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RAINFALL (past 24 hours): Laytonville 2.44" - Boonville 2.09" - Yorkville 2.04" - Ukiah 1.38" - Hopland 0.91"
SHOWER ACTIVITY is expected to dissipate this afternoon. Lingering cold air will promote colder temperature tonight, with freezing temperatures across the interior valleys. Dry and calm weather is forecast for Saturday, followed by more rain and mountain Sunday through early next week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Happy Valentine's Day you soggy weather fans! Another 1.25" in the last 24 hours gives us a month total of 8.77" & a season total of 38.26". (And we continue to NOT mention my dry season forecast from last fall, shhh.) A partly cloudy 46F at 5am will give way to clearing skies today & tomorrow. Rain returns on Sunday then again Wednesday, but nothing like we just had.
LAYTONVILLE PRECIPITATION (Jim Shields)
Weds. Feb. 12—0.52 in.; rain starts 7:45pm-midnight
Thur. Feb. 13—3.48 in.; day-long rain starts midnight
Total 2-day Precip: 4.0 in.
Season Total to-date: 61.83 in.
Historic Norm on Feb. 13: 43.91 in.
NAVARRO RISING (Nick Wilson)
[7:43pm] When I checked the NWS gauge chart for the Navarro gauge just now, it showed a forecast crest of 15.6 ft. at 3 AM Friday, but it showed the observed level was already 17.4 ft. at 6:15 PM tonight. The forecast was issued at 1:39 PM today. Apparently since the river is rising faster than the forecast, so it is possible that it will crest near or above the 23 ft. official flood level at which the water flows over Hwy 128 at the 5 mi. marker near the gauge location. I advise to check the gauge chart later this evening when it will probably be updated with a newer forecast.
[8:13pm] Update, in the past hour a new forecast was issued for the Navarro River level. The observed level rose from 17.4 ft. at 6:15pm to 18.5 ft. at 7:15 pm. The level continues to rise at a steep angle on the chart, meaning that it is not yet approaching the highest level it will reach. The new forecast no longer shows any crest above the current level, meaning that it is not correct since the observed level is already above the forecast line.
MENDO SWAT TEAM CALLED IN TO ARREST LANGENDERFER
On Wednesday, February 12, 2025, at approximately 1:25 PM, Deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office and Officers from the Ukiah Police Department conducted a warrant service at a residence located in the 700 block of Village Circle in Ukiah.
Law enforcement personnel were attempting to contact Brandon Langenderfer, 32, of Ukiah, who had a felony warrant for his arrest for violent felony charges of assault with a deadly weapon and criminal threats.
During the warrant service, Langenderfer evaded law enforcement personnel within the structure for several hours. Due to Langenderfer’s violent history and lack of compliance with law enforcement’s announcements to exit peacefully, additional resources were requested to assist with his apprehension.
Operators of the Mendocino County Regional SWAT Team responded to the scene. Residents in the area were evacuated for their safety. Langenderfer was later located in a concealed location within the structure and in possession of a loaded firearm. Langenderfer is prohibited from possessing firearms and ammunition.
When Langenderfer was located in the structure, he complied with law enforcement personnel and was arrested without further incident for his felony warrant and felony charges of Felon in possession of firearm, Felon in possession of ammunition, and a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest.
Langenderfer was subsequently booked into the Mendocino County Jail where he was to be held in lieu of $100,000 bail.
PALACE HOTEL WALL STABILIZATION WORK NEARLY COMPLETE
by Mike Geniella
Water still drips from remaining gaps in portions of the Palace Hotel roof, creating small shallow pools scattered across the landmark’s ground floor. It is dank inside the cavernous structure; a reminder of the toll decades of wet winter weather is taking on the Palace’s interior.
However, new efforts to remove debris, conduct salvage operations, and make basic structural repairs are revealing the Palace’s old self.
There are now dry sections despite recent rain because of the temporary repairs to a badly damaged roof that looms three stories above. The Palace is in desperate need of a permanent roof replacement to protect its 60,000 square feet of space.
No doubt the Palace’s interior is rough, rotted and in need of gutting. Yet somehow there are reminders of its long history: remnants of old tile floors on the ground floor, an underground storage area where bottles of liquor were once stored, and a side door where patrons of the old Black Bart Room used to slip in and out of the bar day and night.
The Palace’s interior ground floor is lit up for the first time in years, thanks to the return of electricity. Strings of outdoor lights provide carpenters with the ability to do their work, while illuminating beautiful brick walls, curved archways and window casings, and nooks and crannies tucked here and there.
More than 15,000 pounds of debris scattered on the ground floor have been removed, allowing a fresh look at how structural features might appear if the Palace is renovated.
Tom Carter, the new owner/contractor, says efforts to structurally shore up the oldest and most weakened section of the Palace are the focus of Carter, a crew of carpenters, and the Ukiah architect who assists them.
“We are almost there,” said Carter during a tour last week.
Carter’s crew is building a four-story interior support tower inside the oldest section. It reached the roof this week, providing bracing for an extended brick exterior wall along Smith Street and interior support for a seriously damaged roof portion until permanent repairs can be made.
“With the tower nearly complete, it ends the threat of collapse of the most historic section of the Palace,” said Carter.
For now, the priority is to stabilize the sagging section of the Palace, which is three structures combined into one. The original Palace was erected in 1891 at the corner of State and Smith streets. Two other additions supported by concrete pilings were constructed independent of each other during the 1920s. One faces west along School Street and the other fronting State Street about a half-block north of the Mendocino County Courthouse.
Carter is a veteran North Coast contractor who has done extensive work on historic structures, including the Tallman House and Blue Wing Saloon in neighboring Lake County, the old brick Loren Train Station in Berkeley, and Victorian homes around the Bay Area.
Carter’s crew includes his contractor son Chae Carter. The father-son team started work after the senior Carter secured title to the Palace in mid-October from former owner Jitu Ishwar, a Ukiah Valley motel operator.
At first, city building officials resisted allowing Carter and his crew to begin repairs on a structure that they inspected and found unsafe. They and city staff convinced the City Council in November 2023 the Palace was an “imminent” threat to public safety and ordered it red tagged.
The city finally relented and allowed Carter and his crew to begin emergency repairs after architect Richard Ruff stepped in and provided plans and documentation to win approval. The city-owned utility also agreed to restore power to the building so work could proceed without the use of generators inside.
Ruff is intimately aware of the Palace’s current state. He designed and built his own unique downtown office on a narrow lot that butts up against the Palace’s southern wall. Ruff regularly stops in to check on the work in progress at the Palace and review results with Carter.
Carter said while the immediate focus is on the support tower to shore up the exterior brick wall along Smith Street, other progress has been made.
“We have almost cleaned the first floor of all the debris left behind after years of neglect,” said Carter.
The work lights strung throughout the hotel’s ground level illuminate that progress.
The Palace’s old lobby fireplace still stands, along with plaster columns that line a nearby stairway leading up to the second floor. Carter said he plans to strip the brick off the fireplace and return it to the original plaster appearance.
“I want the lobby to reflect how things were when the hotel flourished,” said Carter.
A staging area for workers and equipment has been set up in the old ground floor Palace garage that faces School Street. Nearby is an area set aside for stacks of old interior redwood remnants and other original construction materials that Carter plans to recycle.
In an adjacent area, Carter has set up a table where he can review myriads of renovation and engineering plans prepared for the Palace over the years.
“They may be out of date but they help us understand every inch of this place,” said Carter.
Carter is determined to preserve significant portions of the original Palace.
Carter’s efforts ran counter to a clamor a year ago to demolish the building by developers, civic leaders and city staff frustrated after three decades of the building’s sharp decline.
At the peak of a community cry last summer to tear the Palace down, Carter joined local preservation advocates in unsuccessfully lobbying against a City Council decision to issue a demolition permit to then owner Ishwar. A development deal Ishwar had at the time collapsed and the permit was never activated.
“It was very disappointing when the city chose to issue a demolition permit, but by chance we prevailed. The Palace is still standing,” said Carter.
Carter began negotiating with Ishwar and his attorney Steve Johnson for the purchase of the Palace after the deal with a local investment group led by restaurant owner Matt Talbert and the Guidiville Rancheria failed.
Carter, Ishwar, and Johnson reached an agreement in October, allowing the Lake County contractor to secure title to the Palace, an unexpected turn of events that was celebrated by preservation advocates. Carter has three years to find investors to do full-scale restoration and pay off a note Ishwar holds on to the Palace.
Carter is confident he can make the Palace structurally safe, and lure investors into putting up millions of dollars that it will take to transform the landmark. A small hotel, bar and restaurant, retail shopping complex, and an event center have long been imagined.
Carter’s excitement about the possibilities picks up where others left off.
“We now know where the famous mural for the old Black Bart Room is. We are hoping it can be returned to the hotel someday,” said Carter.
A year ago, such optimism was sparse.
The mantra then among city officials, civic leaders and critics residents was “tear it down.”
The end seemed near to the beloved local landmark that had been for decades under the Sandelin family had been the center of the town’s social life.
The hotel began to slide into disrepair, as the Highway 101 freeway bypassed downtown and typical overnight stops for travelers faded.
The Palace enjoyed a brief, snazzy revival in the 1970s when Pat Kuleto, a restaurant designer who later achieved fame in San Francisco, arrived in Ukiah and did a cosmetic renovation. The Palace became a big hit socially for a new generation but only a decade later, the hotel/restaurant operation was faltering again.
The Palace began to be stripped of important artifacts, including the acclaimed mural hanging behind the bar in the Black Bart Room. It was an ode to the poet-bandit Black Bart, a San Franciscan who robbed stagecoaches and became a 19th century legend across Northern California.
In 1990 a Marin County real estate group led by Eladia Laines bought the Palace at a tax lien sale for a paltry $115,000. Laines made efforts to clean up the Palace but they were erratic and never led to a reopening.
As time passed, advocates of demolition grew in number. City officials struggled for three decades to find a resolution but with the demise of redevelopment agencies statewide, their options narrowed.
Eventually, the city forced the Palace into a court receivership, but a Santa Monica attorney in charge was unable to find outside developers interested in preserving the building.
Ishwar, a Ukiah motel operator and former president of the local Chamber of Commerce, became directly involved after he loaned the court receivership significant money for feasibility studies. Ishwar took the title in 2019 after buying the Palace out of receivership.
Under Ishwar’s ownership, however, the Palace deteriorated further. Ishwar did not spend any money to halt the building’s decline into a community eyesore in the heart of downtown. Ishwar chose instead to negotiate with a string of potential buyers in hopes he would be made whole financially.
In November 2023 The Ukiah City Council declared with fanfare that the Palace was an “imminent risk” to public safety. City building officials and fire captains cited fears of collapse and released staff photos to dramatize the Palace’s decrepit interior.
The city’s move coincided with a deal Ishwar had struck with the Guidiville group, although city staff was adamant there was no connection with developer’s demolition plans and the council’s declaration of public safety issue.
Guidiville’s financing hinged on a state grant application whose details were kept secret initially by restaurant owner Talbert and Guidiville consultant Michael Derry. However, when specifics became public, the plans called for demolition of the town’s most significant historical landmark at taxpayer expense. Local preservation advocates launched a challenge, which eventually drew Carter into the circle.
The Guidiville plans began to falter a year ago after a state agency with oversight of proposed contamination studies ruled out any need for demolition to do investigative work at the Palace site.
Last June, it was disclosed that the Guidiville group’s stalled scheme to secure millions of dollars in public funds to demolish the Palace had engulfed the leadership of the state Department of Toxic Substance Control in internal political strife.
Internal documents obtained under the California Public Records Act showed the controversial Guidiville plan had pitted agency staff attorneys and lower-level managers concerned about the political blowback from tribal representatives against a top division chief who, after review, worried the multi-million award might not “even be legal.”
Diane Barclay, the DTSC’s Northern California Division Chief, wrote in a May 8, 2024, memo to the department’s legal counsel that she feared the Guidiville Rancheria may have been used as a “mule” by investors seeking taxpayer funding of a landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The state agency denied the original $5.3 million grant application and offered instead the Ukiah Valley tribe $200,000 for contamination studies if needed. Guidiville never accepted the limited grant award, according to state representatives.
Since his takeover, Carter and his crew have been working to make his dream of a restored Palace a reality.
The specially designed support tower and further roof repairs are at the top of a lengthy list to get potential investors to see the Palace possibilities.
“It may take us a couple of years to get where we want to be,” admitted Carter. The city permit for the emergency repairs is only the first in a series of what will be needed.
The 73-year-old Carter sees the Palace as his legacy project. And Carter said he is prepared to weather what is expected to be a long and tedious process.
“I know what can be done, and I am prepared to put everything I have into this.”
Carter said he is actively exploring options with outside investors including hotel operators.
“We are going to get this building stabilized, and ready for investors. They are out there, and we are going to land one of them,” said Carter.
LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)
EEL RIVER PACT REDRESSES PAST WRONGS, PROVIDES MODEL FOR COMPROMISE AMONG DIVERSE INTERESTS, OFFICIALS SAY
The agreement on Eel River diversions and future river restoration will begin to redress past injustices against Eel River tribes and stakeholders.
by Mary Callahan
There was emotion in the room Thursday as public officials from around the North Coast gathered in Sacramento for a ceremonial signing.
They were putting their names to a historic agreement on the future of the Eel River that secures crucial water supplies for the Russian River watershed while redressing past oversights and injustices.
Negotiated over more than six years to chart a way forward once Pacific Gas & Electric decommissions its Potter Valley powerhouse and tears out dams that have degraded the Eel River and imperiled fish species, the multiparty pact gives equal attention to river restoration needs and to modernizing water diversions for Russian River users in Sonoma and Mendocino counties.
In the process, it confers Eel River water rights to the Round Valley Indian Tribes in northeast Mendocino County, requiring beneficiaries on the Russian River to pay them $1 million a year for the privilege of transferring water from the Eel into the Russian River.
It further requires Russian River users pay $750,000 into a river restoration fund for the benefit of the river ecosystem and fisheries on which the tribes and Humboldt County communities long depended.
“We’ve been here since the beginning of time, and we’ll be here until the end of time,” Round Valley tribal President Joseph Parker told the crowd. “Today marks the turning point, today and the rest of the river’s life.”
Michelle Bushnell, chairwoman of the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, referenced a “painful history” in which water resources have been diverted out of Humboldt County for the benefit of neighboring counties without any input or consent of stakeholders in the northern county, one-third of which is in the Eel River watershed.
“As I read this, I get chills,” she said at the end of her statement. “It’s been a long time coming.”
All involved cited more work to come to flesh out and implement the memorandum of understanding signed Thursday. The agreement outlines a two-pronged framework negotiated by representatives for Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt counties, the Round Valley Indian Tribes, Trout Unlimited, Cal Trout and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Fish and Wildlife Director Chuck Bonham, who was credited by the parties with ensuring negotiators reached a compromise, announced Thursday a state pledge to provide $18 million toward the mission, with $9 million for the diversion structure and $9 million toward “restoring the fabled Eel River and bringing salmon home.”
“For too long,” Sonoma County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Lynda Hopkins said, “we have treated the Eel River watershed like a bank, and all we have done is take withdrawals from it. We have never put anything back.
“And so starting today we will start making deposits back in the bank,” she said.
Bonham and California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot highlighted the beauty of diverse interests coming together and staying at the table long enough to work through more than a century of conflict over dams and diversions in what will soon be the longest, free-flowing river in California, particularly given the nation’s polarization.
While the paradigm for addressing contentious issues, especially water, is conflict and litigation, “you all chose a different way among a lot of different interests, different needs,” Crowfoot said. “This pathway is a model not only for California but for our country at this time.”
In a nod to recent rhetoric from President Donald Trump regarding California water policy, Bonham referenced critics who call the state “crazy,” incompetent and foolish for choosing “fish over water” supply.
“We can do ‘yes, and …’” Bonham said. “We can do it all in California.”
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
BELL MOUNTAIN THP RESUBMITTED AND UNDER REVIEW
Redwood Empire Mill owner Roger Burch has re-submitted a 527.5-acre Timber Harvest Plan (THP) uphill from the town of Westport, CA and in the hills south of town. The THP is 1-24-00196-MEN and can be reviewed on the CalTrees website by searching for the plan number. Start at https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/natural-resource-management/forest-practice and page down to CalTREES. After much perseverance you will be able to log in and view the THP documents.
The plan was originally submitted in late 2024 but was sent back to the submitter for revision and was accepted for filing on February 6, 2025. As resubmitted the Silviculture plan is:
Clearcutting: 36.5 acres
Group Selection: (smaller clearcuts with buffers in between): 438 acres
Selection: (in the Watercourse and Lake Protection Zones WLPZs): 48 acres
Special Treatment: 1 acre
No Harvest: (Unstable features): 4
Total: 527.5
The watersheds involved are Kibesillah Creek, Chadbourne Gulch, and Rider Gulch.
You will rapidly discover that a THP contains hundreds and hundreds of pages of what will be mostly dreck for the layperson. Section 2 is the guts of the plan (page through toward the back for the maps), and a helpful map is located in the Notice of Intent (NOI).
Much of the plan is in the Coastal Zone, and CalFire has notified the Coastal Commission staff. Whether they engage is likely to be based on community interest and other staffing commitments.
If you would like to comment, send an email to: SantaRosaReviewTeam@fire.ca.gov with the THP number in the Subject line. Initial comments might want to request that the responsible agencies schedule an onsite Pre-Harvest Inspection so they can have a good idea of how the THP will affect the area.
The review process is required to happen very quickly and the clock has started. For the best results, it is important that the agency staffers (CalFire, CA Fish and Wildlife, Regional Water Quality, and CA Geological Survey) realize there are folks who care about the affected area and the outcome of the timber harvest operations. The agencies have many plans to review and, while they will do their best on all of them, it helps for them to know folks care and are paying attention.
OPPOSED TO POT GARDEN EXPANSION
Letter to the Editor:
Presented the following at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, 2/11/2025 re: item 4b- moving Cannabis to General Government Committee meetings. Please publish if you’d like. Thank you.
Like many residents of Mendocino County, I am concerned that our County government is not paying attention to the needs of the majority of the people. This has certainly held true for Cannabis issues. We have been trying to convey to you we do not want expansion and your response seems to be, let’s draw this all out by kicking the can down the road to the General Government Committee. The GGC had already been receiving monthly reports from the Cannabis Dept. What’s been lacking all along is inclusion of the general public for our input on anything Cannabis-related. One need only to watch the youtube video of a Cannabis Ordinance Streamlining meeting dated Sept 18, 2023. Not a GGC or BOS meeting, it appears to be run by the Cannabis Dept. and its stated intent was to gather public input. Sadly, only 3 to 4 members from the Cannabis community are in person or calling in via zoom. No one in attendance from the general public. We’re concerned many changes were made or streamlined from the Ordinance with little if any discussion with those of us most affected. A real eye opener as to the lack of the County’s desire to conduct open dialogue with all its constituency. We are hopeful this will change with this new board as there are still many cannabis issues to be addressed. We feel strongly, however, that the issue of expansion needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.
Our opposition to larger “Commercial” grows has been well documented over the past several years. To the point that we feel even our two new Supervisors are surely aware of the stance from both sides, the growers and the greater public. Neighborhoods have been negatively impacted leading to applications for CP (Cannabis Prohibition zones). The growers, their lobbyists and lawyers continue to push the envelope in hope of larger grows, with the help of County staff it would appear. The economic reality is there is a glut of product being grown not only in California, but all across the nation. This is what has decimated prices, so allowing more to be grown makes absolutely no sense. It will drive prices further down, use more of our resources and most likely increase nuisances to our neighborhoods. Local grape growers are in the same situation, but one doesn’t hear them saying they need to grow more. At the Oct. 2024 BOS meeting, local growers stated they do not believe even doubling the size of their grows is enough to make them viable. An indication that approving this expansion is not enough to make them happy and they will continue to want more. Many of them said as much during that meeting.
Switching all cannabis issues to the General Government Committee may have its place so long as all stakeholders, citizens at large included, have a place at the table. Kicking the issue of expansion down the road needs to be addressed now! It is time for common sense to prevail and the majority of the public to be heard over that of special interests. We would like to see a much more effective and thoughtful Board of Supervisors from here forward. We do believe this new configuration of the Board realizes changes need to occur. So please, assert your authority over that of your staff and special interests and vote in favor of “we the people.”
Frances & James Owen
Redwood Valley
A READER PASSES ALONG: Twomey closes AV tasting room. (This is the old Hans Kobler place.)
Silver Oak wine family abruptly closes two California tasting rooms
by Jess Lander
Twomey, a winery owned by the famed Silver Oak Cellars, abruptly closed two of its three tasting rooms this week, including its original Napa Valley spot, which opened 21 years ago.
Founded in 1999 by the Duncan family, who also own Napa Valley’s premium Cabernet Sauvignon producer Ovid, Twomey shuttered its Calistoga and Anderson Valley tasting rooms. Twomey’s Healdsburg tasting room remains open and the wineries at all three sites will also continue to produce wine. Five full-time employees were let go.…
https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/wine/article/twomey-tasting-room-closures-20165439.php
WINE AND FOOD INDUSTRIES LEAD THE WAY IN RAISING $150K FOR MENDOCINO COAST CLINICS with the Crab & Wine Festival
by Frank Hartzell
Every year, the big top goes up and scrumptious aromas waft out. The tent that takes up the entire block next to Century 21 in Fort Bragg hosts one of the most important events of the year. The fundraiser for the Mendocino Coast Clinics’ Crab & Wine Festival culminated last weekend. The big white tent was packed with top wineries, local restaurant chefs, and a wide variety of foodies from our local dibbling, nibbling and upscale eating world. Our food business is as prestigious and fancy as our area is, otherwise economically impoverished.
The often-reviled wine industry puts up a lot of money to support this half of the medical establishment that keeps our town healthy. The other half is Adventist Health Mendocino Coast Hospital, which gets similar support during Winesong each year and is also supported by taxes every one of us who own property pays.
Lucresha Renteria, Executive Director of Mendocino Coast Clinics, said the event, which spends as little as possible to raise as much money as possible for the cause, did well this year: “We know we grossed at least $155k, we are still counting. We believe the number will climb and then we need to have a full accounting of the expenses. So final numbers won’t be ready for a couple of months. We are very very grateful to our sponsors who help keep the costs covered and means having more net profit from our event efforts!”
The amount of money raised was particularly good news in light of the fact that the wine industry has followed the cannabis industry in a steep decline—both caused by the drop in price of their products.…
ED NOTES
ONE AFTERNOON, as a cruel late summer wind drove a dense fog down California Street in The City, I hopped on the Muni 44 to get across the park where I would catch the N-Judah for the ballpark. Don’t believe the naysayers. Muni gets you anywhere you might want to go in San Francisco. I had my Giants ticket and I had my lunch, three VietCong rice balls I got for less than a buck each from the Korean lady at 7th Avenue and California. The 44’s door is open, the driver, a Chinese guy, behind the wheel. It’s a safe assumption, ordinarily, that a bus with open doors and a driver behind the wheel is in service. “No! No!” the driver shouted as if I’d pulled the pin on a fragment grenade and was about to lob it at him. “No power! Get off!” A couple of years ago I had a similar encounter, that one at the foot of Market as I tried to board a fully operable Number 2 Clement. That afternoon, the driver was just sitting there, doors open, engine idling, recreationally power-tripping me and a subsequent parade of old ladies and their shopping bags, enjoying telling us to get off the bus while he plumply sat there in his Muni uniform. The afternoon I’m telling you about, though, the batteries on the bus really had died, but the driver’s English, as I was to discover, wasn’t good enough to explain the prob so he’d resorted to command mode. “Get off bus!” I retreated into the wind and the fog, as did several more thwarted travelers, but a pair of elderly Chinese women, the ultimate in pure, immovable human force fields, climbed aboard, and there followed a high decibel exchange in Chinese. The old ladies were reasonably demanding that they be allowed to sit down out of the wind whether or not the bus was mobile. Their indignant demands continued for several minutes. They were seated and not about to disembark. The driver yelled back at the old ladies, and every time he did they double-teamed him. He seemed to wince a couple of times as they zapped him in their mutual tongue, which sounded like the Frisco-prevalent Cantonese. I’m sure the old ladies peppered the driver with all kinds of Confucian reminders having to do with the traditional Chinese respect for old age, and didn’t he have a mother? What I wouldn’t have given for a translation! I recalled a slur I’d had translated overseas. “Frog-humping son of a bitch.” The three of them were still yelling at each other when a back-up 44 pulled up. The black woman driving it couldn’t help but hear the beef. “What’s up?” I explained the situation as I interpreted it. She approached the Chinese driver. “You’ve got to remember,” she told him, “that you’re a human being before you’re a bus driver.” The two old Chinese women, as they climbed down the dead bus launched a parting dual salvo at the driver, now thoroughly defeated and looking it, and we all climbed on the operable 44. Four hours later the Giants had won 4-2, Tony Bennett had left his heart up on Nob Hill, and the whole city seemed happy.
The Mendocino Theatre Company is thrilled to announce its upcoming production of Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, directed by the talented Alexander Wright. This thrilling adaptation of the classic novel The Hound of the Baskervilles showcases the incredible acting talents of Ricci Dedola as Sherlock Holmes and Kay Smith as Dr. Watson. Joining them are the versatile ensemble cast members Brady Voss, Lucas Kiehn-Thilman, and Lorry Lepaule who take on over 40 roles to bring this legendary mystery to life. To say the play is a romp is an understatement.
Baskerville will have special previews on March 6 and 7, leading up to the grand opening on Saturday, March 8. The premiere will be celebrated as part of a gala event in honor of the 49th season of captivating performances at MTC, promising an unforgettable night of entertainment. The show continues its run through April 6 playing every Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm and Sundays at 2:00pm.
Tickets for Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery are now on sale at Mendocinotheatre.org or by calling 707-937-4477. For those looking to experience the magic of MTC beyond this production, season subscriptions are also still available.
WALTER ANDERSON’S SETTLEMENT OF ANDERSON VALLEY
by Fred S. Rogers (May 1968)
Soon after Henry Beeson was mustered out of the armed forces in the months following the end of the Bear Flag Rebellion in the early 1850s, Watt (Walter) Anderson and his family had settled on Grand Island, on Sycamore Slough, in Colusi (Colusa County), about six miles south of the present town of Colusa.
He was very satisfied with this fertile “island” which was only an actual island during the flood season. For two years he and his family lived there with plenty of bear meat and other wild life, and the produce of the fertile soil. Then up the river came some settlers who settled on the site of the present town of Colusa. Charles D. Semple, his nephew, Will S. Green, and a carpenter named E. Hicks soon learned that Watt Anderson strenuously objected to their settling in his “front door-yard.” It was said that he told these settlers that “although he liked neighbors, he felt crowded when anyone settled within five or six miles of him, and when that happened, it was time to move.” To make matters worse, he was horrified to think that not only were settlers coming in, but that where Semple, Green and Hicks had settled, a town, Salmon Bend, was being established!
This was the final straw as far as Anderson was concerned, so he packed his belongings and took his family where he could have more “elbow room.”
They journeyed southward, and when the family got to Lake County, they stopped there for awhile, but the attitude of the Indians, after the Battle of Bloody Island, was so hostile that Mrs. Anderson was fearful for her family, and Anderson consented to move on, apparently to Oat Valley, near Cloverdale.
While that move was being made, Henry, his brother Isaac, and step-brother, William, went ahead to find meat for the family. They wounded an elk and pursued it for some time. In all probability the young men were hunting somewhere in the vicinity of our present day road from Cloverdale to the coast. However, the early day trail is said to have been on the opposite side of the gulch. If one looks carefully across the gulch from the sign, “Alder Glen,” the old trail may be discerned.
Whether they found the wounded elk, I do not know, but a far more important discovery was made. The young men walked out on a stony ledge to see if they could see the wounded elk. Instead, they surveyed a panorama that was to them breathtaking, and almost beyond belief.
To the west, a dark forest covered the hills. The sunny eastern slopes, more open, were marked with shadowed ravines. Across the level valley floor, two small streams flowed to meet and form a creek, which moved out of sight down the valley. Ecstatic with the possibilities of this land, the youth, forgetting the elk, descended into the valley, crossed the level to the western foothills, and made a camp near what was later the Tom Ornbaun home. Here they lingered several days, exploring the vicinity and becoming more enchanted with the place each hour. Thick turf of dry grass carpeted the meadows. The level land, where the fairgrounds race track lies today, was covered with manzanita bushes, their berries hanging in rich clusters; clumps of black oak trees, resplendent in their lacquered autumn leaves, cast pleasant shade, as did the madrone, doubly colorful with its Indian-red bark and brilliant berries. Deer roamed as sheep today; bears feasted on huckleberries in the woods; elk bands came out of the timber to graze; small animals abounded.
The young men reluctantly broke camp and returned to their family party. They reported to Walter Anderson that they had found a big meadow, and it was like a Garden of Eden.
The family decided to settle there, and in the fall of 1851, the little group of ten moved into the valley. They set about building a log cabin, but before they had completed their home, Indians arrived, and the Anderson clan’s gestures were interpreted as threatening and the Indians ordered them to leave at once.
With the Lake County incident, still very fresh in their minds, they hastily left. In fact, in their haste, Mrs. Anderson was compelled to leave her spinning wheel. (I wonder if the Indians pondered over what it was)? It was believed that the family, on their retreat, spent the winter somewhere in Dry Creek Valley, west of the present town of Healdsburg.
Can you not see the yearning of ‘Watt’ Anderson for this land that they had seen? Here, indeed, was the “elbow room” he so earnestly coveted. It is also interesting that here, in the valley, his boys had described as a “Garden of Eden,” that he returned to and eventually remained, despite the possible invasion of Indians or neighbors.
It is said that Mrs. Anderson, in relating the story to her daughter Rhoda (who was four at the time), mentioned that in 1852, when they returned, that “others” had come with them to make it safer to settle. However, in true pioneer spirit, Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, on horseback with a child behind each of them, were the first to enter the valley.
The spot chosen for a home was one mile west of Boonville, at the foot of the hill, just beyond the site of the high school. Here they erected their first house in Anderson Valley; an edifice of logs, an earth floor, and “clay and sticks chimney.”
Here Walter Anderson enjoyed life to the full. He dealt in horses and cattle, and drove them for years to his nearest market, Petaluma. The family has handed down the story of where he killed his last bear, marked by a tree that his daughter, Rhoda, remembered. At that time he was said to have been 108 years old. Is it any wonder that he was called “Bear” Anderson? A real hale and hearty “mountain man,” who never wore glasses and was an excellent shot throughout his life. He spent his last years in Ukiah with his daughter, Artemesia Jane, and is buried there.
Rhoda Anderson, a true pioneer, and the Pioneer Woman and Mother of Anderson Valley, was called to rest in 1857 at the age of 52. She had lived a life of hardships, there is no doubt, but let us hope that her last five years in Anderson Valley came closer to a life of happiness in their veritable “Garden of Eden.” She was buried on land owned by her son, Henry, and the weathered headstone still tells the world that Rhoda Crouch, a native of Kentucky, was the pioneer woman of Anderson Valley.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, February 13, 2025
LINDA ALMOND, 66, Ukiah. Trespassing and occupying structures without owner consent, probation violation.
COLBY BOWANS, 48, Little River. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.
MELISSA CROW, 37, Willits. Trespassing, vandalism, probation violation.
CHRISIAN ESTRELLA, 30, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury, conspiracy, resisting.
CRYSTAL ESTRELLA-REYES, 26, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury, conspiracy.
VERONICA HERMOSILLO, 30, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
JACOB PARMELY, 39, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, parole violation.
BOBBY RILEY, 53, Crescent City/Willits. Under influence, disorderly conduct-loitering, unspecified offense.
NICOLE SANDERSON, 30, Branscomb. Disorderly conduct-lodging without owner’s consent, probation revocation.
JUAN VAZQUEZ, 42, Ukiah. DUI.
FRED GARDNER
Old Valentine
We can go to the movies
share a bottle of wine
maybe do a few things together
while you’re waiting for your lover
and i’m waiting for mine
.
We can go out dancing
If you’re so inclined
Maybe watch the moon shine together
while you’re waiting for your lover
and I’m waiting for mine
.
We get born one day and one day we go
In the meanwhile that’s the whole show, so
.
If I should send you
a valentine
would it blow away your cover
while you’re waiting for your lover
and I’m waiting for mine
.
They say time makes love pass —and it’s true
But mama love makes time pass, too
.
Don’t know your fortune
Your rising sign
But I bet we’d have a good time together
While you’re waiting for your lover
and I’m still waiting for mine.
— Fred Gardner
REP. JOSH HARDER INTRODUCES BIPARTISAN BILL TO STOP SWAMP RAT INVASION OF CALIFORNIA
by Dan Bacher
The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta ecosystem is in its worst-ever crisis as Central Valley salmon and Delta fish populations move closer and closer to extinction.
The Delta Smelt has become virtually extinct in the wild, due to massive water exports to agribusiness and Southern California water agencies through the state and federal water projects, combined with toxics, invasive species and water pollution. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife caught zero Delta smelt in its annual Fall Midwater Trawl survey in 2024, despite the stocking of tens of thousands of hatchery-raised smelt over the past few years.
The Sacramento perch, the only native member of the sunfish family west of the Rocky Mountains, became extinct in its native habitat in the Delta by the 1970s. Fortunately, the unique fish is thriving in Pyramid Lake in Nevada and Crowley Lake in California and the CDFW recently introduced the sunfish to a pond in Sacramento.
But one creature that has increased in numbers in the Delta is the nutria, a giant swamp rat that causes massive damage to crops, levees, and the Delta.…
VALENTINE STALKING
by Paul Modic
It was the day before Valentine’s Day and I had no prospects. A friend really wanted a date, I steered my other friend toward her but he couldn’t commit, typical male. Then he told me about a woman going through some hard times: first she broke up with her husband and then her father died.
He had run into her at the store where her hands were full of veggies and when he offered to get her a cart she had refused. That’s when he thought she was kind of frazzled and needed some attention, although he’s always reading stuff into situations, and analyzes people constantly. He’s friends with her ex, so that wouldn’t fly, but what about me?
“Well, Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, I could bring her flowers and chocolate?” I said.
“Perfect,” he said. “She might need a friend, a man to talk to, or who knows, maybe you two would hit it off. I’ll even buy the flowers and chocolates.”
Since I’ve had this persistent cold a friend has been coming by to cook and clean, smoke and dance, and often we go to the Woodrose for breakfast. One night she said, “Can’t you wear something nice? You’re always in your grey pajamas?” (Leisure wear, really.) She looked in my closet, picked out some better things to wear, and got me dressing up for dinner in my vibrant African shirts, white party pants, vest, tie, and a dandy hat. (It was fun, I felt like a new man.)
I went to the flower shop and asked if one rose was more romantic than three. Yes? Then I wanted three, but I didn’t want to pay the price so I got one rose with the greenery around it, figuring that would lower any romance level for this situation.
“I’m just ‘Valentine stalking,’ I said. “I don’t even know the woman.” They didn’t care, gimme money, honey.
I dressed in my holiday finery and went to deliver the flowers, the chocolates I deemed unnecessary. I walked into her nursery school with my flowers, startling her co-worker ‘Stephanie,’ and then she quickly relaxed.
“She went to the bank, she’ll be back soon,” she said. “I could call her, tell her there’s a special delivery?”
“No, don’t do that, I’ll just wait,” I said.
“Okay, we can sit outside and talk. What’s your name?”
“Jefe,” I said and decided to confide in her. “Hey girlfriend, here’s my plan: I’m going to just hand ‘Alyssa’ the flowers and walk away, unless she says or asks anything, then I’ll hand her this card with a poem and my contact info on it.”
She read the poem and said, “No, you have to put this with the flowers.”
“Really? But won’t that seem too aggressive, to give her my numbers? I don’t even really know her.”
“No! You have to put that card in, just tuck it under the ribbon, she’ll think it’s weird if there’s not something.”
When the busy beauty returned I gave her the flowers and she made one of those girly sounds, like a combo of mmm and a little squeal, you know what I mean? She found the card and read the poem, reached over with a smile and gave me a kiss, then whispered, “I’ll call you.”
(may you float in a bed
of chocolate and kisses,
starry skies and
romantic near misses…)
A FEW WELL-CHOSEN WORDS ABOUT VALERIE PLAME’S CIA BOOK: HO-BLEEPING-HUM
by Mark Scaramella
“…the final assault was the climax of our paramilitary training. Each of us carried 80-pound backpacks, filled with essential survival gear: tents, freeze-dried food, tablets to purify drinking water, and 5.56 mm ammunition for our M-16s. The late fall weather was bitter and slimy water sloshed in our combat boots. A blister on my heel radiated little jabs of stinging pain…”
— From the opening paragraph of ‘Fair Game,’ Valerie Plame Wilson’s 2008 memoir.
The above excerpt is from the very first chapter of former CIA Agent Valerie Plame’s 2007 personal memoir, ‘Fair Game.’ It sets the tone for the entire book. Overcoming problems akin to blisters during fake CIA war games are elevated in the author’s mind to the level of courageous acts.
Random House was reputed to have offered Ms. Plame $2.5 million for this large pile of blanked-out pages, self-pity and personal trivia. But the deal fell through for unpublished reasons. Simon and Schuster picked up the leavings and published it for a presumably lesser, undisclosed, but still hefty advance.
Ms. Plame, you may recall, was the CIA agent who was “outed” by conservative columnist the late Robert Novak in 2003 soon after Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed entitled “What I Didn’t Find In Iraq.” The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to see if Saddam Hussein was really trying to procure yellow-cake uranium ore as an obvious and previously known Italian forgery had implied. Hussein wasn’t doing it; he already had plenty of yellow-cake uranium which he was doing nothing with.
But that hadn’t stopped George W. Bush from inserting the bogus claim in his 2003 State of the Union address while trying to convince the country — and a very gullible, bum’s-rushable Congress — to invade Iraq — disastrously, as it turned out.
Since there wasn’t much of an anti-war movement (and still isn’t), tame liberals seized on Wilson’s Op-Ed as mainstream proof that the case for war was bogus. Anyone with a functioning brain already knew that. Exposed Bogusity, even the reams of it uncovered since 2003, has never stopped a determined administration from going to war and it certainly wasn’t going to this time.
Joe Wilson at least deserves a little credit for publicly declaring the yellow-cake story to be false.
However, according to her own book, the same cannot be said about the lame Ms. Plame.
“But she’s such a babe!” exclaimed a liberal friend who has very little knowledge of the case and bought the liberal party line that Ms. Plame was simply a victim of a vindictive administration who would even go so far as to endanger national security by outing a CIA agent to get back at a minor critic.
Agent Plame’s book paints a different story.
Ms. Plame says that her outage inflicted serious (but unspecified) damage to national security because she was a NOC agent, a No-Official-Cover CIA agent (i.e., she wasn’t commonly known to be a government employee), who was working on counterproliferation of nuclear weapons and other dangerous activities around the world.
There are several things wrong with this argument.
While Ms. Plame was probably more than “a glorified secretary” as Republican Congressman Robert Wexler once called her, she wasn’t much of a spy. As Time Magazine reported shortly after Novak’s breech, “Mostly Plame posed as a business analyst or a student, according to her former boss Fred Rustman. Plame was never a so-called deep-cover NOC, he said, meaning the agency did not create a complex cover story about her education, background, job, personal life and even hobbies and habits that would stand up to intense scrutiny by foreign governments. ‘[NOCs] are on corporate rolls, and if anybody calls the corporation, the secretary says, Yeah, he works for us,’ says Rustmann. ‘The degree of backstopping to a NOC’s cover is a very good indication of how deep that cover really is.’
Rustmann described Plame as an “exceptional officer” but says her ability to remain under cover was jeopardized by her marriage in 1998 to the higher-profile American diplomat Joe Wilson. Plame all but came in from the cold the prior week, making her first public appearance, at a Washington lunch in honor of her husband (a Nation Magazine fund-raiser), who was receiving an award for whistle blowing. The blown spy’s one not-so-secret request? “No photographs, please.”
But “exceptional officer” Plame soon “reluctantly” posed for a glitzy Vanity Fair cover story.
Reading between the large blacked-out sections of text in Plame’s book (the CIA wouldn’t let her publish her service history which was already mostly public, and Agent Plame obediently went along with the CIA’s bogus cover up) we find that Agent Plame had two jobs during most of her CIA career: chatting up dignitaries in Greece and Paris attempting to ID info sources for the first part of her career; and basic international purchasing research for most of the rest. She was trying to help figure out who bought what in the world of free-range nuclear weapon consultant A.Q. Kahn and other independent nuke proliferators. Although Agent Plame claims to have accomplished a lot both professional and personally, she never claims to have done much, if anything, to ratchet back actual nuclear proliferation. Only that she worked on it.
Supposedly Agent Plame was a NOC, but, as her former boss noted, she didn’t have a fake name or identity. Those are “deep cover NOCs.” If the CIA had simply given her a fake name and if she had never authorized glossy celebrity photos of herself, chances are that nothing much would have come of Novak’s breech of security. So much for the CIA’s vaunted damage control.
In addition, there are a number of indications in her book that Agent Plame wasn’t as sharp as her boss or her admiring fans want us to think.
Take this key section of her memoir:
In the lead up to a Senate hearing on the case, a young Senate Republican staffer asked Plame, “Why did you suggest your husband for the trip to Niger?” The meanie-face Republican questioner, Plame complains, “had been particularly pointed in his earlier queries. His increasing hostility concerned me, but I had no idea then of how the Republicans were seeking to shape my testimony. In my desire to be as accurate and truthful as possible, I answered, stupidly [sic], ‘I don’t believe that I recommended my husband, but I can’t recall who suggested him for the trip.’ This was true. Given the incredible pace and scope of my work during that pre-war period and the subsequent passage of time, I simply did not recall the sequence of events leading to the trip. I had completely forgotten that it was a Junior Reports Officer who had first suggested to me that CPD [Counter Proliferation Division] consider talking to Joe about the alleged transaction. I had forgotten that Penny received the call from the vice president’s office that had set Joe’s trip in motion. I had also forgotten that we went to our Branch Supervisor and it was he — not me — who requested that I ask Joe to come into Headquarters to discuss ‘options.’ No lawyer had prepared me for my [Senate staffer] interview; I did not review the events with [husband] Joe [Wilson] or any of my colleagues prior to my appearance because I did not think it was proper to ‘compare memories’.”
Agent Plame forgot. A veteran, classified NOC agent described by her boss as “exceptional” simply “forgot” who had suggested her husband — her husband! — for an important investigative assignment.
Liberals were outraged that G.W. Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez forgot so much about his attempts to fire US attorneys for political reasons. But here’s Plame herself saying she “forgot” one of the most important factoids of her case at what she herself describes as an important interview.
Poor beleaguered veteran NOC CIA Agent Valerie Plame remembered her painful blister back in the 80s during recruit training. But, when the chips were down, she “forgot” the most critical part of her own defense while facing “hostility” from a young Republican staffer.
Poor Ms. Plame. Now she’s no longer saving the world from the [non-existent] threats from Iraq.
With just a small dab of skepticism we can think of a number of questions about this paragraph, including:
Was veteran Agent Plame intimidated by a young Republican? Why didn’t she prepare for the interview? She’s an experienced CIA agent! Why would she need a lawyer? Did she really forget? Or, like Attorney General Gonzalez, was there another reason she didn’t “recall” the answer.
There are numerous other hints that Agent Plame was not exactly on the fast track to replace then-CIA Director George Tenet. In fact, she’d have been hard pressed to make it out of ordinary boot camp.
- When entering the CIA Ms. Plame says she “did not expect to find any sort of discrimination because of my gender.” Then she was shocked when it happened. The CIA? Sexist? Omigod!
- She calls her fellow CIA recruit classmates “a bunch of whiny suburbanites.”
- “My proudest moment came when I managed to score very high on a handgun test, despite having to balance on crutches after spraining an ankle during a morning run.”
- “If you faltered [during recruit field training] in any way you were kicked or subjected to brutal verbal abuse.”
- In the summer of 2003 “there was just confusion at CIA Headquarters as we tried to figure out what the hell had happened to the vaunted Iraqi WMD program. Why aren’t we finding anything? What is going on out there? How could we have been so wrong?”
- Agent Plame’s first day on the job in Athens, Greece: “I ordered a cold coffee in my halting [bleep (Greek)] — espresso and milk were shaken together in a drink with a frothy top [bleep bleep bleep bleep (maybe something to do with adding Ouzo to your coffee?)] and settled in, ostensibly to study the map. I lit a cigarette, another gesture to fit in with the crowd because most [bleep (Greeks)] smoke like chimneys, and I tried to look relaxed. I was actually extremely keyed up and waiting for my target.” (Tough assignment there.)
- Agent Plame didn’t bother clearing her (partially disguised) Vanity Fair photo with her CIA boss in advance. Her boss chewed her out in a way she said she’d never been chewed out before (even worse than the “brutal verbal abuse” she suffered in CIA recruit training). Agent Plame subsequently agreed that her boss was right to chew her out.
- Ms. Plame also seems to suffer from a little sexism herself, saying that during her training, “Without a doubt the best officer I have ever seen work a room was my Deputy [bleep] Chief, Jim. Jim was tall, dark and handsome and a legendary recruiter.” (Who was dreamboat Jim recruiting? The world wants to know!)
- Ms. Plame seems to (implausibly) deny that she’s starry eyed and naive, but she apparently got the vapors when meeting such name-dropped celebrities as Warren Beatty, Norman Lear, Tim Robbins and Marlo Thomas after she herself had enjoyed her 15-minutes of fame and celebrity.
- One of the things Agent Plame says makes her a good Agent: “As a Pi Beta Phi sorority sister at Penn State, I had lived through the frenzied ‘rush’ weeks and once I’d been accepted in the sorority, I attended many a crowded party where fitting in and exchanging easy banter with others was key to social success.” This apparently prepared her well for chatting up foreign dignitaries, but not at handling young Republican twits.
- Most of Agent Plame’s description of the case in the last half of her book reads like a poorly written recap of public aspects of her case from very conventional sources since the story broke. In fact, she says she admitted to a co-worker, “I don’t know anything more than what everyone else gets on CNN.”
- After Novak’s column was published Ms. Plame remained a key CIA operative, albeit not too secret and at an office job in Langley, still drawing her nifty NOC pay. But, admits Agent Plame, “My heart wasn’t in the job as it should have been.”
- It’s possible that Agent Plame got overcome by a bad case of cliché-itis, but at one point she also confesses, “Maybe I’m just a slow learner, but it [counterproliferation] is a complicated and ever-changing field.” (Um, excuse me, Agent Plame, isn’t that your job?)
- Agent Plame’s readers are frequently teased with unexplained passing references to such things as “technical spy gadgets that didn’t work as promised.” (Maybe Agent Plame is a slow learner and couldn’t figure them out. Maybe the CIA’s procurement staff didn’t do much quality control. Maybe the design was flawed and somebody died. Who knows? )
- “The idea that my government, which I had served loyally for years, might be exaggerating a case for war was impossible to comprehend.” (This veteran CIA Agent actually said that.)
- And there’s this pathetic whine from Agent Plame (among several others), as if she was the only woman in the entire world who has to raise kids while working at a job: “My only trepidation about my husband’s trip to Niger was my fear of being left to wrestle two squirmy toddlers into bed each evening.”
We could go on at extreme length with these examples, but what would be the point?
The book wasn’t much of a seller. Amazon ranked Agent Plame’s memoir down in the sales dungeon, ranking it soon after it came out at an abysmal #552,196, well below Roger Duvoisin’s relatively popular children’s book “Petunias” at #87,782.
In some ways that’s too bad because the quicky “Afterword” that Simon and Schuster commissioned journalist Laura Rozen to stick on the end of the book to fill in some of the public record holes in Plame’s book is pretty good. Ms. Rozen found some new information about the case and its background that has not appeared in conventionally published sources, including the likely real reason Bush never pardoned Scooter Libby, just commuted his jail sentence.
One is left to wonder how much else Agent Plame forgot. Maybe her blister was still bothering her.
If the whiny, groupie-ish, forgetful and highly credulous Agent Plame is an example of an “exceptional” CIA officer assigned to counterproliferation, then we have a lot more to worry about than blisters on our feet.
(Note: The title of this book review was inspired by Dwight MacDonald’s unforgettable movie review of ‘Ben-Hur,’ one of the most overhyped, over-produced and silly films in American movie history.)
INSIDE THE NBA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH WINE COUNTRY: ‘FANS WANT TO KNOW WHAT LEBRON IS DRINKING’
by Ann Killion
When the NBA descends on the Bay Area this weekend, it won’t just be a showcase for basketball — it will be an exhibition for wine, too.
The relationship between Wine Country and the NBA is a longtime love affair. The league is packed with oenophiles — players, coaches and ownership — and evidence of that relationship will be on display at the All-Star festivities, with wine tastings, wine pairings and trips north to Napa and Sonoma, both over the weekend and in the league’s off days following Sunday’s tournament.
All this high-profile exposure by a league full of cultural influencers is great news for an industry that has seen a sharp decline in sales in recent years. Younger Americans are drinking less, and — when they do imbibe — are choosing libations other than wine.
Jackson Family Wines, hoping to connect to a younger, diverse demographic, partnered with the NBA in April. The Santa Rosa company owns 28 wineries in California, more in other states and abroad, and has price points ranging from $15 a bottle to over $1,000. It’s already seeing benefits.
“It’s been fantastic, and everything that we thought when we signed this deal is coming to fruition,” said Vince Urmini, vice president of partnerships for Jackson Family Wines.
“We saw the trends in the industry and we didn’t want to just sit on the sidelines because we’ve had the No. 1-selling Chardonnay for the past 30 years. I applaud ownership trying to beat the competition to the punch.”
That Chardonnay, Kendall-Jackson, became the first official partner of the NBA. Another Jackson Family winery, La Crema, is the official wine partner of the WNBA. In addition to its sponsorship of the two leagues, the company has formed liaisons with individual teams, like the Golden State Warriors, getting its product into arenas and surrounding restaurants.
Urmini said the 8-month-old partnership has already yielded a five-fold increase over the previous year in arena sales. NBA arenas are now the ninth-largest on-premise buyers of Kendall-Jackson wines in the U.S., and as of December the brand had grown to represent 8.3% of the U.S. Chardonnay market — a gain that vice president of partnerships Maggie Curry attributes to the NBA deal.
“There’s headwinds in the industry. You would think that the most popular would bear the brunt of that the most,” she said. But “Kendall-Jackson is seeing its highest share of the Chardonnay category we’ve seen in 20 years.”
The NBA considers itself the “wine league,” and many players have favorite Napa Valley wineries. Josh Hart, Zach LaVine and Kevin Love have all professed fondness for Harlan Estate. LeBron James is a known fan of Mayacamas and Opus One. Carmelo Anthony and Jimmy Butler collect Screaming Eagle.
Others have gotten directly involved in the Napa wine business, like Klay Thompson with his Diamond & Key label, Domantas Sabonis with his Sabonis Family Wines and Dwyane Wade with his Wade Cellars. Last year, Anthony announced Ode to Soul wine in collaboration with Robert Mondavi Winery, a follow-up to the winery that Anthony founded with partner Asani Swann in France’s Chateauneuf-du-Pape region. Stephen Curry’s wife and sister started a wine brand, Domaine Curry, which they sold to the major conglomerate Constellation Brands in 2023.
It has become common for players to visit Wine Country on the day off between road games against the Warriors and the Sacramento Kings.
“Sometimes we’ll see a group of 10, and they’re often traveling with their wives and girlfriends,” said Jackson Family’s Curry, though, she added, “I don’t know if we’ve ever seen a full team roster.” In the days following All-Star Weekend, she said, players and league officials have scheduled visits to Jackson Family properties including Freemark Abbey and Verite.
The California wine industry sees basketball fans as an ideal customer base to reach. They are watching games in an evening window, an appropriate time for drinking a glass of wine. The league’s fans tend to trend younger and more racially diverse than other sports, which have been elusive demographics for the wine industry.
“The fans in the arena are who we want to engage with,” Urmini said. Among households buying Kendall-Jackson for the first time, Curry said that 68% are new to wine.
In a league of influencers, where every game entrance is treated like a red carpet affair, and players’ outfits and shoes are dissected on social media, wine has become part of the trendsetting package. Last spring, at a Cavaliers-Celtics playoff game, a shot of James sitting courtside drinking a bottle of Opus One went viral (and not only because regular folks wouldn’t be allowed to have their own bottle under their seat).
There was a time when the typical image of an NBA player at leisure was at a private club in Las Vegas with expensive bottle service. Now it may be providing a tour of one’s extensive personal wine cellar, as new Warriors star Butler did with Architectural Digest. (His favorite wine of all time? Sassicaia, an Italian Super Tuscan.)
The genesis of the Jackson Family Wines’ interest in connecting with the NBA dates to the pandemic, when the playoffs were held in the “NBA bubble” at the Walt Disney Resort. Some players, like CJ McCollum, not knowing how long they would be sequestered, brought their own wines. Others were left to fend for themselves with whatever Disney provided and, through social media, it began to leak out that the selection wasn’t great. Jackson Family took notice.
“We were brainstorming ways to get our wines out to consumers,” Urmini said. “We were reading about the players and coaches and executives who were not really enjoying their wine there. We decided let’s just send them over 100 cases of wine. We didn’t want anything from them. It was just a natural synergy. And they approached us about a partnership about 18 months ago.”
Alcohol and sports have a long relationship. But wine was historically left out of the equation.
“The NFL’s image is a guy busting a beer can over his head,” said ESPN’s Marc Spears. “But NBA fans want to know what LeBron is drinking.”
Spears, a senior NBA writer for the ESPN platform Andscape, was hired by Jackson Family Wines to be an ambassador to the league. In the past year, he has helped connect the company with players, coaches and teams, facilitating wine dinners and trips to Napa. At the Warriors’ training camp in Hawaii last year, Jackson Family served wines from Verite and Lokoya wineries from the years of the Warriors’ championship wins.
In his quarter-century covering the league, Spears has seen interest in wine grow. A connoisseur himself, he feels he deserves a bit of the credit for turning Anthony onto wine when Spears was a beat writer in Denver and Anthony played for the Nuggets. Anthony was one of the first stars to get heavily into wine, and is credited with spreading the wine gospel to other stars, like James and Chris Paul.
San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich was key in cultivating a wine culture within the league. During his team’s dynastic run, with five championships from 1999 to 2014, his wine dinners became legendary. Once, when asked about his coaching legacy, Popovich replied, “What’s my legacy? Food and wine. This is just a job.”
“As the Spurs were winning, his story got out there about his love for wine and team meals and team bonding, and it started to take hold,” said Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who played for Popovich and remains close to him. “And then athletes started to invest in the vineyards and wineries and it’s just become part of the sports landscape.”
Spears said players’ natural competitive instincts can fuel their wine passion.
“LeBron and Draymond (Green) have parties to see who can bring the most exotic bottle of wine,” Spears said. “It’s a huge competition.”
(SF Chronicle)
THE EPA’S INCREDIBLE $20 BILLION DOLLAR CAPER, EXPLAINED
A chance leak about a last-minute financial agent agreement at the Environmental Protection Agency is the latest evidence that our government is a lot more corrupt than even cynics guessed
by Matt Taibbi
The EPA’s new chief Lee Zeldin dropped a bomb on social media Wednesday evening:
Roughly twenty billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA. This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.
It’s a true, crazy, obscene story:
It started with a repulsive Beltway Candid Camera scene posted last December 3rd by oft-maligned Project Veritas. In it, an EPA special assistant named Brent Efron dressed in smart glasses and guzzling a tangerine-colored cocktail gushed: “I do implementation.. I do, like, how do you spend $100 billion?” He added he worked on “climate change things,” boasting that in the last year, “We’ve spent like fifty billion dollars… billion with a B!” But, with Trump coming, “We’re just trying to get the money out as fast as we can before they come in and like stop it all… We’re on like, the Titanic, throwing gold bars off the edge.”
Two weeks ago, on January 29th, the Senate confirmed Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from New York. Less than two weeks into his tenure, on Monday, Zeldin posted a response to the Project Veritas video, saying “I’ve directed the EPA to put on their scuba gear and help me find the gold bars.” Almost immediately, staff found them. Outgoing Biden staffers drafted a pair of agreements in August and September, clearing the way for the last-minute transfer of $20 billion out of government to an authorized financial agent, Citibank. Once money goes out the door it’s considered expended, legally, achieving Efron’s stated end of making it harder for the new administration to “stop it all.”…
https://www.racket.news/p/the-epas-incredible-20-billion-dollar
TRUMP, REPUBLICANS, AND ANIMALS
Wildlife at risk as US government funding paused
…Nearly a dozen IFAW projects across 13 countries have come to a complete stop—and with each day that passes, the damage to conservation efforts, local economies, and vulnerable wildlife is amplified:
- In Kenya, 252 community rangers will be left without work—and as a result, 468 lions and 18,000 elephants they were hired to protect will be left defenseless against the deadly threat of poachers.
- 250 front line law enforcement officers around the world will not receive the essential training they need to detect wildlife crime, leaving animals vulnerable to trafficking and abuse.
- 350 endangered elephants that call Malawi’s Kasungu National Park home will be at risk of poaching as rapid response units will not be trained and equipped with the tools they need to tackle the illegal killing of wildlife.
These are just a handful of the life-saving IFAW-affiliated projects that have come to a stop as a result of the funding pause…
LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT
14 States Sue to Challenge Musk’s ‘Unchecked Power’
Judge Orders Trump Administration to Resume Foreign Aid Spending
Judge Temporarily Stops Trump’s Plan to End Funds for Trans Youths’ Health Providers
Trump Official’s Demand in Adams Case Forces Justice Dept. Showdown
Trump Is Newly Unleashed on Trade, With Global Consequences
Trump Officials Escalate Layoffs, Targeting Most of 200,000 Workers on Probation
Senate Confirms Kennedy, a Prominent Vaccine Skeptic, as Health Secretary
Trump’s Whirlwind Now Blows Through Europe
Texas Judge Fines New York Doctor and Orders Her to Stop Sending Abortion Pills to Texas
Joann Is More Than a Chain Store to ‘Heartbroken’ Regulars
“YOU’RE NOT THE FIRST PERSON who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
— J.D. Salinger, “The Catcher in the Rye”
‘NO TO ETHNIC CLEANSING’: Hundreds of U.S. rabbis, Jewish celebrities condemn Trump Gaza plan in NYT ad
Signatories of the ad include rabbis from Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal movements working in congregations, campuses, hospitals, rabbinical seminaries, and community organizations in the U.S. and Israel
by Etan Nechin
Over 350 rabbis, along with Jewish artists, writers, and activists, have signed a New York Times ad denouncing Donald Trump's proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and have the U.S. own it for "a Real Estate Development for the Future," which read "Jewish people say no to ethnic cleansing."…
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
It is a constitutional crisis when an unelected plutocrat unilaterally takes control of the purse strings constitutionally defined as belonging to Congress. It is a constitutional crisis when federal agencies funded by the legislative branch are being shut down by the executive.
It is a constitutional crisis when unjustly fired appointees to the National Labor Relations Board know that, in exercising their right to bring their case before the judiciary, they may imperil the nation because of the Supreme Court’s ideological alignment with the wishes of the president.
FOR AN ENTIRE DECADE now American consciousness has been plagued by the delusion that fighting the power has something to do with Donald Trump. Democrats act like they’re being brave revolutionaries by standing against him. Republicans act like they’re being brave revolutionaries by supporting him.
In reality the fight against real power has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump. It’s got very little to do with opposing him, since the US president is just a figurehead and if it wasn’t Trump standing in that position it’d be some other ideologically identical empire goon. And it’s certainly got nothing to do with supporting him, since he’s completely unified with establishment power structures.
Progressives view Trump as a Hitlerian dictator who plans to end democracy in America, while rightists view him as a heroic populist who is leading a charge to dismantle the Deep State. In reality Trump’s record has established beyond a doubt that he is nothing other than a standard shitty Republican president. As far as his material policy decisions and governance are concerned he is not extraordinary, and he is not special. His few superficial differences from his predecessors are eclipsed by his similarities with them, which dwarf the differences by orders of magnitude. The only reason Trump is regarded as an aberration rather than a continuation of US status quo politics is because both sides of the imaginary partisan divide keep fueling that delusion with baseless emotion-driven narratives.
The network of plutocrats and empire managers who really run America have been in power since long before Trump, and could easily run things today without Trump, and will continue to run things after Trump. For the previous four years the United States had a president who was an actual dementia patient, and it made no difference to the functioning of the empire. Trump is the same. Anyone could be sitting in that figurehead position, and the tyranny and abuses of the US empire would continue uninterrupted.
To meaningfully oppose real power is not to take some special stance toward Donald Trump, or any other individual empire manager for that matter. The abuses of the empire aren’t the product of any one individual, but rather the inevitable fruits of the systems and practices that the empire is premised upon. Capitalism. Imperialism. Hegemonic control. Plutocracy. Militarism. Ecocide. Exploitation. Extraction. Authoritarianism. Propaganda.
Fighting the power means taking your stand against these things. You know this is true because while the powerful permit and encourage the partisan feuding for and against Donald Trump, they have violent conniptions whenever a robust movement against imperial war agendas or capitalist oligarchy emerges anywhere in the world. One need only look at how aggressively the FBI targeted antiwar activists, communists and black civil rights groups with COINTELPRO operations to stomp out any movement toward justice and equality in the United States, and contrast this with how freely opposition and support for Donald Trump is allowed to flourish in mainstream discourse, to see what real opposition looks like.
If you want to fight the power, take your stand against the empire itself. Help discredit its propaganda machine in the eyes of the public, so that people will stop consenting to its abuses. Help oppose its war agendas, so that its abuses will become harder to inflict upon the world. Help open people’s eyes to the injustices that are baked into capitalism, so people can see that a better world is possible. Help spread awareness of the way the empire really operates, so people can stop throwing their energy into the delusion that fighting real power has something to do with Donald Trump.
— Caitlin Johnstone
POOR HENRY David Thoreau. His short (forty-five years), quiet, passionate life apparently held little passion for the opposite sex. His relationship with Emerson’s wife Lidian was no more than a long brother-sisterly friendship. Thoreau never married. There is no evidence that he ever enjoyed a mutual love affair with any human, female or otherwise. He once fell in love with and proposed marriage to a young woman by the name of Ellen Sewall; she rejected him, bluntly and coldly. He tried once more with a girl named Mary Russell; she turned him down. For a young man of Thoreau’s hypersensitive character, these must have been cruel, perhaps disabling blows to what little male ego and confidence he possessed to begin with. It left him shattered, we may assume, on that side of life; he never again approached a woman with romantic intentions on his mind. He became a professional bachelor, scornful of wives and marriage. He lived and probably died a virgin, pure as shriven snow. Except for those sensual reptiles coiling and uncoiling down in the root cellar of his being. Ah, purity!
But we make too much of this kind of thing nowadays. Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual; it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and iron gridwork of our industrial culture. In the relatively wild, free America of Henry’s time there was plenty of opportunity for every kind of adventure, although Henry himself did not, it seems to me, take advantage of those opportunities. (He could have toured the Western plains with George Catlin!) He led an unnecessarily constrained existence, and not only in the “generative” region.
Thoreau the spinster-poet. In the year 1850, when Henry reached the age of thirty-three, Emily Dickinson in nearby Amherst became twenty. Somebody should have brought the two together. They might have hit it off. I imagine this scene, however, immediately following the honeymoon:
EMILY (raising her pen)
Henry, you haven’t taken out the garbage.
HENRY (raising his flute)
Take it out yourself.
— Edward Abbey, Down the River with Henry Thoreau (1980)
CALVIN R. GREENE was a Thoreau “disciple” who lived in Rochester, Michigan, and who first began corresponding with Thoreau in January 1856. When Greene asked for a photographic image of the author, Thoreau initially replied: “You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally – the stuttering, blundering, clodhopper that I am.” Yet Greene repeated his request and sent money for the sitting. Thoreau must have kept this commitment to his fan in the back of his mind for the next several months. On June 18, 1856, during a trip to Worcester, Massachusetts, Henry Thoreau visited the Daguerrean Palace of Benjamin D. Maxham at 16 Harrington Corner and had three daguerreotypes taken for fifty cents each. He gave two of the prints to his Worcester friends and hosts, H.G.O. Blake and Theophilius Brown. The third he sent to Calvin Greene in Michigan. “While in Worcester this week I obtained the accompanying daguerreotype – which my friends think is pretty good – though better looking than I,” Thoreau wrote.
EIGHT PEOPLE ON A GOLF COURSE AND ONE BIRD OF FREEDOM FLYING OVER
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1988)
The phoenix flies higher & higher
above eight elegant people on a golf course
who have their head stuck in the sands
of a big trap
One man raises his head and shouts
I am President of Earth. I rule.
You elected me, heh-heh. Fore!
A second man raises his head.
I am King of the Car.
The car is my weapon. I drive all before me.
Ye shall have no other gods.
Watch out. I’m coming through.
A third raises his head out of the sand.
I run a religion. I am your spiritual head.
Never mind which religion.
I drive a long ball. Bow down and putt.
A fourth raises his head in the bunker.
I am the General. I have tanks to conquer desert
And my tank shall not want. I’m thirsty.
We play Rollerball. I love Arabs.
A fifth raises his head and opens his mouth.
I am Your Master’s Voice.
I rule newsprint. I rule airwaves, long & short.
We bend minds. We make reality to order.
Mind Fuck Incorporated.
Satire becomes reality, reality satire.
Man the Cosmic Joke. Et cetera.
A sixth man raises his gold bald head.
I'm your friendly multinational banker.
I chew cigars rolled with petro-dollars.
We’re above nations. We control the control.
I’ll eat you all in the end.
I work on margins. Yours.
A woman raises her head higher than anyone.
I am the Little Woman. I’m the Tender Warrior
who votes like her husband. Who took my breasts.
A final figure rises, carrying all the clubs.
Stop or I’ll shoot a hole-in-one.
I’m the Chief of All Police. I eat meat.
We know the enemy. You better believe it.
We’re watching all you paranoids. Go ahead & laugh.
You’re all in the computer. We’ve got all
your numbers. Except one
unidentified flying asshole.
On the radar screen.
Some dumb bird.
Every time I shoot it down
it rises.
On the Eel River Pact
“For too long,” Sonoma County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Lynda Hopkins said, “we have treated the Eel River watershed like a bank, and all we have done is take withdrawals from it. We have never put anything back.
“And so starting today we will start making deposits back in the bank,” she said.
Dearie me, for far too long it seems our representatives have treated those they represent like a bank. Taking withdrawals and never putting anything back toward those they represent.
The resources guy…“This pathway is a model not only for California but for our country at this time.”
I certainly hope it isn’t the model, as it appears to give the rights to another party, for maybe water, and make you pay for it.
If you are going to pay for it you should probably secure the water right.
From my perspective it seems more like the EPA throwing the gold bars off the Titanic.
If what is happening in Washington is a constitutional crisis, then we have had a constitutional crisis there for a very long time.
Keep telling yourself that George, if it makes the bitter pill of what Trump and his MAGA morons are doing to this country a little easier to swallow. Next you’ll be telling us that his cabinet picks are the best of the best and shit canning our European alliances is in our best interest, to say nothing of sucking up to Putin. The Constitution and Democracy are out dated, right? Oh and there’s that humongous 1.4% mandate he has to throw the baby out with the bath water. Who needs co-equal branches of government when we can be ruled so much more efficiently by an impulsive, narcissistic dictator and his tech bro puppet master. But yeah, that democratic constitutional crisis is finally over. Gimme an effing break!
+1- Said with vigor and righteous annoyance–I just read the subject of your comment minutes ago and shuddered, then shrugged.
Thanks for taking the time, Jurgen.
+1
George is worried that his precious Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025 might be turned to dust by a fed-up population, so he’s a little incoherent these days.
Wrong. Really, REALLY wrong.
The article today about the Palace Hotel was the most encouraging news, local or otherwise, I have read in many weeks, even months. I am not a Ukiah person, though I have known the town since the early 1960s, and have been commuting there for work or government obligations for the last fifty years. Watching the Palace gradually die has been too often just a metaphor in my imagination for the general state of the world, and Ukiah in particular. The construction crew, the contractor, and the architect Richard Ruff are all capable and seem to have the skills and determination to bring this important little piece of town back to a vibrant life. The investors need to show up, but there’s plenty of money in the world, we just need some commitment to do good with it.
Good news at last. Thanks for the update.
I have a confession: I told a big lie in my Valentine story in MCT today and I don’t care. You may think so what but my trademark is to always tell it exactly as it happened, just ask anyone. But ya know, sometimes ya gotta give the people what they want (like Chuck), and that’s usually a happy ending, or at least a possibly hopeful one, right? (And I’m not talking about the kind you can get at that donut shop in Eureka.)
Once I gave my dearly departed friend Davy Rippner (he’s still alive, just moved far away) another one of my stories and after reading it he said, “No one wants to read another story about a guy who never gets laid!”
(I miss Davy, how many friends would say, “How’d you get to be so dumb?”
“Umm, smoked too much weed?” I said.
“I smoke a lot of weed,” he said, “and I’m not dumb.” Davy!)
So I was thinking about what Davy said when getting my Valentine’s Day story ready and decided to turn the dull and anti-climactic ending into a juicy moment of possibilities.
Yes, I did it for you, dear readers, I’m becoming a liar for you, and ya know, it feels pretty good. Why not make something up, frankly it makes me also feel better to imagine this more lively, heroic, and slightly happy ending to my story, so I guess I did it for all of us. (I know, this confession isn’t necessary, just offering fool disclosure.)
Thank you, Paul, and even if it’s just a bit of fiction, an ending that comes with “a juicy moment of possibilities” makes us all smile and hope for the best. BTW, confession, as they say, is good for the soul.
Thank you Mike G. for the great update on the Palace. Pictures really helped tell the story.
Awoke early at the homeless shelter in northeast Washington, D.C. and proceeded to Whole Foods for a breakfast nosh, and then on to the MLK Public Library to check emails on a guest computer. I’ve no idea what comes next, but it is okay, because nobody in the district knows what is next either! Craig Louis Stehr
In case anyone doesn’t know why the new administration is firing and trying to get federal government civil servants to resign, it’s because they already have about 20,000 vetted hard right replacements they want to hire. Those new hires will do the will of the president by remaking “the deep state,” and even when there’s changes in congress or the presidency, in the future, they will still be there to wreak havoc from within…(Project 2025 formula)
“The self-indulgent man craves for all pleasant things… and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else.”
—Aristotle
I will add to Aristotle, a self-indulgent man substitutes happiness with pleasure.
“ONLY THE BEST PEOPLE” – D. Trump
Of Kennedy’s confirmation, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said to his colleagues: “It’s truly astounding that the Senate stands on the brink of confirming Mr. Kennedy to lead America’s public health agencies. And if the Senate weren’t gripped in this soon-to-be infamous period of total capitulation, I don’t think this nominee would have made it as far as a hearing…. If I’d told you a couple of years ago, ‘There’s a guy who’s been nominated to run public health nationwide. His job will be to protect American families from death and disease. He’s going to run the whole public health system: Medicare, Medicaid, the C[enters] for D[isease] C[ontrol and Prevention], the N[ational] I[nstitutes of] H[ealth]—all of it. He’ll decide how we protect the country from infectious disease, he’ll set the rules for every hospital in the country, he’ll decide what healthcare and medicines get covered by Medicare, he’ll manage our response in the event of a pandemic.’ And then I told you,… ‘Well,… there are a few concerns about this nominee. First of all, zero relevant experience. He’s a trial lawyer, a politician from a famous family. No medical or scientific background, he’s never run a hospital or a health system or anything like that. Second of all… he’s said some pretty wild stuff about public health, over and over and over again, like: he proposed that Covid-19 might be ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews. Ethnically targeted to spare Jews. He said Lyme disease was a military bioweapon. For years he’s been persuading American families against routine childhood immunizations. He’s compared the work of the CDC to ‘Nazi death camps.’… If a couple of years ago I told you all that, and I told you that the Senate was about to put America’s health in this man’s hands, you’d probably tell me the Senate has lost its mind.”
Well said, and yes, the Senate–Trumpist Republicans, that is– has lost its mind. We will see some horrors result from this one.
Hate to say it, but when it comes to state or federal water policies in the state of California, Donald Trump is a total disaster. What a joke to have him at the helm of public health or agriculture needs, let alone fire protection. I have a solution… Let us control our own stuff and keep your small hands off of our well being.
Ah yes, the benefits of federalism. A good start is to stop accepting federal dollars, and stop voting for legislation that provides them. Those dollars come with strings. If it is not a President, or Congress controlling those strings, it’s an unaccountable faceless federal bureaucrat.
The “State” is equally ruthless in policies “mandating” services for socio-economically impoverished populations, which “accepted” the cessation of the “General Revenue Sharing Program” in the mid 1980s. Lake and Trinity counties were examples cited by the General Accounting Office in its report on the impacts of President Reagan’s orders to end the era of beneficial “safety net” programs: food stamps, medicaid, medicare, mental health, welfare, unemployment, housing, and “protective” services.
The same attitude prevails at the county level. California Constitution Article XIII, Section 35, “mandates” the prioritization of tax dollars to be spent on public health and safety before expenditures for attracting tourism and subsidizing wine and cannabis “industries.” Nonetheless, the pusilanimous treatment of our Area Agency on Aging, our senior centers, our Access & Functional Needs requirements, and general services for all disabled people stands in simple defiance of their moral obligations to serve all the residents of the county, plain for all to see in the proceedings of the Board of Supervisors.
Hard to get high-end investors to place their bets on an area with substandard roads, substandard houses, deferred environmental maintenance, extreme Fire Hazard Severity zones (in Lake, pretty much all of it), spotty phone and internet services, funky lake, outdated regulatory ordinances, and organizational mysteries.
I’m one of those people whose lives would be destroyed by the elimination of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and local policies and planning objectives aimed chiefly at converting the population from a pleasant retirement and recreation General Fund sources (too poor, too sick, and too old) into a “Blue Zone” (with other hues tagging along to glorify their planned set changes.
I surely appreciate Senator Ossoff’s caution. I just can’t understand how this situation (President No. 47 and his gang) is allowed to go on, or how people didn’t see this coming all along.
Henry, baby, ya gotta lose that neck beard. Chicks just don’t dig ’em man.