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RELATIVELY CLEAR, WARM, AND DRY conditions expected through midweek. A weak shortwave will move through the region Wednesday and Thursday, producing light drizzle along the north coast. Chances for rainfall or drizzle increase through the weekend. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Good buddy weatherman Steve Paulson at KTVU bay area news said our next rain will be MAYBE about the 15th or 16th & even that looks iffy? Let the roofing ROLL! A clear 40F on the coast this Tuesday morning. Patchy fog, sun & warm is our forecast until I say otherwise. Well, you know what I mean...
MARIE MEYER:
I spoke with Guadalupe Martinez, the sister of the man who went missing in Covelo named Manuel. She gave me permission to share the following info to the community: Manuel went missing on the same day he was supposed to be paid by a local grower for his work. He had called his Mom in Mexico and lamented that his boss didn't want to pay him what he was owed for some period of time. The day he went missing he had apparently lost his way out on some trail near a spot known as "jump off creek". He called his family and told them that he was lost and sent coordinates. He sadly told them that they would find him in the mountains of Covelo:( . Guadalupe says that she doesn't wish to be ungrateful but the police she contacted here were not very helpful when she asked them to search the area where he was last seen. If anyone knows this area and is available to help search; the family would be so eternally grateful for your help and I'm sure your compensation would come from God if not anyone else. Thank you; and feel free to DM me with any further questions for the sister; I can translate if you are unable to communicate with her directly. Will screenshot the coordinates she sent me and add them to the comment section ...
https://www.facebook.com/groups/45011122850/user/100051270129357
90 YEARS OLD AND…
Elderly couple needs a place to rent
Hello,
Posting this for a friend: An elderly couple (about 90 years old) in Fort Bragg have to leave their rental ASAP as it has been sold, and they need a new place to live in Fort Bragg. They can provide references, and have a cat and dog. Please email peattie@mcn.org if you have a place to rent.
Thanks.
Susan Warner
RODRIGO’S DRUNK ADVENTURE
On Wednesday, November 23, 2024 at approximately 12:42 A.M., Deputies with the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) were conducting a follow-up investigation in the 400 block of Observatory Avenue within the City of Ukiah. While conducting the follow-up investigation, Deputies heard a vehicle in the area which was driving in a reckless manner.
The Deputies, who were standing near their patrol vehicles at the time, observed the vehicle approaching them and attempted to stop the vehicle to question the occupants regarding the reckless driving. The driver of the vehicle, who was later identified as Rodrigo Chavez-Bejinez, 28, of Ukiah, accelerated toward the Deputies ultimately driving between them and speeding away. The Deputies followed the vehicle which was later identified as a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee.
The Deputies illuminated their overhead emergency lighting and siren and the vehicle failed to yield, resulting in a short vehicle pursuit. The vehicle pursuit ended when Chavez-Bejinez came to a large gate in the 600 block of Redwood Avenue. Chavez-Bejinez then put the vehicle in reverse and rammed an MCSO patrol vehicle, which was stopped behind him and occupied by a Deputy. None of the involved parties were injured during the incident.
Chavez-Bejinez was found to be on active probation out of Mendocino County with terms to include obeying all laws and having an ignition-interlock device. The vehicle being driven by Chavez-Bejinez during this incident was not equipped with an ignition-interlock device.
Officers with the California Highway Patrol (CHP) and Ukiah Police Department (UPD) arrived on scene to assist with the continuing investigation. Chavez-Bejinez was ultimately arrested for two counts of Assault with a deadly weapon, no ignition-interlock device, Violation of Probation, and Failure to yield to orders from MCSO Deputies. Chavez-Bejinez was also placed under arrest by an Officer with CHP for Driving under the influence of alcohol.
After his arrest, Chavez-Bejinez was transported to the Mendocino County Jail where he was booked on the above listed charges and held in lieu of $32,500 bail.
MENDOCINO'S COMMUNITY SERVICES DISTRICT will convene a public forum today (Tuesday) to discuss long-term water sources for the historically parched community. See their website for details. (www.mccsd.com)
MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: What happened to that $5 million grant for a 500,000 gallon water tank and associated wells and plumbing that Senator McGuire announced in March 2022 right after the big drought the year before that was supposed to be somehow merged with the town’s school district’s water system? In June of 2022 McGuire posted: “A big water storage project is coming to the community of Mendocino — 500k gallon water storage tank and new water wells! This has been a 100% partnership between the District and the State with nearly $5 million in State drought relief funds being invested. Grateful for the coordinating meeting with Supervisor Williams, the Mendocino Community Services District, Mendocino Unified School District and the Mendocino Volunteer Fire Dept. A lot more work and information ahead!”
The only “information” that came “ahead” was that it might take five years. But even so, why do they need a “forum” now if that project is in the works? Is it not enough? Why isn’t it mentioned in the forum announcement? According to the MCCSD website this $5 million “infrastructure project” has got so far as to have an MOU signed, a hydrogeologial report and a well siting report prepared. But it doesn’t look like anything else has happened since early 2023.
A LOCAL CONTRACTOR we spoke to recently had almost half his 120 person “illegal” tradesmen quit on him, saying they were going back to Mexico for fear of getting caught up in a surprise ICE raid after January 20. The five Mexican tradesmen were all related (brothers and cousins) and they decided as a group to return to Mexico, what Trump calls “self-deportation,” and take their chances there rather than take their chances here in the light of the anti-immigration rhetoric and plans. Two of the tradesmen reportedly had kids with women who were American citizens and those mothers/wives do not want to return to Mexico. We don’t know how those family negotiations are going. But the contractor says that because he doesn’t think he can hire comparably skilled and reliable replacements, he’s not bidding any new jobs. (Mark Scaramella)
TINY HOMES, BOONVILLE STYLE
Last April we published a brief plug for two local guys who had announced that they were setting up some kind of tiny home production business. But there wasn’t much else about the operation. This week we have learned that the operation is the brainchild of Felipe Camacho, a Colombian by birth who became a US Citizen a few years ago. The entrepreneur is now set up to import prefab “trailers” (essentially small homes) built and assembled in Colombia and shipped to the US in finished form ready for relatively low cost installation locally. The first one, with a sleeping loft and a full bathroom plus many other amenities, is now available for rent at $1500 per month. It has been installed behind the Brewpub and comes complete with kitchen and appliances, even a deck, The personable Mr. Camacho is set up to bring more of these small homes in to the Valley (via Oakland, as it turns out) for rent or purchase. (Estimated basic purchase price: $90k, installed). The sturdy, self-contained units are on wheels and can be towed in with nothing more than a good sized pickup, then propped up on pier blocks when installed. Therefore, they do not need to meet the same level of permit requirements that would be required for a stick-built structure.
For more information call Mr. Camacho at (704) 608-9080, or visit their website: gomagdalena.com. (Mark Scaramella)
PALACIAL HISTORY IN UKIAH
Hello Local History Buffs,
Here are the details of our quarterly history talk, coming up on Sunday, December 8, at 1:00 pm. The guest speaker is going to be Karen Rifkin, a local journalist who recently published a history of Ukiah's historic Palace Hotel. Karen will discuss the process of researching and self-publishing the story of the Palace, where she once worked as the kitchen manager. With any luck, she'll also season her talk with some of the spicier stories that came from her research.
Karen moved to Ukiah almost 50 years ago where she raised a family while working in several different careers, from baking to teaching English and history to middle school students. She began submitting stories to the Ukiah Daily Journal in 2008, launching her career as a journalist and photographer.
In July 2023, the Historical Society unveiled our new research room, where Karen Rifkin eagerly stepped forward as one of our inaugural docents. During her time exploring our collection, she came across the Palace Hotel (Ukiah) archival collection, an exciting find, given her past experience as the kitchen manager, line cook, and sous chef at the Palace Bar & Grill. Discoveries like an original menu and a newspaper article celebrating the restaurant's grand opening stirred many memories.
In the winter of 2023, Karen wrote a feature article for the Ukiah Daily Journal about her time at the Palace Hotel. “The story unexpectedly touched a communal nerve,” writes Karen, and launched her on a series of stories about the lengthy history of the place. Karen soon became a weekly guest at the Toney Archive of the Historical Society, poring over files, memorabilia, photos, and newspaper articles, until the critical mass of all that information inspired her to write a book.
Karen recently held a book release event at the Archive and pavilion, which attracted about 100 people. It was a cold November day, but people stayed for hours to buy books, share stories of the Palace, and enjoy a lovely buffet. Our archivist, Alyssa Ballard, even put together a pop-up exhibition of Palace photos and artifacts.
Come and join us at Bromley Hall, First Presbyterian Church of Ukiah across the street from the Historical Society, on the corner of Perkins and Dora Streets to hear the story behind the stories. The $10.00 price of admission gets you an afternoon sweet treat and beverages to enjoy. For reservations, please call us at 707-462-6969, email us at info@mendocinocountyhistory.org, or reserve on our website:
mendocinocountyhistory.org.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Thank you,
Tim Buckner
E.D. Historical Society of Mendocino County
Ukiah
CITY OF FORT BRAGG TO HONOR OUTGOING MAYOR NORVELL WITH RECEPTION
The City of Fort Bragg invites the community to celebrate and honor Mayor Bernie Norvell for his dedicated service and impactful leadership. A reception will be held on Monday, December 9, 2024, at 5:00 PM in the Fort Bragg Town Hall, preceding the City Council meeting.
For his eight years in public service, Mayor Norvell has led Fort Bragg through pivotal moments, leaving a lasting legacy of transformative leadership. His tenure has been marked by significant achievements, including adopting balanced budgets that ensured financial stability, addressing homelessness with innovative strategies, enhancing water resiliency and infrastructure, and prioritizing public safety for the community.
In addition to these accomplishments, Mayor Norvell has devoted countless public service hours to serving Fort Bragg, embodying the values of dedication and community spirit. His unwavering commitment has touched countless lives and strengthened the fabric of the community.
“Mayor Norvell’s leadership and unwavering commitment to Fort Bragg have left an indelible mark on our community,” said City Manager Isaac Whippy. “His ability to balance fiscal responsibility with compassion and innovation, while staying deeply connected to both staff and residents, sets a high standard for public service.”
The reception offers an opportunity for residents, city staff, and community leaders to express their gratitude and celebrate Mayor Norvell’s many contributions.
Following the reception, the City Council meeting will begin at 6:00 PM, during which Mayor Norvell will deliver his final remarks as Mayor of Fort Bragg. The meeting will also include the seating of the new council and the appointment of a new Mayor and Vice Mayor.
As Mayor Norvell transitions out of his role with the City, he will begin his next chapter in public service as a member of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, continuing his dedication to the region. All are welcome to join this special occasion to honor Mayor Norvell and recognize his remarkable contributions to Fort Bragg over the past eight years.
For more information, please contact the City of Fort Bragg at 707-961-2823.
WHEN THE LATE GENE HERR asked the Supervisors about the usefulness of Mendocino County’s General Plan Update in 2008…
After a few remarks about the awkward timing of the General Plan update process Ms. Herr asked, “Is there any compulsion anywhere that says that you have to do what you say you're gonna do?”
A long, embarrassed silence was followed by an uncomfortable round of nervous laughter by the Supervisors and their General Plan consultants. Finally, County Counsel Jeanine Nadel whose office was and continues to be complicit in the General Plan boondoggle as well as all County boondoggles, replied with a non-sequitur:
“The attempt is to try,” a statement that of course elicited more laughter from the Supervisors, acknowledging its ridiculousness.
Ms. Herr then pointed out that by her calculations the County had spent at least $2.5 million on the General Plan Update so far, and will probably spend another $1.9 million in 2009.
“You’ve spent lots of money, and you continue to spend money on a document that does nothing for us. If you're not gonna do anything, why have you done all of this work?”
“Thank you for your comment,” blandly replied Board Chair Jim Wattenburger.
IN 2008, the Board of Supervisors got a report from their then-budget analyst Jennifer Wyatt about the County’s expensive new financial software package, “MUNIS,” which didn’t work very well in 2008 and has never worked very well, causing individual departments to do their own individual budget tracking with conventional spreadsheet software.
Ms. Wyatt told the board that “MUNIS only produces canned reports which are very limited in scope. They can not be printed and read easily by the board.”
It’s now more than 16 years later and MUNIS still doesn’t work very well.
(Mark Scaramella)
SING ALONG MESSIAH IN MENDOCINO
Sing along Messiah Community Concert on December 14th at 3 PM, Mendocino Presbyterian Church. Free admission. Come early.
Guest conductor Les Pfutzenreuter leads Symphony of the Redwoods, soloist and you through the glorious Handel’s Messiah. Professional soloists this year will be soprano Abigail Strock, alto Sara Couden, tenor Marius Constantin, and bass Bill O'Neill.
Vocal scores will be provided. You may sit in the center and be part of the choir or just come to listen and enjoy this community experience.
Handel’s Messiah has been a beloved holiday tradition for many years— we invite you to be part of this inspiring piece of music!
New this year! Community Rehearsal at Preston Hall on Wednesday, December 11th from 5-7pm
Guest Conductor Les Phutzenreuter, togehter with an accompanist, will lead a rehearsal for everyone who would like to practice their part together with others. Both events are free and open to all.
BILL KIMBERLIN:
“although there’s a Boonville woman whose name eludes me”
She is Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin. Awards
- 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts
- 1991 National Endowment for the Arts, Artist’s Fellowship Grant
- 1981 National Endowment for the Arts, Artist’s Fellowship Grant
- 1980 Young Talent Purchase Award, Los Angeles, County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
- 1978 Ford Foundation Grant
- 1977 Ford Foundation Travel Grant
ED NOTES
A READER WRITES: “If this note has an opinion within it I leave it to you to find it. One of the many rewards for subscribing to the AVA is your facility for recounting various tales of the more colorful events that routinely occur with alarming if not predictable regularity in your domain. It must be something in the water. I picked up a subscription to Lapham's Quarterly. As a reader I know you surely enjoy the efforts of Lewis Lapham. Lapham's Quarterly is a collection of the arcane and I admit my ability to stay focused on some of what has been placed there makes for tough sledding in places, like the AVA. Among the many nuggets however is this: books condemned in the United States public schools during the 1980s last happened in 1989 in Laytonville, California. Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax was challenged because it 'criminalizes the forest industry.' Well! Does this book ban hold? 'The Lorax' appears to have been prophetic in its message, if one's first impression of the crossroads known as Laytonville can be trusted. You may remember that I worked as a timber faller in the 1980s so I have formed some ideas about cropland for history and the myths of renewable and sustainable. 'What does Labor want?' We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed: more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and children more happy and bright.' — Samuel Gompers, 1893. If newspapers should have no friends does it follow that they should make a few of enemies? Thanks to both of you there at the AVA.”
MENDOCINO COUNTY has its own Billy Ayres. You remember Billy? The guy John McCain beat Obama over the head with, suggesting that Obama was also a bomb-throwing radical? Ayres the remodeled 60's terrorist? The professor of education with the cush job at the University of Illinois?
AYRES and his girl friend, Bernadine Dohrn, also now a professor, with Bernadine's wealthy, connected parents running interference for them, managed to elude lengthy prison sentences for spending their youths as revolutionaries, crossing over the line when they placed bombs in places like a Pentagon bathroom and at draft boards.
A LOT of young people got caught up in pseudo-revolutionary activity, then became middle of the road extremists when they hit their 30s as the overthrow-the-government fad ended with their less well-placed comrades dead or locked up for the rest of their lives.
YOU'D SEE the Ayres-like people in the late 1960s stomping around like Black Panthers, their leather jackets just open enough to display a gun butt. They tried to act like tough guys but were just caricatures of themselves, really, with their wallets full of credit cards and mom and dad's fancy lawyer at the other end of the hot line if they got arrested. One group of them blew themselves up trying to make bombs, and lots of them spent time in Mendocino County, sheltered by rich friends in up-market Mendo homes.
FIFTY YEARS down the road, I saw a bunch of them popping up in the news as think tankers, professional commentators, judges like John True in the East Bay, spokespeople for politicians like Phil Trounstine, academics, Democratic Party hacks and hackettes. You could see these see-through opportunists coming, and here they were, including Mendocino County's former lead garbage bureaucrat and marijuana fighter, Mike Sweeney, self-reinvented as a respectable citizen after a youth as a Maoist revolutionary, but in Mendo, land of self-reinvention, a fanatic anti-pot warrior.
A RICH KID from a politically connected Republican Santa Barbara family, Sweeney belonged to a Billy Ayres-like group at Stanford led by an English professor named H. Bruce Franklin. They called themselves Venceremos and waved the Great Helmsman's little red book around. They even wore a kind of khaki Boy Scout-like uniform, which of course led their fellow students to accurately assess them as dweebs of a whole new kind.
BUT THEY KILLED PEOPLE, including an unarmed prison transport officer with a young wife and two toddlers at home. His name was Miguel Hernandez, a kid of 23. The great revolutionaries forced Hernandez and the other unarmed transport guy, an older man, to their knees by the side of the road outside Bakersfield and shot them in the backs of their heads. Sweeney's comrades did this to free a prisoner who later snitched them all off and sent several of Sweeney's comrades to prison for long stretches. They're probably all out by now and solidly behind Kamala. Professor Franklin got fired by Stanford but merely moved on to Rutgers where he rattled tea cups with the other lions of the faculty lounge until his comfortable retirement.
SWEENEY married Judi Bari, who he'd met at a Maoist conclave, and later blew her up with the kind of device he'd semi-mastered in his Stanford days, although you don't semi-master a pipe bomb — the thing either works or it doesn't, and Sweeney's bombs were never quite fully functional. Back in 1980, prior to his Mendo interlude, Sweeney, presently a resident of New Zealand, blew up a hangar at the old Navy airfield not far from the home he shared with Bari in Santa Rosa. The weekend fly-overs irritated him, you see.
HE AND BARI had separated by the time he tried to kill her in Oakland in 1990, but still lived on the same property in Redwood Valley where they'd built a spec house together. Bari became semi-famous as NorCal's Earth First! leader as Sweeney re-invented himself as garbage bureaucrat, built himself a big house in the hills west of Ukiah, moved Glenda Anderson of the Ukiah Daily Journal and Press Democrat in with him, had his own key to the Mendocino Environment Center on West Standley in the building owned by John McCowen, and has presumably lived anxiously ever since, waiting for the knock on the door.
BUT SWEENEY, like Billy Ayres, has not only gotten away with all this stuff, he prospered in Mendocino County, land of amnesiacs, where you can be anything you say you are, no questions asked, and history starts all over again every day.
MONOMANIA? I have lots besides this one, but where I come from, mister, persistence is a virtue, and it outrages me no end that the Bari Bombing is presented by the old girl's dwindling but active cult as a mystery, and an aggrandizing mystery at that with the FBI, timber corporations, Old Testament fanatics, and men generally — phallocrats every last one of them — as among the likely perps, the ex-husband always magically excluded from suspect status. The FBI knew almost immediately who did it, so why didn't they move on Sweeney? Because, I'd say, he was a loyal informant going back to the middle 1960s as a Stanford student. The cunning little fellow was also uniquely placed to reveal the FBI's activities in Mendocino County during the Redwood Summer period, which would have caused no end of embarrassment to quite a number of locals, including former supervisor John McCowen. With the FBI itself about to be vetted by a MAGA man, who knows, maybe the feds will take a fresh look at the agency's Ukiah antics?
FOR A DEEPER DIVE into this nearly unbelievable case, including a link to Steve Talbot’s famous 1990 PBS documentary, go to the AVA’s Bari Bombing special series at: https://theava.com/archives/1235
FAMILY NEWS? NONE FOR ME, THANKS
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
I once described my family as “six abrasive oddballs” led by “parents from Neptune and three siblings I never knew. All the kids ignored each other except when tormenting younger ones, while mom and dad orbited in ellipses that brought them into contact with us regularly but never intimately.”
It’s a fair description, if a little on the warm and fuzzy side. Not that we dislike one another, or that we are unhappy as a family. We surviving siblings (brother Pete died in 2012) are just a bit prickly, with a side dish of antisocial and a healthy dollop of broken glass on top.
I’ve never had an actual conversation with anyone in my family, ever, unless it involved the Cleveland Indians having traded someone they shouldn’t have, or vice-versa. And maybe weather.
Other subjects, like health, finances or family life are all off-limits, although no one has ever said so. Work and jobs go unmentioned and politics isn’t on the menu. It’s OK to ask about someone’s pet.
I’m in my eighth decade and I’ve never physically embraced anyone in my family and that will never change. We don’t do hug.
This is a lengthy but necessary introduction and explanation for my darling wife being troubled, and borderline traumatized, following a 15-minute phone conversation with my sister. Why? Because Trophy suddenly realized she didn’t know whether Carol was divorced or still married.
Uh oh. Carol must have let something slip.
I tried being honest. I said “I don’t know” mixed in with two other truisms: ”What do I care?” and ”None of my business.” There could have been an anniversary a few decades ago but I’m not sure.
This failed to satisfy Trophy, who is Italian and thinks families should know everything about each other, starting with birthdays and shoe size to genetic predispositions, wildest fantasies and which Beatle was their favorite.
Fine with me. Whatever. Tell each other anything you want. You won’t hear me complain.
“Oh, and by the way, I don’t know if Bill is married either.”
(I didn’t actually say that. Wouldn’t have occurred to me. None of my business.)
But after several minutes stewing following that phone call, Trophy smelled family discord. She zeroed in: ”What about Bill and Darlene? Are they still married?”
My wife should understand that I don’t know about them and they don’t know about me, and that calling up and demanding answers to personal stuff just ain’t gonna happen. Bill and Darlene got married in the early 1970s (my mother told me a few years later) and at some point they split up. But got back together.
Over the years they’ve often lived apart, mostly because he taught Black History at South Carolina State, and she taught Black History at Michigan State, Stanford, Harvard, Charleston College and some others, maybe. Not sure.
She also had a kid at some point. Not with him. Don’t ask, how would I know?
I’m happy to report that neither of my siblings know whether I’m married to Trophy (or to Paris Hilton) or not. Put bluntly: They Don’t Care and I Don’t Mind.
I’ve been writing columns going back to the 1980s and with the Daily Journal since 2007. Sometimes family stuff gets tossed into the Osterizer blender I call a Royal typewriter and sometimes their names get mentioned.
Bill and Carol will never know about this column. Neither have the slightest interest in my writings, my books, my hopes nor yearnings. I could tell them my favorite Beatle was Spiro Agnew and they’d shrug. If you think any of this causes me to weep bitter tears on lonely winter nights, please tell me. I’ll laugh for 10 minutes straight.
It goes both ways. I stopped at Carol’s house in Pennsylvania one time in 2008; Bill has lived in South Carolina nearly 60 years and I visited once in 1983. But a year ago I bumped into him in a bar in Columbia, the state capitol and biggest city. (NOTE: Mathematically impossible.)
People may think my family is stunted or repressed, and I wouldn’t argue. But look around the next roomful of people you happen to be standing in and I’d bet their families and upbringings were at least as whacky as mine.
Or yours.
MULTIPLE DRUG ARRESTS IN ANDERSON VALLEY by Bruce Anderson (2008)
Mendocino County's Major Crimes Task Force roared into Anderson Valley in a fleet of unmarked vehicles, headed for the old Bachman Hill School in Philo and an Anderson Valley Way, Boonville, address.
It was Tuesday morning, the 14th of October, 2008, a perfect fall day at the end of which a half-dozen people had fallen to law enforcement, and two very young children, ages 1 and 3, were in the custody of Mendocino County social workers.
Near the Philo Grange, a dozen athletic men in jump suits had leaped from their vehicles to run through the rambling Philo property, guns drawn, a hand-held battering ram at the ready, one of them waving a warrant for the occupants of two of the many rental units on the place.
Jose Luis Anguiano, 29, was soon arrested on suspicion of charges that include possession of marijuana and a controlled substance for sale and child endangerment.
Martin Anguiano-Soto, 18, was arrested at Anderson Valley High School on suspicion of possession of marijuana and a controlled substance, methamphetamine, for sale.
Norma Alisia Anguiano-Soto, 19, was also arrested on suspicion of possession of marijuana and a controlled substance for sale and child endangerment.
Antonio Lopez Cuevas, 23, was arrested and charged with suspicion of possession of marijuana and a controlled substance for sale.
And Jaime Damian-Aparicio, 26, was arrested on suspicion of possession of marijuana and a controlled substance for sale.
Bob Nishiyama, then-head of the Ukiah-based office of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, said 104 pounds of marijuana, 746 grams (roughly a pound and a half) of methamphetamine, and more than $10,000 in cash were confiscated.
Nishiyama speculated that the persons arrested had begun to sell crank to make up the income they'd lost from earlier raids on nearby marijuana gardens. Another officer said he thought the crank, imported from Mexico, had been traded for marijuana.
While arrests were made on the east side of 128 at what is now called Villa de Guadalupe, formerly Bachman Hill School, owned by the Ashiku family of Ukiah, several members of the raid team sprinted across the street where the battering ram was used to crush the front door of Pam Balson's rental. Ms. Balson and her children were not home at the time but, a week later, Ms. Balson remains highly indignant.
“I got home and my front door was smashed in. They left this so-called warrant, and now I'm wondering who's going to pay to fix my door. I'm probably the only person in this whole area who doesn't have marijuana!”
The door was soon fixed by the property manager. Ms. Balson, however, remained unmollified.
At 12449 Anderson Valley Way, where three small houses occupy a crowded half acre next to Evergreen Cemetery, the strike force served a warrant for Gustavo Perez Sanchez, 39.
“Everybody and their uncle ran in six different directions when we got there,” Nishiyama commented, although no one was arrested until the next day.
Mr. Sanchez, the man named on the warrant for 12449 Anderson Valley Way, is employed by Frank Vane Firewood. He was not at home when the Strike Force sent his large family scurrying from the premises, but was arrested the next day by Anderson Valley resident deputy Keith Squires when Squires spotted Sanchez driving a log truck to Ukiah.
At the Sanchez home, police seized twelve 1-pound bags of processed marijuana, marijuana seeds, $1,700 cash, a 12-gauge shotgun, two 9mm pistols and two illegal assault rifles – an MAK 90 and an AR 15.
The Sanchez family was invaded last winter by a gang of armed men who robbed them of marijuana, cash of an unknown amount, and household goods. The home invaders also cleaned out the home of Sanchez's brother next door. They arrived at the Sanchez homes after midnight and loaded their vehicles with as much of the Sanchez family's portable goods as they could carry.
The Strike Force, according to sources close to law enforcement, “is not through in Anderson Valley. The people we got this time were snitched off by friends and relatives. Old scores are being settled. This isn't the end of it.”
CHUCK ROSS: Another 4th of July fire was the end of the wharf at Greenwood. That was 4th of July weekend, 1939. It appears that a couple guys from "the city" came up to fish off the end of the wharf. There was a stiff onshore wind blowing, they got cold so they built a fire right on the wood planking. (My mother opined that alcohol may have been involved) Townspeople had to tear out a section of the wharf as a firebreak to keep the flames from reaching the town.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, December 2, 2024
FERNANDO CAMPOS-REYES, 29, Covelo. Loaded handgun-not registered owner, firearm without ID markings.
MICHAEL HARRISON, 28, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI-alcohol&drugs.
JAIME MARIN-JUAREZ, 27, Ukiah. Probation violation.
MARIA RAZO, 35, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation violation.
JESSICA SCHAFER, 45, Albion. Domestic battery.
VANESSA WILKINS, 35, Eureka/Ukiah. Stolen vehicle, controlled substance without prescription, metal knuckles, failure to appear.
HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?
Editor:
The news that more than half of students are failing mathematics and English is beyond comprehension. How is it possible that California, the fifth-largest economy, is failing in education? It can’t be money. Over 40% of the California budget goes to education. It can’t be class size, at an average of 25 students per class. Compare that to Japan’s (first in mathematics) average of 38 students per class.
It’s not salaries. Per the California Board of Education, the average teacher’s salary is $95,000, and that does not include $30,000 in benefits. That’s for 180 days of work vs. a regular job’s 250 days of work. The Press Democrat’s article says, “Only 18.4% of the district’s students were absent for more than 10% of school last year.” As if that’s a good statistic? Nearly 1 in 5 students missing 10% of their school days should not be classified as “only.”
Parents’ odds of their children getting a sufficient education is less than 50%. This failure is incomprehensible. More money, smaller class sizes, better salaries won’t fix it. We have those. We need an entire cultural change that allows teachers to teach and students to succeed. I’m wondering how we can address this.
Paul Franceschini
Petaluma
GRANOLA
by Paul Modic
I have this odd friend or acquaintance who refuses to tell me how old she is, fair enough I'm over it. However the other day she told me that she went on an all-day birthday hike with a couple friends. “Did they know how many years you have?” I asked. She didn't answer, then played dumb, and it was so annoying I felt manipulated to ask her a couple more times, a fool's errand.
On my walk in the park later I was thinking about this and decided to send her a text saying “I'm going to re-re-ghost you until you answer the question.” When I got home I turned on the flip phone and found a couple texts from her, photos of freshly baked granola she had said she was going to send me. (She makes some amazingly addictive granny.)
Oh shit! If I send my ultimatum text she won't send me the granola! Instead I texted my mailing address which she's always getting mixed up. The next day she wrote back that the granola is in the mail.
I texted back “Whoopie!”
THE HAPPY MAN only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible.
— Chekhov
GIRLS? I'M AVAILABLE!
Warmest spiritual greetings,
I Am Available! Talk to Me.
Following three months of “putting in the prayer request” for the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil, my primary purpose for going to the district has been accomplished. Still visiting the vigil regularly, providing food and beverages. Still at the homeless shelter in the northeast section of the district. I am available! Talk to me.
Craig Louis Stehr, craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
LINDY PETERS: Even though we lost this may have been the most fun I have ever had at a 49er game. The Bills fans were friendly (of course, they were thumping us) and so loyal to their team. The place goes nuts. You never sit. Everyone stands the whole game. It never stopped snowing. Whole game! 25° at kickoff. Lucas got us fantastic seats 18 rows behind the Niner bench at the 50 yard line. Good times!!
WHEN THE NINERS HAD A REAL COACH
‘Inside The NFL,’ Reviewed by W.E. Reinka
“Who would want to be a pro football coach?”
That’s what you’ll be asking after reading The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football & Created An NFL Dynasty by David Harris (Random House, $26).
Walsh changed football forever as his “West Coast offense” spread nationwide.
It seems as if he could never stop thinking football. Once when he took his wife out to dinner as a peace gesture in their rocky marriage, he stood with his arm around her as they waited for a table. Suddenly she realized he was tracing a play on her shoulder. The coach who never developed a close relationship with his kids was forward-thinking enough to sponsor financial and life counseling for young players who faced lucrative but short-lived careers. He insisted that everyone who dealt with the 49ers be treated with respect. On the other hand, if he saw a rookie goofing off in the training camp dorm, he’d cut him from the team without even taking his name.
Sometimes this biography bogs down into a collection of reporter’s notes. Harris seems attribution-shy, hesitating to ascribe comments from newspaper columnists or former Walsh associates even when they aren’t off the record. On the other hand, Harris effectively takes us beneath the placid Walsh façade after Walsh got blindsided when mentor Paul Brown (namesake of the Cleveland Browns and earlier “genius”) turned on him. It seems that Walsh never truly got over it.
There’s no question that Walsh’s innovations helped move the game away from the abiding principle that “three things can happen on a forward pass and two of them are bad.” However, his organizational skills may have contributed as much as his coaching “genius” to his three Super Bowl wins and 10 victories in 14 post-season games. Here’s a guy who could have revamped a major corporation to make the wheels spin faster. His personnel skills led to still-legendary draft days when Walsh would pull future Hall of Famers out of obscure schools in the latter rounds. Former 49er owner Eddie DeBartolo, Jr., a boozer who relied on his inherited bank account as a panacea to life’s ills, frequently tested Walsh’s personnel abilities from the top side.
As his home life showed, Walsh wasn’t perfect. When he blew his stack you didn’t want to be there. He grew Nixon-like with the press, making jabs at the sportswriters when he might have basked in the joy of winning his third Super Bowl. As he got older, losses got tougher and victories less satisfying.
This biography of the man many consider the greatest coach in history leaves us bowled over with what an all-consuming (and consumptive) job coaching is. Walsh would return from an away game loss and go straight from San Francisco Airport to the team headquarters where he would work all Sunday night. If coaching wears down a man with three Super Bowl rings, what about those in charge of struggling teams?
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
The idea being floated is to change the makeup of the occupants/invitees of the small room (holds about 4 dozen seats) for press conferences.
The idea would be to arrange for podcasters to be in the mix, and possibly exclude dying organizations with low viewer #'s such as CNN and MSNBC.
My point being the 'news' you refer to is dying off, with low ratings and sparse viewership except in a shrinking demographic.
I think it's safe to say more people watch Joe Rogan than CNN. Is it news? Sometimes. Does it ask tough questions, mostly yes.
WE ARE NOT POLITICIANS or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connections, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislature, any political platform, any presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our estate.
— Frederick Townsend Martin, “the Millionaire with a Mission,” 1910
LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT
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A DISGRACEFUL PARDON
by Bret Stephens
If Democrats want to understand one of the reasons the Republican Party is ascendant, they can look to President Biden’s pardon on Sunday for his son Hunter. In its rank mendacity, political hypocrisy, naked self-dealing and wretched example, it typifies so much of what so many Americans have come to detest about what the MAGA world calls “the swamp.”
Start with the mendacity. Last December, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, insisted, “I’ve been very clear: The president is not going to pardon his son.” The president reiterated the point in early June, when he told ABC’s David Muir that he would not pardon Hunter if his son was convicted, as he later was, of three felony charges related to his purchase of a gun while he was addicted to drugs. The younger Biden also faced separate criminal tax charges.
It was always a good bet that the president would break his word as soon as it was politically safe to do so. But he doubled down on dishonesty in his statement about the pardon, claiming Hunter’s prosecution was a result of “political pressure” on the judicial process. Nonsense. The charges stem from Hunter’s reckless lifestyle, abetted and financed by his willingness to trade shamelessly on the family name. A previous plea agreement between Hunter and federal prosecutors fell apart last year under scrutiny from a federal judge.
More obnoxious is the hypocrisy. Every year, federal prosecutors file hundreds of cases against persons charged with lying on the Firearms Transaction Record, or Form 4473, which is required from anyone buying a firearm from a licensed gun dealer. In 1993, then-Senator Biden made that form a key part of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. How is it that the same president who made both gun control and stricter tax enforcement key parts of his political message suddenly sees his own son’s transgressions as nuisance offenses?
As for the self-dealing, it’s touching that the president invoked his feelings as “a father” in letting his son off the legal hook. Too bad that luxury isn’t available to so many other parents who watch helplessly as their children run afoul of the law — and pay the legal consequence.
After the news of the pardon broke, a liberal friend wrote to say that perhaps it wasn’t such a big deal, at least when considering Donald Trump’s choices for attorney general and F.B.I. director. OK. But when a Democratic president behaves as Biden just did, it fuels the corrosive public cynicism that helped elect Trump yet again while licensing and excusing whatever plans the president-elect may have for politicizing justice and using it for the benefit of friends, family and self.
What a degrading finale for Biden’s feeble, forgettable, frequently foolish presidency.
THE BLOB HAS A MIGRAINE
by James Kunstler
"It's a beautiful thing to watch the Biden family destroy the Democrat Party." — @Mazemoore on "X"
You can be sure the blobists have seen this coming from years away. The boys and girls in the agencies have behaved more than just a little badly, and they know it. They committed serious crimes against our country and its citizens under color-of-law since 2015, ranging from seditious conspiracy clear up to treason (say, just for instance, the case of Col. Alexander Vindman using his Ukraine connections to lever Mr. Trump out of the Oval Office in the 2019 impeachment scam.)
You have whole C-suites of agencies teed-up on RussiaGate for felonies, misprision of felonies, abuse of power, deprivation of rights, lying under oath, conspiracy to commit fraud, and much more. You have Judge James Boasberg playing games in the FISA Court he presided over; Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann running a two-and-a-half-year Chinese fire drill to cover-up years preceding of FBI / DOJ misconduct; John Brennan, James Clapper, and Gina Haspel abusing the “Five Eyes” intel arrangements to turn the CIA on innocent citizens at home; the fifty-one current and former intel agents colluding to bury Hunter’s Laptop to sway the 2020 election; the antics of Judge Emmet Sullivan in the Flynn case. . . .
And then on to a whole new round of frolics under “Joe Biden” including the malicious prosecutions of J-6 protesters; the pipe-bomb caper at the DNC; the use of several agencies to censor speech and manage the news media; the treasonous negligence of Alejandro Mayorkas on the nation’s borders; the DOJ-coordinated lawfare hounding of Mr. Trump and his adjacent lawyers; the Ukraine War project ginned up by the State Department’s Victoria Nuland and cohorts; and the sinkhole of greed, malice, and medical homicide that was the Covid-19 operation, millions killed and disabled, and likely more of that yet to come from the vaccines, trillions in wealth purloined or just plain lost, and businesses destroyed in lockdowns. It’s not a mere “swamp,” it’s a whole forbidden planet of turpitude.
hen there are the floaters and freelancers who move from one blob venue to the next, like lawfare artists Mary McCord, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, David J. Kramer, or the girl-band of Lisa Monaco, Fiona Hill, Kathryn Ruemmler, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Nellie Ohr. And finally, there are the real big fishes: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, Chris Wray, Merrick Garland, General Milley, and “Joe Biden.”
Add William Barr to that list for failing to reveal that he was in possession of Hunter’s laptop as early as the fall of 2019. Of course, it was crammed with exculpatory evidence that could have ended impeachment No. 1 on day one of the initial hearings, yet he never alerted President’s lawyers to its existence. Weird, a little bit. And also, for the effrontery of allowing Jeffrey Epstein to be killed in his Manhattan jail, and never offering the public a coherent account of how the cameras on the cellblock failed, or why the guards who fell asleep on-duty were disciplined with only 100 hours of “community service.”
My Gawd, they must be eating Xanax like tic-tacs in their drawing rooms and boudoirs as the name Kash Patel floats across their social media screens. Kash Patel, a real-live exterminating angel, will finally step in to the FBI Director’s office and turn the investigative powers of the FBI on. . . the FBI! And its parent, the DOJ. The poetic justice is sublime. You must wonder: how does Mr. Patel get through the RINO-infested Senate confirmation process? Start with: what have they got him? Answer: probably not a goshdarn thing, not a hair out of place. More to the point: what has Mr. Patel got on them? (Especially Messers Thune, Barrasso, Cornyn, and let’s just throw in the Democrat Mark Warner, VA, who was up to his eyeballs in RussiaGate as chair of the Senate Intel Committee.)
And were Mr. Patel to land in the FBI Director’s office 49 days from now, what additional info might he uncover about years of weaponized government with assistance from John Ratcliffe at the CIA and Tulsi Gabbard as DNI — who will access a pipeline to the vast national security server farm out in Bluffdale, Utah. So, in case you think that the document-shredding party currently underway in DC will conceal all that criminality, consider what lives forever in the alternate universe of cyberspace. There are additional NSA intel server farms in Fort Meade, MD, Augusta, GA, and San Antonio, TX, all with troves of agency emails and cell phone texts. Not to mention what whistleblowers-to-come might have saved on their thumb drives. And you may be sure that the whistles will be blowing, even while the culpable rat each other out. Remember too: there is the document dossier of FBI crimes that Mr. Trump had in his personal possession after leaving office— the reason for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, August, 2022, and Jack Smith’s bullshit court case to justify it.
In a new wrinkle to things transitional, you have the news late Sunday that “Joe Biden” issued a blanket pardon to “the smartest person I know,” Hunter Biden, that covers every last criminal act he committed from January 1, 2014, to present, including bribery, wire fraud, money-laundering, trafficking minors for sex, handgun violations, tax evasion, crack-cocaine parties, and probably more.
“JB” assured America more than once that he would never pardon Hunter. Turned out to be the joke that all his utterances were supposedly not. But, really, did you expect anything else? Do you see now, also, why Hunter pled guilty to those tax charges in the LA federal court? I’ll tell you why: because in a trial all the mechanisms of the money transfers through a myriad of bank accounts would have been disclosed. And the money trail leads from the multiple accounts of Hunter’s Rosemont Seneca operation to the personal bank accounts of Biden family members, brother Jim and wife Sara, possibly Hunter’s half-sister Ashley, and, of course, “the Big Guy.” Where are their pardons? And where is “Joe Biden’s” pardon for Joe Biden?
It is unfortunate that the way forward (to a national government different in scale, scope, and disposition toward its citizens) will require so much consorting with what is past. But it must be if consequence is to be restored as a basic element in our constitutional arrangements. You can’t just have people doing stuff outside the law because they feel like it.
LIARS, LIARS, LIARS
by Maureen Callahan
What little was left of Joe Biden's legacy is in tatters.
Having promised the American people repeatedly, and for months, that he wouldn't do it – well, on Sunday night, President Biden announced that he had pardoned his son Hunter, for crimes committed as well as any future charges.
Future charges! Well, well, well.
Hunter, we know, earned millions sitting on boards he wasn't qualified for, introduced shady businessmen to his father, frequented sex workers, and pled guilty to lying about his active drug addiction when purchasing a firearm, as well as tax evasion — owing the IRS $1.4 million, yet spending millions more on drugs, hookers, five-star hotels and a sex-club membership.
To say nothing of banging his dead brother's widow and (allegedly) her sister at the same time, then knocking up a stripper and disowning that child — a child barely ackowledged by Joe himself. But hey, at least none of that's illegal.
The totality of Hunter's depravity, however, begs the question: What does Joe Biden know that we don't? What other skeletons hang in the family closet?
We certainly can't rely on the liberal media, which spent years denying that Hunter's laptop was real — a Russian hoax, per the New York Times, MSNBC and their ilk — while telling us that Biden was sharper than ever (until he wasn't), that the border was secure, the economy was gangbusters, that men can be women, that Kamala Harris was totally qualified and that Donald Trump was Hitler.
Make no mistake: The Bidens, the Democratic machine, and Establishment media despise us, the average voters. They think we're too stupid to notice what's really going on — and when we do, they tell us we're even more stupid for believing what we see and hear.
Remember that moment weeks ago, when Biden called over half the electorate 'garbage'? It's contempt, plain and simple. They tell us so all the time.
Yet Dems still can't understand why Trump won so decisively. Why every branch of government has turned red.
This is exactly why: The American people have thoroughly rejected an elite that lies to them, daily, with a smirk and a shrug.
Just as Biden's shameless press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, did with a straight face on Monday, telling reporters that 'the one thing the president believes is to always be truthful with the American people.'
Disgusting. Seriously, what is this — one long epic troll?
Joe Biden, clearly, no longer has any f's to give — not when it comes to arming Ukraine and escalating that war, not when it comes to now loosening border restrictions, and not when it comes to issuing a pardon he promised, over and over and over, he'd never issue.
By the way, what did Kamala get for her loyalty, refusing to put any daylight between her and her morally vacant boss? She got a knifing in the front, Biden wearing a 'MAGA' hat and turning the White House dark on election night, well before the results were in, signaling to the world that the president had gone beddy-bye.
Joe Biden has always been small: A small mind and a small man, interested in power for power's sake alone. What other politician would use his badly injured sons — who'd just lost their mother and infant sister in a car crash — as political props while being sworn into Congress?
What other president would routinely insist, to Gold Star families, that his son Beau died while serving in Iraq — not stateside, as a civilian, from brain cancer?
Little wonder that the party made this infirm, elderly man wait until nearly 11pm on his farewell night at the DNC — it seems they can't stand him either.
'I give you my word, as a Biden.' Joe says this all the time, as if his surname confers some majesty, some imperial morality, that no one else's does. What malarkey, as he would say.
Not since Richard Nixon has a presidential pardon been so wide-ranging and controversial. But at least that was done for the good of the country.
The Hunter Biden pardon is purely personal, craven and likely designed to protect not just the president's son but the president himself, referred to in multiple emails with foreign entities as the 'Big Guy' — you know, the one allegedly taking ten to fifteen percent of Hunter's lucrative paydays.
Don't believe it when you hear Biden's lackeys in the media regurgitating the White House spin, that Hunter was targeted as 'Joe Biden's son' — a phrase I heard one talking head use three times in two minutes on MSNBC Monday morning.
Talk about malignant narcissism. Joe wants the credit, even when it comes to his reprobate son!
Two sources with direct knowledge now say that Biden had been talking about a pardon with his closest aides since June, when Hunter was convicted of three felony gun charges.
According to those insiders: 'It was decided at the time that he would publicly say he would not pardon his son even though doing so remained on the table.'
That's as cynical as it gets.
Here was this utter disgrace of a president sitting with ABC's David Muir in Normandy that same month, commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day, displaying the kind of 'honesty' synonymous with the Biden name.
Muir: 'Will you accept the jury's outcome [for Hunter], their verdict, no matter what it is?'
Biden: 'Yes.'
Muir: 'And have you ruled out a pardon for your son?'
Biden: 'Yes.'
As recently as November 7, Jean-Pierre repeated, for at least the sixth time, that same lie.
'Our answer stands,' she said, 'which is no.'
While he was still — delusionally — running for president, Biden had a constant, Trump-centric refrain.
'No one is above the law,' he'd say.
Unless, of course, you're a Biden.
(DailyMail.uk)
TRUMP PICKS LEE ZELDIN AS EPA HEAD TO OVERSEE DISMANTLING OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS
by Dan Bacher
President-Elect Donald Trump recently announced that Lee Zeldin, a former New York Republican Congressman who holds a lifetime League of Conservation Voters (LCV) score of just 14 percent, will be his nominee to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Zeldin will “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses,’' Trump claimed in a statement. Zeldin also will maintain “the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,’' Trump said in the cynical hyperbole that he is known for.
Trump also misidentified the name of the agency that Zeldin was picked to head, calling it the “Environmental Protective Agency.”
Leaders of environmental groups slammed Trump’s nomination of Zeldin for EPA Administrator, a key environmental post.
“We need a steady, experienced hand at EPA to marshal federal resources to fight climate change and utilize the full power of the law to protect communities from toxic pollution,” Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen said in a statement. “Lee Zeldin is not that person. His loyalty to Donald Trump indicates he will gladly take a sledgehammer to EPA’s most recent lifesaving regulations, putting politics over science and endangering our communities. It is clear President-elect Trump is prioritizing loyalty above actual qualifications to address our current and future environmental concerns.”
The Sierra Club also blasted Trump’s pick, noting that Zeldin “voted against critical environmental protection and clean energy job investments, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which has already created more than 300,000 American jobs.”
In response to the nomination, Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous released the following statement:
“Naming an unqualified, anti-American worker nominee who opposes efforts to safeguard our clean air and water lays bare Donald Trump’s intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs, and our future out to corporate polluters. Our lives, our livelihoods, and our collective future cannot afford Lee Zeldin — or anyone who seeks to carry out a mission antithetical to the EPA’s mission.
“2024 will assuredly surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record. Across the country, we are experiencing record droughts, heat waves, and deadly storms, wiping out entire communities in a matter of hours. Americans need and deserve someone who will put them first, not millionaires sitting in board rooms seeking to increase the profits of multi billion dollar international corporations.
“We have made too much progress to allow Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin to take us back. We will not give up the clean energy manufacturing jobs rebuilding communities. We will not accept more dangerous air and water. And we will not allow Trump, Zeldin and corporate polluters to steal our future.”
Ken Cook, president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, also responded critically to the nomination of Zeldin, stating: “The most important thing to know about Trump’s nominee for the EPA is not his name, or his record, or his views on any particular environmental issue. The most important thing to know is that his mandate from Trump is to destroy the EPA.”
“Lee Zeldin seems perfectly fine for the job. In announcing the former congressman for the position, Trump promised ‘fair and swift deregulatory decisions’ from an agency whose central duty is to regulate in the service of environmental protection and public health,” Cook said.
“Zeldin’s lack of devotion to the Constitution and the rule of law and his servility to Trump are shown by his vote against the certification of President Joe Biden, in January 2021. His nomination is a bracing contrast with the instincts of the EPA’s first administrator, Republican William Ruckelshaus, who resigned in protest from his subsequent position at the Justice Department, alongside the attorney general, when then-President Richard Nixon sought to fire the special prosecutor investigating his Watergate crimes,” Cook said.
“When January 2025 rolls around, Zeldin will have set his sights on the undoing of as many Biden EPA rules as possible. He will likely start with the unraveling of any and all regulations designed to combat climate change, delicacies of special appeal to Trump’s deregulatory appetites,” he observed.
If Zeldin’s nomination is confirmed, he will replace Michael S. Regan as EPA Administrator. Sworn in as the 16th Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency on March 11, 2021, Regan is the first Black man and second person of color to lead the U.S. EPA.
Background: The stated mission of the EPA is to “protect human health and the environment.” EPA works to ensure that:
- Americans have clean air, land and water;
- National efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information;
- Federal laws protecting human health and the environment are administered and enforced fairly, effectively and as Congress intended;
- Environmental stewardship is integral to U.S. policies concerning natural resources, human health, economic growth, energy, transportation, agriculture, industry, and international trade, and these factors are similarly considered in establishing environmental policy;
- All parts of society--communities, individuals, businesses, and state, local and tribal governments--have access to accurate information sufficient to effectively participate in managing human health and environmental risks;
- Contaminated lands and toxic sites are cleaned up by potentially responsible parties and revitalized; and
- Chemicals in the marketplace are reviewed for safety.
It depicts a world in which the normal laws of gravity do not apply. The architectural structure seems to be the center of an idyllic community, with most of its inhabitants casually going about their ordinary business, such as dining. There are windows and doorways leading to park-like outdoor settings. All of the figures are dressed in identical attire and have featureless bulb-shaped heads. Identical characters such as these can be found in many other Escher works.
In the world of "Relativity", there are three sources of gravity, each being orthogonal to the two others. Each inhabitant lives in one of the gravity wells, where normal physical laws apply. There are sixteen characters, spread between each gravity source, six in one and five each in the other two. The apparent confusion of the lithograph print comes from the fact that the three gravity sources are depicted in the same space
The structure has seven stairways, and each stairway can be used by people who belong to two different gravity sources. This creates interesting phenomena, such as in the top stairway, where two inhabitants use the same stairway in the same direction and on the same side, but each using a different face of each step; thus, one descends the stairway as the other climbs it, even while moving in the same direction nearly side-by-side. In the other stairways, inhabitants are depicted as climbing the stairways upside-down, but based on their own gravity source, they are climbing normally
Each of the three parks belongs to one of the gravity wells. All but one of the doors seem to lead to basements below the parks. Though physically possible, such basements are certainly unusual and add to the surreal effect of the picture.
This is one of Escher's most popular works and has been used in a variety of ways
– Wikipedia
THE BELL FINALLY TOLLS FOR THE FBI
The reported nomination of Kash Patel means chickens are coming home to roost for the FBI, which needs to be destroyed as a political entity
by Matt Taibbi
From CNN’s “Trump announces he intends to replace current FBI director with loyalist Kash Patel”:
Even among Trump loyalists, Patel is widely viewed as a controversial figure and relentless self-promoter whose value to the president-elect largely derives from a shared disdain for the so-called deep state… Patel rose to prominence within Trump’s orbit in 2018, when he served as an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee… Patel played a key role in Nunes’ efforts to discredit the FBI’s Russia investigation into the Trump campaign, including a controversial classified memo that alleged FBI abuses of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants on Trump advisers.
What’s a “loyalist”? How many presidents nominate “disloyalists” to fill senior positions? Why do sites like Axios continue to complain that Donald Trump has picked “yet another hardline MAGA ally” to occupy a key spot? Who the hell else is he supposed to pick?
After everything that’s taken place, it’s unsafe for Trump to do anything but bonfire the whole FBI leadership structure, including probably the entire National Security and Counterintelligence Divisions, for starters. Control over the FBI is the critical test of how real any coming changes will be. In the last eight-plus years, the Bureau went beyond the excesses of the J. Edgar Hoover era, attempting to install itself as a KGB-like domestic intelligence service with gatekeeping power over everything from the White House to the speech landscape. Forget Trump: we are not safe unless its bureaucracy is fully dismantled.
As for CNN: for the network to shudder about what a “frightening” choice Patel is without mentioning its own role in his story ought to be a shock, but it’s sadly par for the course. Coverage of the “controversial classified memo” Patel helped author may be exhibit A in the case against the “dishonest fake news media,” a description CNN’s gesticulator-in-chief Jim Acosta denounced as “out of control” and part of Trump’s “assaults on the truth.” The network spent more than a year attacking this “Nunes memo,” through reports that were themselves frequently proven wrong, with a few venturing into the realm of outright hoaxes. Industry coverage of the episode collectively represents perhaps the most egregious still-unacknowledged error of the Trump years, a story botched in quantity. No one performed worse than Acosta’s CNN.
I defy anyone from CNN to defend its pile of misses on this subject, which collectively read not as journalism but free advertising for Democrats and the FBI. This episode was so shameful, it blurred the lines between the press and a corrupt federal police force. At minimum, the smug mass errors by stations like CNN were Trump’s best campaign ads. Anderson Cooper, can you defend it? Wolf Blitzer? Brian Stelter? Chris Cillizza, who wrote some of CNN’s copy on this? Anyone? Could even recently departed Chris Wallace justify unacknowledged “mistakes” on this scale?…
https://www.racket.news/p/the-bell-finally-tolls-for-the-fbi
NOTE ON THE FBI
Kash Patel will be the focus of scrutiny now, but the Bureau needs to look in the mirror. How J. Edgar Hoover's legacy was revived in the Trump years
by Matt Taibbi
When I heard Kash Patel had been tabbed by Donald Trump to run the FBI, I could already imagine the pushback and moved immediately to start the just-published article “The Bell Finally Tolls for the FBI” piece. The thought was that the role Patel played in preparing the “Nunes memo” was both the clearest example of media corruption from Trump’s first term and also the most easily demonstrated episode of FBI malfeasance. Since I had to spend an unnatural amount of time on the topic over the years (it even intersected with the Twitter Files and Hamilton 68) I quickly found myself in the weeds of the “memo” tale, when there’s a larger argument about why the FBI needs a major reorganization that someone needs to make amid what’s already an ugly fight about Patel’s nomination:
The transformation of the FBI back into a J. Edgar Hoover-style domestic spy service with sweeping political ambition has been a long-developing story, obscured by a political anomaly. In the first phase of this nightmare, between 2001 and 2016, the post-9/11 Bureau used the pretext of an enhanced counterintelligence mandate to throw off some mild restraints that had been placed on it the last time it had to be slapped down, i.e. after the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s. The second phase of its transformation took place after the election of Donald Trump, when the Bureau remade itself on the fly as a kind of government-in-exile, empowered by an outpouring of public and media support to view itself as a counterweight to the Trump government.
This dichotomy has probably helped prevent a full portrait of the FBI’s makeover from appearing. The more troubling aspects to phase one were mostly found in reports by a then-adversarial ACLU or in testimonials of agents and investigators who spoke out in places like Democracy Now! or the Southern Poverty Law Center, with examples being people like Colleen Rowley and Mike German. The post-Trump exposes of FBI excess meanwhile often appeared in places like Mollie Hemingway’s The Federalist or broadcasts by the likes of Tucker Carlson or even sites like The Conservative Treehouse, and the signature FBI whistleblowers of this period were agents like Steve Friend, Garrett O’Boyle and Marcus Allen, testifying in front of Republican elected officials like Jim Jordan.
They were all really talking about the same subject, but their complaints were broadcast to different audiences at different stages of the Bureau’s evolution. With the exception of the audiences of people like podcaster and Provoked author Scott Horton, who kept eyes on the subject through both eras, few in the public saw the FBI story as one unbroken progression toward a fully politicized police force. I tried to do it here a little bit, making Racket home to multiple stories about the FBI’s transformation and interviewing current and former agents from both eras (Walter Kirn and I have also devoted a fair amount of time to FBI shenanigans on America This Week). Though I tried to present these stories in a way that had a chance of reaching those old Southern Poverty Law Center/ACLU audiences, I doubt they reached those ears, especially after the FBI denounced the Twitter Files as the work of “conspiracy theorists” whose “sole purpose” was “attempting to discredit the agency.”
In the 1970s a Senate Committee led by Idaho Democrat Frank Church exposed what James Risen called “Gestapo” tactics by the FBI under Hoover, who green-lit “witch hunts” against communists, civil rights leaders, and antiwar activists. The Bureau was unapologetically a political actor at that time, with Hoover instructing agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" groups it didn’t like. There are FBI memoranda outlining general instructions to “prevent the RISE OF A “MESSIAH’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement,” pointing to Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Stokely Carmichael as likely candidates. Draw your own conclusions, but two were assassinated, one was stripped of his title, and the fourth fled to Africa.
After behaviors like this (which included campaigns of media falsehoods and agent provacateurs) came out in the Church hearings, the FBI in the eighties and nineties eased back at least somewhat on its monitoring-innocent-people habit. There were plenty of questionable operations (Ruby Ridge comes to mind), but in general this was a period when the Bureau with Hollywood’s help re-marketed itself as a professional police force that profiled serial killers (though its record of actually catching them isn’t fantastic) and helped bring down mobsters like John Gotti.
The 9/11 attacks caused the FBI’s counterintelligence unit to come under intense criticism. A lack of investigatory power was blamed, but as people like Rowley explained, the Bureau had identified key al-Qaeda player Zacarias Moussaoui through old-fashioned police work, but the national office had simply failed to follow up on the intelligence. Nonetheless, the Justice Department gained sweeping new authority under the PATRIOT Act, and the FBI began to transform itself from a case-making organization to an intelligence-gathering bureaucracy. The blue-leaning press paid attention to this phenomenon when FBI resources were turned on immigrants or Muslim academics, and there was significant coverage of abuses of techniques like National Security Letters. Still, few noticed when the Bureau lowered standards for initiating a type of pre-investigation called an “assessment,” or when agents once again began to be asked to develop strategies to “disrupt” people deemed members of terrorist organizations.
Each step moved the Bureau further away from the mission of developing evidence for court and more in the direction of gathering information for its own sake, while pursuing extrajudicial remedies to “contain” or “disrupt” undesirable “conduct.” The Bureau was now more and more exercising its own judgments about what constituted threats and before long started taking aim at ideas instead of acts. As a long-serving undercover agent German put it to me a few years ago, the distinction “between people who believe bad thoughts and people who do bad things was completely lost on our counterterrorism enterprise after 9/11.”
German wrote a 2019 book called ‘Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide’ that described the Bureau’s descent to a thought-policing mission. A political liberal, he guessed he’d have “sharp disagreements” with people like Friend or fellow ex-FBI man Kyle Seraphin, which from my perspective is unfortunate because both generations of whistleblowers were describing the same problems. The difference in the Trump era was the excesses were now targeted either at groups like “domestic violent extremists” or Trump himself, who elicted the opposite of sympathy from outlets like Democracy Now! that once loved any story about FBI overreach.
A big reason for the divide was the inability of old liberal outlets to grasp the enormity of what took place in the Trump-Russia investigation, which featured giant-scale versions of such old FBI standbys as warrantless surveillance, political spying, and planting false media reports. I know, because I still talk to some of them, that more than a few of the headline liberal thinkers of the Bush era have seen through the Trump-is Putin’s-agent nonsense since at least the release of the Mueller report. But the rank-and-file Democrats of this era still believe it as gospel, and simply can’t grasp that the FBI became so high on its own supply, it took it upon itself to “disrupt” its own boss, the President of the United States.
Unless you think the FBI really believed Trump was in league with Russia (and as the “Bell Tolls” article explains, the record leaves little doubt the Bureau knew early on that premise was nonsense), there’s no other explanation for its conduct in the Trump era. A massively empowered national police organization that considers the elected head of the Executive Branch to be a criminal target in need of “disrupting” and “discrediting,” the way Hoover went after the Revolutionary Action Movement or the Nation of Islam, is by definition an illegal/subversive organization that needs to be dismantled and rebuilt with a much narrower mission. That’s a priority everyone should believe in, irrespective of political belief. My guess is it will take time for most Democrats to see this, and of course the whole apple cart will be upended if the Trump administration takes missteps that create a political pretext for re-empowering the bad actors.
Those are just broad strokes, before we even get to issues like the Foreign Influence Task Force (monitoring domestic speech) and the clearly corrupted relationship between the Bureau and the corporate press. I have no idea if Kash Patel will do a good job or if he’ll even make it to office, but answering the question of why he was chosen as FBI Director isn’t hard: ironically, it’s the FBI that now needs to be disrupted, urgently, and he’s at least shown a willingness to do it. I doubt they’ll go quietly.
https://www.racket.news/p/note-on-the-fbi
Dear Editor: Just a bothersome nit… Sweeney CURRENTLY lives in New Zealand. PRESENTLY means he will live there soon.
Otherwise, continued Happy Holidays to you and the Major.
I thank whatever powers there are every day for your continued tenacious recovery. Carry on.
$1,500 a month for a small trailer “tiny home” is not affordable housing.
Agree+1
I would give President Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, a presumptive break. She knows what she is told, and is told what to say. Her job does not include knowing what is really going on. Getting thrown under the bus is part of the job. The money is good. I hope she invested it well because her future in media is questionable. After a long vacation, maybe she can write a book.
Good points, all true–it’s a truly thankless job, no matter who you’re working for. Not one you wake-up and look forward to each day, for sure
Here are a few of the past Press Secretaries
From where I sit they’ve done pretty well after leaving the job…
It’s like any, what you put in, you get out.
Thank you,
Laz
2007–2009 Dana Perino
2009–2011 Robert Gibbs
2011–2014 Jay Carney
2017–2019 Sarah Sanders
2020–2021 Kayleigh McEnany
2021–2022 Jen Psaki
Good points. We will see. But I can not imagine Karine Jean-Pierre in a job where she could get beyond the portrait of herself, everyday, trying to explain away numerous Biden inconsistencies that were obvious to everyone.
C’mon man, the job is a high achievement for Jean-Pierre, whatever she has to say for her boss…
Former high ranking DOJ employees say it is rare for anyone who did what Hunter Biden did to be prosecuted at all. And it is even more rare for the DOJ to renege on the agreed plea deal. Add to that president-elect Trump’s promises to jail his political enemies, pardoning Hunter seems like the only fair thing to do. And to all the republicans who are crying that the President lied when he said he had no intention to pardon his son: please give me a break!
First off, Trump has never said he will jail any of his political opponents. He has said when asked winning the election would be his revenge. History shows us that if what you say is true, Trump had plenty of ammo to go after Hillary Clinton. When asked, Trump said, “She has been through enough.”
The only person jailing political opponents is Joe Biden. A simple fact!
As for Hunter your comment shows how brain dead you are. Martha Stewart went to jail for exactly what Hunter did, minus the gun violations.
And don’t be fooled, this pardon is Joe Biden’s attempt to protect himself with a 10 year time frame. Although, this could come back to haunt him. Both Biden’s including Jim Biden should all be prosecuted for their foreign money scheme.
We now are faced with no accountability for breaking laws because of your party. Eli Maddock, one of your fellow Libtards, actually believes unless you shoot the innocent, his words, that gun laws shouldn’t be prosecuted, or at least for Hunter. What do say, Norm? I guess you’re totally fine with Hunter being in possession of a gun, he gets rid of it because he is prohibited from possessing, throws near a trash can bordering a school. Just imagine if a kid picked that gun up!
I thought you Libtards took gun violence seriously, unless it’s one of your own.
You see with me, I don’t care who you are, if you violate the law there is a consequence. Period.
Why don’t you calm down, and the libtard tag has been tiresome all the way back to when the dirigible of drivel (Cockburn) first said it. BTW, Martha went to jail for lying to an FBI agent, which she didn’t do but off she went anyway. The gun violation is the least of Hunter’s crimes, but filial devotion trumps (sic) all, and Trump, lest we forget, pardoned a whole parade of crooks.
Next time “Call It” uses that “L” word, please ban him from commenting for a couple of weeks. I am sure he will refrain thereafter.
Yes, but, a couple YEARS, please. He’s nothing but a cowardly anonymous troll.
(He even proudly says he invented the L word, which is hooey, but ban him anyway).
This poster might be a she.
At this point, the term libtard has long lost its punch.
As has proclaiming pizza-living Democrats are pedophiles engineering an internation sex trafficking operation.
Censorship, the Libtards best tool!
Good luck battling the Marin county advertiser. They are very powerful
You should have your own column, Mr. (or Ms.) It: “Dispatches from fantasy land”.
” Since 2022, when he began preparing for the presidential campaign, Trump has issued more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents,”
Maybe I am simply a pessimist I prefer to call it experienced but, why are folks shocked about this? We’ve been saying for years that politicians will back peddle at any opportunity. Has everyone forgotten politicians move from one side or the other depending on the political climate at the moment. Biden was saying he wouldn’t pardon his son during a time he was attempting to win the presidency, that changed.
For anyone to believe President Biden wouldn’t pardon his son is an example of naivety and the feigned shock of this action in public outcry is a bigger example of a naive public. I always expected he would and therefore I’m not shocked in the least.
Many of these politicians seem to have a weather vein in the place where a moral compass should exist. A long time ago I heard a man say “Politicians are like diapers, they need to be changed often and for the same reasons”. This is simply a manifestation of that sentiment.
Hear! Hear! Well said! I especially envy that moral compass weather vane bit! Well done, Brovo Zulu and I believe we may go ahead and splice the mainbrace! (All you lubbers will have to goggle bravo Zulu— if lubbers is not too offensive a slur for our esteemed editor…?)
And furthermore, cut the voluminous whining from the pundit class about the Prez pardoning his kid…I would say, “Who cares?” but looks like lots of people seem to…
Many thanks to the AVA for publishing my brief statement that whereas the prayer request on behalf of the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil is in, following months of attending Catholic Mass daily at the Basilica, and also sending prayer requests to the priest administrators, I am now available to move on. Talk to me. Thank you very much!
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone: (202) 832-8317
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
December 3, 2024 Anno Domini
Re: Today’s mighty AVA, what a breath of fresh air, tell it like it is! The delusional nonsense is relegated to the comments and the rebirth of a nation is beginning, and yes, there is hope.
I wonder how this “rebirth of a nation” you refer to would have been seen by the original founding fathers, who risked everything to shit can being governed by the worlds biggest authoritarian, the king of England. I notice Trump has a penchant for appointing sex offenders and rapists to his cabinet, and people that have no experience in the agencies they are going to oversee. That’ll shake things up alright! I’m thinking one of the cost savings that his efficiency tech bros will come up with immediately is getting rid of police rape kits, because there will be no more rape as Trump has promised to protect women and rape will simply cease to exist. And on the slim chance a woman opens her mouth about a non consensual sex encounter she will obviously be lying and only making it up and probably was asking for it anyway, like what happened to “grab em by the pussy Trump”. Can’t wait till January and the “rebirth”. It’s almost like the hope and change of the Obama years except 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
+1–Thank you, Jurgen, for being damn blunt, saying it like it is.
Thanks Chuck, looking forward to meeting up with you and some of the others who comment on here in the re-education camps. I got a feeling Bruce will be there too. Torturing us with Kunstler is probably not going to be enough to keep him out.
Don the Con is already hiding his donors, and demanding money for any access.
That his fans think he’s any sort of swamp-drainer is classic cult delusion.
They’ve got a lot more reality checks coming. Which most will ignore, all the way to Jonestown.
Re: “Family News? None For Me, Thanks” by the mighty TWK-
…Your Favorite Beatle is Spiro Agnew? MINE is Bebe Rebozo! OMG!
I think what changed was the election of Trump and his nominating Pam Bondi and Kash Patel. Since Trump, Bondi and Patel, along with hundreds of thousands on a dark background on X proclaiming many key Democrats should be arrested and prosecuted, we would be more fair and accurate to characterize Biden’s compass as a “survival” signifier, not one that shifts to changes in attitudes re political issues. Biden might have been deluded in thinking Trump couldn’t win and now he saw that his son was at real risk from those who have been calling for years now to go after Hunter.
Our system for law enforcement and justice is now on shaky grounds. Hopefully the traditional conservative perspective regains control over the GOP party, ensuring a healthy regard for the rule of law.
(Post out of place…it’s a reply to the Sheriff.)
Now, Mike, you have been a good friend over the years but the sheriff is right. Joe Biden would have sold his son down the river to win another election , sure, and reneging later, but his party threw him under the bus— the way he threw Bernie Sanders under four years ago. His term has been disgraceful but his wife was not going to let him sacrifice her son to salvage whatever scantlings of character Joe had left. That’s why judges have to recuse themselves from hearing cases involving family members— a father may be callous enough to let his sons hang but a mother is different. And if the father has the power to pardon a son his wife will insist he do it. So if you don’t think the First Lady went to her daft old grifter and gave him the most dreaded ultimatum a wife has in her power then you are blinded by partisan prejudice.
Point taken Mike. And I understand there may be a concern in some circles about the future for Hunter Biden. But we are seriously ignoring the fact Hunter Biden appears to be a GRADE A SCREWUP, (pardon the technical term). I wasn’t a fan of President Biden however the moment he won the election he became My President because I believe in our nation.
One thing we have all seen throughout all of these shenanigans and remains clear, President Joe Biden loves his son. And screw up or not, that’s what a father does. Don’t discount that fact.
I heard media reporting the president hasn’t shown much “tough love” These opinions were based on our “Non biased corporate media” (oxymoron? )
At the end of the day, and the end of our careers we all hope and pray we will still have our family. I’m not saying the president is right or wrong in this, Hell I wouldn’t know the first thing about what a president should or shouldn’t do. What I do know is people tend to forget elected folks are humans also.
Does anyone think for a moment our president, in declining health wants what could be his final years on earth to be spent worrying about his son in prison? while knowing full well with a pen stroke he could stop it? Not saying it’s right or wrong but it is human and we all need to think about what we would do in his shoes.
Perhaps that is a portion of what is guiding President Biden’s decisions right now. He isn’t doing anything illegal and I’ve seen murderers pardoned by presidents and governors with little to no public outcry.
If we don’t want the president doing things like this then please lobby to remove the power for the president to do so. It may be selfish, politically unwise or simply in bad form, but it’s well within his rights to do so.
Hunter is now some years in recovery mode so his being a major screw up (which he openly described in detail in a memoir) may be a past reality.
Your take goes beyond the rigid polarized perspectives, which is a good thing.
[“Hunter’s GRADE A SCREWUP] may be a past reality…”
Aye, sure. A recovery program would have been part of his deal with the judge. And if his probation officer was still involved he’d stay in recovery and maybe succeed, but now things have changed and his dedication to recovery is entirely voluntary— just like all the Prop 47 addicts.
(I don’t see now Bruce’s post defending Matt’s post, but here’s my thoughts responding…)
I think there’s a lot of us Dems who are angry with Jill because she was very deluded to encourage her husband to run for reelection when there could have been a robust competition for the nomination (beginning in 2023).
I think the Sheriff is IN GENERAL right about the weather vane compass. Biden’s concern now was as I stated: we face a difficult time now concerning risks to the just execution of laws. There are safeguard-mechanisms still in place so I’m not going to imagine the worse.
I was hopeful of that also but no longer since the supremes put their fingers on the scale for Trump. Having them and Cannon in his back pocket and Garland’s reticence to get the ball rolling has given Trump a permanent get out of jail card. Not sure what our justice system is based on now.
From my view, the US Supreme Court is the only functional branch of government in Washington, and their decisions are in support of the Constitution, and for all Presidents. They have been a breath of fresh air. Their abortion decision was the Constitutional one, and by the next election will likely be a nonissue. That would be a relief, after the decades of abortion politics since the bad Roe V Wade decision. We might also begin to get along together when the people of Oklahoma City and the people of San Francisco can make decisions based on their own respective cultures, without imposing on each other.
We always imagine the worst case scenario. It has been my experience in “most cases” the pain of our perceptions greatly exceeds the pain of our realities.
Human nature is an odd thing. But we are pretty incredible creatures as well.
Anything potentially good coming from Kash Patel is invalidated for the same reason any potential good from RFK Jr is invalidated – they’re both rabid genocidal Zionists.
Of course, Biden was recently spotted buying a copy of Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Khalidi put out a statement saying it was “four years too late.”
I’d be willing to bet that Azeez Al-Shaair wouldn’t have received a 3-game suspension if he hadn’t been wearing “Free Palestine” shoes.