegut was a socialist. John Steinbeck was a socialist. …

Einstein, 1929: “I honor Lenin as a man who completely sacrificed himself and devoted all his energy to the realization of social justice. I do not consider his methods practical, but one thing is certain: men of his type are the guardians and restorers of the conscience of humanity.”

‘THE PIRATES and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the CounterCulture,’ by Bob Levin, Fantagraphics Books. Cloth, 270pp. $24. In 1963 the San Francisco Chronicle made 21-year old Dan O’Neill the youngest syndicated cartoonist in American newspaper history. As O’Neill delved deeper into the emerging counterculture, his strip, Odd Bodkins, became stranger and stranger and more and more provocative, until the papers in the syndicate dropped it and the Chronicle let him go.

THE LESSON that O’Neill drew from this was that what America most needed was The Destruction of Walt Disney. O’Neill assembled a band of rogue cartoonists, called The Air Pirates after a group of villains who had bedeviled Mickey Mouse in comic books and cartoons. They lived communally in a San Francisco warehouse owned by Francis Ford Coppola and put out a comic book, Air Pirates Funnies, that featured Disney characters participating in very un-Disneylike behavior, provoking a mammoth lawsuit from Disney for copyright and trademark infringements and seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

DISNEY was represented by one of San Francisco’s top corporate law firms and the Pirates by the cream of the counterculture bar. The lawsuit raged for ten years, from the trial court to the US Supreme Court and back again — changing lives, setting legal precedent, and making clear the boundaries in a still unfolding cultural war. Novelist and essayist Bob Levin recounts this rollicking saga with humor, intelligence and skill, bringing alive the times, issues, absurdities, personalities and the changes wrought within them and us all. The great O'Neill lives on in the AVA.

I LIKE THIS ONE spotted in Ukiah: “Partnership For An Idiot-Free America.” Never happen. There’s too many of us.

A SIMPLETON’S GUIDE to deficit spending, or why the Republicans’ and Democrats’ economic policies are bad: The more money government has to borrow to pay its bills, the more money government has to pay lenders to borrow it. As debt grows, the willingness of lenders to lend diminishes. Federal and state debt is reaching a point where the juice alone is so great it’s difficult to pay. And as indebtedness deepens, the dollar weakens, as it is weakening now, meaning more dollars buy less. As the dollar weakens because government is less creditworthy (and a big hunk of our debt is owned by furriners who don’t like US much anyhow), interest rates rise, as they are now rising, life moving faster and faster in an ominous direction.

WE COULDN’T HELP but notice that there was no mention of John ‘Cash & Carry’ Fisher in all the local coverage around the last “Bay Bridge Series” baseball game between the Giants and the As. Of course, that doesn’t mean nobody mentioned Fisher; it just means it wasn’t in the coverage. The Oakland fans who made it onto the TV airwaves all said how “unfortunate” or “sad” it was that the As were moving out of Oakland, or similar comments. And the announcers scrupulously avoided the word “Fisher.” Just another indicator of how wealthy people can avoid public blame by dictating the coverage and focusing interest on the shallowest aspects of what’s going on. Several former Oakland As execs have pointed out how the Oakland City Council could have exerted much more leverage on Fisher if they’d wanted to. But Fisher escaped that too. Plus he gets a publicly funded new stadium in Vegas. (Mark Scaramella)

THE LADIES ARE OUT IN MANCHESTER

(Photo by Kathy Shearn.)

GHOSTED?

by Paul Modic, answers by Bruce Anderson

Do you have a friend who rarely answers your calls, never calls you back, and you’re starting to wonder if you’re even friends anymore? Well, maybe the problem is you, maybe you’re not interesting or stimulating enough and need to up your game? Here are some talking points and questions you can use the next time you get ahold of him/her:

Q: So tell me something new.

Why should I entertain you?

Q: Do you ever ponder the past and relive experiences you have had?

Yes, and lament some, enjoy others.

Q: What three words do you want on your tombstone?

Yer outta here!

Q: How are you feeling these days?

So-so.

Q: What is it about you that you think people don't get?

Why would I wonder what people get or don't get?

Q: Would you ever consider suicide?

Certainly, but only in great physical pain.

Q: How would you do it?

Backflip off the Noyo Bridge.

Q: Do you feel fulfilled on personal and creative levels or is there something you could do to realize your goals? What is that?

Satiated every which way. Sole remaining goal is to stay alive a few more years for my family.

Q: When are you happiest?

I'm not unhappy

Q: What do you worry about?

The Niners.

Q: When did you see your first naked woman?

National Geographic, 1948.

Q: When you first had sex did you know about foreplay?

Isn’t that a golf term?

Q: How did you know?

I didn’t. I don't play golf.

Q: Which past lover would you like to find and talk to?

I've only had one, and I'm married to her.

Q: What do you want to do before you die?

The Joe's Special at Original Joe's.

Q: What are you afraid of?

Being eternally trapped in a small room with the Press Democrat's editorial writers.

Q: What was your first job as a kid?

Newspaper route.

Q: Would you say you had a happy childhood? Why or why not?

Happy. Three squares a day and a safe place to sleep.

Q: Do you have a memorable birthday when a kid?

No. My birthdays were all the same because I only had one friend, the late Rich Johnson.

Q: Do you sit around thinking about the past? Do you like that? Why?

No, it's frightening, but not as frightening as the future. My god, the Democrats! If this is the leadership we're doubly doomed.

Q: Do you think you're an interesting person? Why or why not?

Not particularly but I wouldn't be the judge, would I?

Q: Do you think I'm an interesting person? Why or why not?

Not especially, but some of your prose holds my interest.

Q: Did you have someone you would call “the love of your life”? Who? Was the feeling mutual?

My wife. Presumably mutual since she’s still with me.

Q: Have you ever been in jail? When was the first time? Why?

Many times since, but Pismo Beach, 1962, bar fight was the first, which I did not start but the cops were friends with the yobbos who attacked me and my friends.

RECURRING IRRITANTS FILE: Righteous bumper stickers. Brand new Volvo sedan outside the Good Earth (sic) Market, Fairfax. “Celebrate diversity” in rainbow colors on one end of the rear bumper, “Tell children the truth” at the other end of the bumper. (Or maybe it was the more pompous “Speak truth to children,” I can’t remember exactly how it was phrased because I was looking for something to vandalize the vehicle with instead of searching out my pen.) The true message is always, “Celebrate Me. I Think Good Thoughts.” And why scare the kids with a lot of gloom and doom? The celebrating diversity types can’t be trusted to tell the kids anything, let alone the truth. The kids will get the bad news in due time. We all do.

“THERE'S NO EXCUSE FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.” Wrong. There are lots of reasons for domestic violence, but the reasons for not doing it are a lot better than the reasons for doing it.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Vineyards. Or alcohol grapes as I like to remind people about the non-food component of our county’s fully legal cash crop. The water use, the use of migrant labor, and the attachment to the pesticide industrial complex. The biggest oakwoodland destroyer of them all those vineyards. Let’s not forget the most prevalent addiction in our society of alcoholism, there’s the drunk driving which endangers us all and there’s the reminder that most people have their first sexual experience intoxicated on alcohol. Most addicts of hard drugs have an underlying and primary alcohol addiction. And it’s fully legal and accepted.

As a child of cannabis and alcohol grape addicts, I can tell you they are remarkably similar. The agriculture difference is that cannabis is an annual crop which relies on fresh (yet artifical, check out how potting soil is made) soil and fertilizers and new plastic every year versus grapes, which are planted to suit mechanised and diesel-based conventional farming methods along with constant pesticide and herbicide use . Both use impoverished Mexicans(legal, illegal and everything in between). Local alcohol ranches aren’t providing jobs for the local youth, they import their workers. Migrant men sleep in tents 30 a piece on cots with Porta Poties and right here. Right in our county, it’s just off a dirt road so the general public only sees the pretty winery fronts and labels on bottles.

Most wine is consumed by women. By stressed out, overwhelmed moms. We’ve all seen the “RosE all day ” slogans.

I’m not anti farmer, I’m anti us not knowing what we’re growing with our local Ag land and water, and my people, we are growing intoxicants.

Does the money from alcohol farming trickle down to the local people who are affected by the pesticides, and water degradation? No.

Almost all cancers are from “environmental” (chemical) exposure. A quick Google search will remind you about the heightened cancer rate of industrial farm workers. And their families .

Next time you see a vibrant green vineyard standing out against the golden dry grass and more muted greens of the oaks behind remember, someone wants to get drunk on that. Hope that drunken night’s insights we’re worth all that natural and human resource down the drain

[2] Walk any part of the Navarro river and you will see pumps every 20 yards or so going directly to vineyards. I asked a game warden once why this was allowed and he told me only PUMPING was illegal. Having the pump ready to go is totally fine. So unless they get caught actually pumping there is no issues for them. Its a travesty of justice and has destroyed a river that once had salmon and otters and numerous other wildlife that has been eradicated.

[3] And the astrologers tell me that the FULL Super-Blue Moon tonight and once in a lifetime planetary conjunctions b/w Mars and Uranus, the two most violent planets, does not bode well for the DNC—or did they plan the convention to happen now because of that in their demonic insanity. Can’t wait to see how this horror movie turns out.

[4] It’s again time to eschew obfuscation and dispense with all the obnubilation, time to cut to the race.

There was no mistake last night that the fourth turning was here. As I watched Harris and Walz prance about, mouths agape with those ghoulish, forced grins and fingers pointing everywhere and nowhere, my stomach turned for the fourth time and I thought that it just might try to climb out of my mouth and hide in that nether region. No, Pepto Bismol wasn’t going to do any good here, and after a while the heaving did subside, but only after looking at pictures of that diabolical duo being burned in effigy.

Listen, this is all very serious business, and I don’t really know if I can survive this monstrous, morbid metamorphosis of Harris into Trump. As she shamelessly strips, it’s not at all a tease, but a terror, with even her soiled liberal undergarments being thrown into MAGA faces as she simultaneously dons Donald’s garb, never for a moment exposing her swarthy, revolting, naked flesh.

It must all be so smooth, like the T-1000 in the Terminator and his liquid metal, shapeshifting mimetic polyalloy. It’s all so disgusting and abhorrently apparent, one wonders how the public could fall for it, but as Hamlet said, “aye, there’s the rub.” The public, in this case.

My mind has doubts but it seems that my gut is more certain, certain that Trump is in trouble. Trump is bleak and Harris is full of joy, says her campaign, and I think they hit on something there. They are regenerating Obama euphoria into a ‘Trumpian’ Harris, energetic and ebullient.

Just look at those two, Trump and Vance, aging, angry Orange man with the tired MAGA trope, and the rat faced, bootlicking vulture capitalist. In ways, it’s a fucking pathetic duo. Trump needed the energy of someone like Nikki Haley, but I guess she was too sharp, too articulate for him, too threatening.

As Trump once did, Harris is taking all the oxygen out of the room. Next week is the convention and after that will be the endless media jubilation in debasing Trump and highlighting Harris. Perfect timing with the coup against Biden and the three-month Harris whirlwind into November.

Trump is now on the defensive and now probably worried about debating this spitfire banshee, foretelling his death, right after “Dia de los Muertos”.

In November, Harris and Walz will consummate the marriage unless the Trump campaign can foment some fireworks. That’s what my gut is telling me.

[5] RFK Jr can’t get on the ballot in many states.

If he did, in fact, reach out to Kamala Harris for a cabinet position, then RFK is finished in this election cycle.

Regardless of whether or not one likes or agrees with RFK Jr, the fact that he cannot get on the ballot in many states tells one a lot about how America really works.

[6] I’m sure there is going to be a post-convention blip for Kamala and Walz. The media is going to be all agog in the Democrat lovefest, hyping up the party narrative big time. Most likely any dissention among party rank and file will be quashed and any media coverage of protests among the unwashed masses will be not actively reported upon.

[7] Income disparity is a prime indicator for a society gone off the rails and due for revolution or extreme political and social turmoil, with foreign wars usually the chosen solution to redirect all that pent up frustration toward foreign boogeymen, rather than the real culprits right here at home.

[8] OH, and I forgot… the “land of the free” is now the land of the woke, and the accompanying moral decay is not going to help America pull out of its nosedive. The (senseless) culture wars are a distraction that America really can’t afford–in my opinion. We should not be wasting time discussing how many genders, or whether drag queens can be reading books to 9-year olds at public libraries, while the house is on fire. Yet here we are…

1. Hard times make strong men. 2. Strong men make good times. 3. Good times lead to weak men. 4. Weak men lead to hard times.

Russia miraculously survived their implosion in the 1990s. Can America survive one?

Russia is at stage 1 to 2 today, and needs to be careful lest it reach stage 3.

The US is in stage 4.

Just one opinion here. And no, I’m not going to Russia. Just saying.