SAD NEWS from a reader:
I heard from a good source that Bill Heil died yesterday. He was at the center of Albion’s Table Mountain commune back in the day. Few know the past as you do.
REMEMBERING BILL HEIL
Tim Scully: I remember Bill Heil and his partner Linda Perkins from when I was working with the Little River Airport Advisory Committee. They originally came to committee meetings because they were concerned about the environmental impact of the airport and airplanes. They expressed their concerns in a civilized manner and as they got more engaged with the committee they provided very constructive criticism. Their deep knowledge of botany and ecology was placed in service of the committee’s decision-making processes and helped produce better outcomes. His community engagement seemed to always be constructive.
“SHE DID THE RIGHT THING. She did not try to cover anything up.”
(Judge Moorman on Chamise Cubbison)
I DON'T THINK it's an exaggeration to say that without Mike Geniella's dogged reporting on the Cubbison Case, the terribly wronged Mses Cubbison and Kennedy may have stayed wronged and ruined, their unblemished reputations for years of honest public work irreparably destroyed.
IN JAPAN, right up to modern times, officials who were found culpable of grave dishonor, literally fell on their swords. But I doubt that the Mendocino County officials who nearly destroyed two innocent women will so much as issue a public Sorry, let alone resign their tarnished positions.
RIGHT from the git almost three long years ago, it was obvious that DA Eyster conjured his phony case against Cubbison and Kennedy, made it up, used his position as, of all things, Mendocino County's lead law enforcement officer, to get rid of Cubbison simply because she challenged his public spending on Christmas parties for himself, his staff and assorted hangers-on.
THEN, with a big assist from the lame brains sitting as supervisors who removed the elected Cubbison from office on Eyster's say-so, commenced the longest preliminary hearing in the history of Mendocino County, during which, with not even two days to go in the seemingly endless farce, the judge and Eyster's star witness, CEO Antle, announced they had to go on vacation. If they didn't board the Love Boat, you see, they couldn't get their reservation money back! (This is the judicial equivalent of the dog ate my homework and, as we all know, both the judge and the CEO are paupers.)
BACK FROM VA-CA, Judge Moorman declared that which was obvious from the beginning of this cruel farce, that there was no evidence to support Eyster's see-through case. And please note here that as the Judge cited a few “incompetents” — which is a euphemism in this case for liars and cover-up artists — by name, the Judge didn't mention Eyster, the architect of the whole sordid show.
SUPERVISORS MULHEREN, WILLIAMS AND HASCHAK should, if they have even an elementary sense of honor, resign, and I hope they, along with former supervisors Gjerde and McGourty, are sued as individuals by the two women they so blithely tried to destroy.
EYSTER? He'll retire rather than risk re-election as he rides off to a lush retirement, guarding his lawn against gophers, maybe after a farewell dinner at the Broiler where his disgrace began.
THE PRESENT SUPERVISORS ought to fire Eyster's co-conspirator CEO Antle, and finally demand that that nest of appalling incompetents in the tax-paid County Counsel's office at last be purged and real lawyers installed in their place, lawyers who will defend our ripped off County rather than farm everything out to City lawyers at large cost to the beset taxpayers of this county.
MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: Former County Counsel Christian Curtis was a co-conspirator in the preparation of the case against Cubbison with CEO Darcie Antle who, as reported shortly after Cubbison’s suspension in October of 2023 by former KZYX reporter Sara Reith, together began looking into the Payroll code question back in September of 2022, presumably when Cubbison herself started asking about it. In September of 2023 Curtis hired a $400 an hour SF attorney, Ms. Morin Jacob of Liebert-Cassidy-Whitmore (who's now defending the County in Cubbison’s civil case) to bum’s-rush the gullible “Get Cubbison” Board through the railroaded suspension proceedings (before giving Cubbison an opportunity to respond to Eyster’s bogus charges), citing what most people think was an incorrect government code section which applied to the Treasurer position, which Ms. Cubbison did not hold at the time of the alleged offense for which she has now been exonerated. In December of 2023, just two months after Cubbison was suspended, Curtis resigned as County Counsel to take a job as City Attorney in Redding, California. After Curtis resigned, CEO Darcie Antle then hired a $400 an hour “interim” County Counsel named James Ross, from the SF-based Renne Public Law Group. Mendo didn’t even need to hire Ross because a few months later Curtis’s Assistant County Counsel, Charlotte Scott, was appointed County Counsel, just as she should have been when Curtis left. We hope Curtis and Ross and Scott are all deposed in the Cubbison civil suit to see just how nefarious Curtis’s actions were in the Cubbison matter and if his suspicious December 2023 resignation was related to the bogus Cubbison charges. According to Sara Reith’s KZYX report in December of 2023 (based on Eyster’s initial filing of charges against Cubbison): “The Sheriff’s office began the investigation into Cubbison and her co-defendant payroll manager Paula June Kennedy in September of 2022. That was shortly after a meeting where CEO Darcie Antle and County Counsel Christian Curtis began to suspect Kennedy of embezzlement. According to Eyster, they were also ‘suspicious of Ms. Cubbison’s demeanor at the meeting and at least some of her answers to questions posed to her about what she knew and when’.” Eyster’s original declaration when filing the charges against Cubbison said his suspicions had to do with “Cubbison’s recollections about [the use of] an obscure payroll code changing over time.” Apparently, when first asked about the use of the “obscure payroll code,” Cubbison simply couldn’t remember the particulars of who authorized it and when. And that was all it took for Eyster to file the felony misappropriation charges which lead to her unjustified suspension and which were dismissed by Judge Ann Moorman at the end of the 18-month long preliminary hearing on Tuesday.
THE FARM BUREAU used to do tours of the Potter Valley Diversion and the Eel River venues that feed the Diversion. Given Congressman's Huffman's Two Basin Plan, the sons and daughters of the soil might want to revive their instructive outings because for them, the water picture is a'changin'. If you've never seen the thousand foot-long tunnel through which flows diverted Eel River water, you will have a hard time understanding just how precarious the entire downstream supply is for water consumers from Potter Valley to Marin County. The tunnel was hand dug by Chinese labor and Jim Armstrong at the turn of the century, mostly to run turbines that would provide electricity for Ukiah. Since those modest beginnings, the tunnel, resembling in its dimensions a horizontal mine shaft, carries Eel River water to water-short Santa Rosa and numerous other downstream consumers as far south as Sausalito where the Sonoma County Water Agency sells it for a nice profit. If the tunnel collapses, and an earthquake of '06 power will do it, Lake Mendocino, most of the Russian River, and suburbanites from Cloverdale to Sausalito will die of thirst. Anyway, if you want to get the full grasp of the situation, plus get a look at the cockamamie “fish ladder” serving the diversion, take a drive out to Potter Valley some time.
THE COVELO HOTEL was torched some 15 years ago. By the time firefighters from near and far could get enough water on the unoccupied building, it was in ashes. A couple of drunks were duly arrested for torching it. (They said they were in there looking around using paper torches for light… Recreational arsons are a persistent feature of life in Round Valley.) There was serious talk of outside money fixing up the old hotel and re-opening it, but that never happened. The old hotel had been the site of some exciting 19th century history where it was the scene of at least two pivotal revenge shootings, one of which put an end to the infamous Wylacki John Wathen, a white man fluent in all the regional Indian dialects who'd become a hitman for George White, the 19th century “King of Round Valley.” White, a wealthy cattle rancher, became nationally infamous for murdering, or plotting to murder, several wives. He was locally infamous for killing off competing homesteaders and anyone else who crossed him. Wylacki John functioned as White's gunsel. A fancy dresser and just as impeccably well-mannered in an area not known for either the sartorial or social graces, Wylacki John's total kill-count could never be precisely known, but many of White's enemies went into the mountains surrounding Covelo and were never seen again. Until the early twentieth century, Round Valley was more closely tied to Trinity County, Weaverville being Covelo's twin city and the site of the courts where Round Valley matters were sorted out. The trail from Covelo to Weaverville was a long, hard slog — three nights out by horse — and the bold men who took on White were lucky if they made it to Weaverville to testify against him. Wylacki John had insulted the daughter of another man named White, and that man shot Wathen dead in the now dead Covelo Hotel.
THE WHITE HOUSE kicked HuffPost, Reuters and a representative of the foreign press out of the traditional “press pool” Wednesday, making good on press secretary Karoline Leavit’s pledge to pick which outlets cover the president in confined spaces. Ahead of Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, the three reporters were told they weren't allowed to join the rest of the pool by press aides. They were banished alongside the Associated Press reporter and photographer, who were ousted from the pool indefinitely earlier this month over the wire service’s refusal to use the term “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico.”
NIGHT LOADING PECKER POLES. On the Oregon Coast, awaiting the hurricane-force winds that are supposed to smack Astoria sometime today [Wednesday], I was awakened at 4 am from a dream of playing centerfield for the Orioles by loud metallic noises, thinking that part of the roof of the old motel had been shredded off. Well, the winds hadn’t arrived yet, but about 25 log trucks had queued up right outside my motel room door, their engines rumbling like flatulent bears in the fog, waiting to enter the log export docks, where they were being loaded up, one by one. I grabbed my Gore-Tex jacket — which is missing either the Gore or the Tex because I was quickly soaked — and my iPhone and stumbled out into the rain, and snapped a few photos of the malign art of log-loading in the dark until security chased me off the site under threat of either arrest or being loaded along with the logs and sent to a pulp mill in South Korea. Most of the logs were thin, almost emaciated-looking, another grim indication that the big trees in our temperate rainforest are mostly gone, and all that’s left are pecker poles and piss firs that log truck drivers 30 years ago — who prided themselves on driving three-log-loads — would have been embarrassed to haul. Perhaps that’s why they do it at night: to hide their shame.
(Jeffrey St. Clair)
MARX'S PROGRAM AS DESCRIBED IN THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Given the ignorant Magababble aimed at conflating liberals and communists, here's what the old boy was after:
- Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
- A heavy progressive income tax.
- Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. (To be applied these days to Americans who hide their money in offshore accounts.)
- Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. (Uh, not a good idea, Karl, although we pretty much already have it in the corporate media's fealty to the Democrats. Transportation? It does take a government to make the trains run.)
- Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. (Now more than ever. Corporate land is depleting the soil and making unhealthy fatties out of us as they go.)
- Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. (Even the bums would have to put their idle shoulders to the wheel of the potato patch.)
- Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. (Less concrete, more trees, more space for everyone.)
- Free education for all children in public schools. (We've got that although the political right would like to privatize it.)
TIME TESTED:
Last Sunday in Sacramento I visited “Time-Tested” books, a distributor of the AVA in years past. Scott Soriano, the long-time manager, “got married and moved to San Francisco,” according to Peter Keat, the long-time owner, who was behind the register. The inventory hasn’t changed drastically, the prices still reasonable. Fortunately for Keat, two restaurants directly across 19th street are extremely popular. Given a 45-minute wait for a table at The Morning Fork (the place to have brunch), and a used bookstore right across the street, wouldn’t you do some browsing?
(Fred Gardner)
ERNIE BRANSCOMB
I hope this “catch-all-comment-section” is the okay-place to mention the February False Spring. Sometimes erroneously called “unseasonably warm weather”. It is not only warm weather, it is predictably likely to happen along the north coast in most Februarys.
The Oldtimers knew it was a false spring and a cruel trick by Mother Nature to catch us off-guard, then blast us with the March snow storms, frosty mornings and then the, also predictable, Equinoctial Storm.
Brace yourself and resist the desire to stick something green and fragile into the ground for it to get frozen.
HAPLESS HASCHAK’S WATER EXTRACTION REGULATION PROPOSAL REJECTED BY ALL FOUR OF HIS COLLEAGUES
JIM SHIELDS
AVA,
Mike Geniella, has been doing an outstanding, award-winning series on the now infamous Cubbison affair. Mike’s the OG journalist in these parts and beyond.
God bless Judge Ann Moorman for recognizing that the people who brought this case forward were, at best, being exceptionally economical with the truth. It’s a ploy long practiced in these kinds of politically motivated prosecutions. And usually it works. But not this time.
As Chairman of our Laytonville Town Council at our meeting Wednesday night on Feb. 26, I asked District 3 Supervisor Supe John Haschak several questions regarding the Cubbison matter. Haschak is one of two BOS members who attend our meetings since Council area boundaries include all of the Third District and a portion of the 4th District (District 4 Supervisor Bernie Norvell did not attend).
Without repeating any of the explanatory comments I made at the meeting regarding Superior Court Judge Moorman’s dismissal of the case against Cubbison on Tuesday, Feb. 25, of the legally defective charges brought against Ms. Cubbison and payroll manager Paula Kennedy, I asked Haschak if the County has reinstated the two women to their positions.
Haschak replied that Cubbison was “reinstated yesterday.” (Feb. 25), the same day of Moorman’s ruling. When I asked him about Ms. Kennedy’s status, Haschak replied, “I can’t talk about that.”
When I stated, “I’m assuming you can’t reply because that’s counsel’s advice,” he responded in the affirmative.
I closed off our discussion by asking Haschak if the Supervisors are planning to send Cubbison and Kennedy public letters of apology given Judge Moorman’s dismissal ruling, buttressed by her scathing reproach of the conduct and performance of bullying high-ranking county officials and their criminal justice counterparts who were hell-bent on persecuting two innocent women. Again, Haschak politely declined comment.
SUPERVISORS HOIST BY THEIR OWN WHEREASES
Let’s take a quick look back at the original resolution that the Supervisors passed unanimously back in October of 2023:
Notice that the fourth whereas says that Cubbison’s suspension is effective “until such matter is resolved.”
It’s been “resolved.” The Cubbison criminal case is now officially dismissed. According to the resolution’s own text Cubbison must be returned to office. Immediately. With back pay. (The civil suit will be separate.) Will the Board even honor their own resolution? Will they act professionally and without rancor toward the exonerated elected Auditor? Will they undermine her and her office at every turn, withdrawing or delaying support or funding? Will they resume the Get Cubbison project with a different line of attack? Will they drag their feet in paying her the back pay she’s due? Will they even be courteous? Or will they circle the wagons and stonewall Cubbison’s return? Now that the case has become high profile (by Mendo standards), lots of people will be watching.
(Mark Scaramella)
THE CUBBISON AFFAIR, an on-line comment;
Wait, the DA wanted to use forfeiture money for a steakhouse dinner? Oh man, I thought this was all small-town politics at its worst before and now I know it was. LOL
BRUCE BRUGMANN, founding publisher of the SF Bay Guardian, lamented the death of a very good reporter named Pete Petrakis a few years ago. Brugmann said Petrakis, “developed the stories in the mid-1970s that became known to Guardian readers as the PG&E/Raker Act scandal,” a scandal drawn to Petrakis’s attention by the late Joe Neilands when “Pete learned of the scandal in the mid-1960s as a student of J. B. Neilands, a biochemistry professor and citizen activist at U.C. Berkeley.”
JOE NEILANDS AND HIS WIFE owned, and their son Tor Neilands still owns, a modest home on Nash Mill Road here in Philo, which the Neilands built themselves. Joe was right at the top of Reagan’s hit list when Reagan was governor, but survived that effort to get him as he continued to be a relentless thorn in the side of corrupt power, literally in the case of PG&E.
BRUGMANN CONTINUED: “Neilands had in the late 1950s started the campaign that ended up stopping PG&E from building a nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay. In the process of researching the Bodega Bay story, Neilands came upon an even bigger scandal: the PG&E/Raker Act scandal. After winning at Bodega Bay, Neilands did the research into the scandal and then brought it to me shortly after the Guardian began publication in 1966. This was a huge story and I remember saying, ‘Joe, why are you bringing a big story like this to me?’ He replied, ‘Nobody else will print it because of PG&E. You’re my only hope. If you don’t print the story, nobody will’.”
THAT WAS JOE, and he and Brugmann were on PG&E’s case ever since, a case against the mammoth utility that Joe always hoped to live long enough to see become a true public utility owned by the public and at last operated in the public’s interest.
RECENTLY, in the wake of wildfire disclosures and outrageous rate increases, some Bay Area city council’s have passed resolutions urging state lawmakers to take over PG&E in the public interest. So far, no bills have been proposed.
A READER WRITES: “The Tough Love vs. Spanking argument continues to defy resolution. Most of the American population thinks it improper to spank children, so I have tried other methods to control my kids when they have one of those moments. One method that I found effective is for me to simply take the child for a car ride and a talk. Some say it’s the vibration from the car, others say it’s the time away from distractions such as TV, Video Games, Computer, IPod, etc. Either way, my kids usually calm right down. Eye to eye contact helps a lot too. I have had a few very effective sessions with my son in the past. Proper use works with grandchildren, nieces, and nephews as well.) No thanks necessary. Just want to be of any help I can.”
MARK SCARAMELLA’S MENDO QUIZ:
- Within 500 miles, how many square miles comprise Mendocino County?
- To within one thousand, what is Mendocino’s population?
- Name Mendocino County’s incorporated cities.
- Within five years, what year was Mendocino County founded?
- Within a thousand, how many acres of grapes are there in Mendocino County?
(Multiple choice: 10,000, 13,000, 15,000, or 18,000?
- Name the last five elected District Attorneys. (half point for three)
- Name the last five elected Sheriffs. (half point for three).
- Which County official is responsible for checking the accuracy of gas pumps?
(Multiple choice: Sheriff, Ag Commissioner, Clerk-Recorder, or None of them— it’s done by the state.)
PEOPLE COMPLAIN that multiple choice answers for the population and size question questions would have been more fair, but The Major replies that the County’s physical size is “merely a matter of applying simple math — just estimate the County’s rectangular dimensions.” The best most people can do on Mendo-knowledge is a pitiable 3.5.
ANSWERS: 1. 3510. 2. 89,108. 3. Ukiah, Willits, Fort Bragg, Point Arena. 4. 1850 (Mendo was a founding County administered out of Santa Rosa for a few years until it was considered ready for self-government, that question remaining relevant to this day 5. About 15,000 down from a high of almost 17,000 a couple of years ago. 6. Eyster, Lintott, Vroman, Massini, Rauckaukas. 7. Kendall, Allman, Broin, Craver, Tuso. 8. The Ag Commissioner, who is also Commissioner of Weights & Measures.
BEFORE the internet ate the world’s brains, and everyone became his own newspaper, the print media, very generally speaking as applied to Mendocino County, were able to hold officials responsible, often getting the most egregiously corrupt and/or incompetent removed, even jailed. Used to be, Mendocino County was literally on the same page produced daily by the Santa Rosa-based Press Democrat. The PD was Mendocino County media, esp in the person of M. Geniella, with the Ukiah Daily Journal providing valuable back-up but unread beyond Ukiah. The, ahem, AVA, got in more than a few telling shots and, like its big brother the Press Democrat, was also read everywhere in the county. But that was it. But it was a pretty effective “it” in revealing official misconduct. Public radio appeared but seldom did effective local reporting and never, ever criticized officials. Then the internet deluge, with websites and blogs and facebook blips popping up everywhere, fatally fragging the Mendo attention span to where, today, we have the huge irony of media everywhere while a huge Ukiah-based injustice eludes sustained, effective attention — the grossest official misconduct in the history of the County going pretty much unremarked, nay unknown, to many voting citizens of Mendocino County, the upshot being the DA is able to divert public money to his personal pursuit of another elected and totally innocent public official while our derelict board of supervisors removes Ms. Cubbison from her elected position as County Auditor on the say-so of that DA, removing her without so much as giving her an opportunity to answer the bogus charge against her. This whole sordid show was, unsurprisingly, aided and abetted by the County’s chief executive officer and County Counsel, and it all happened in a place where there are more media of various kinds than ever before!
NOT TO BEAT you over the head with my pinko opinions on saving deputies and health centers and social security and medicare and public education and state parks and the rest of the good things we’ve have taken for granted in this country since 1936 presently under renewed assault by the orange wrecking crew, but ever since the New Deal saved the major capitalists from themselves major capitalists and their descendants have dreamed of destroying all tax-funded social amenities.
The difference between then and now is that the contemporary ruling class lacks the candor of their grandfathers, who used to say forthrightly things like, “We can pay half the working class to shoot the other half.” These days the RC funds both the libs and the magas while buying (on the cheap) elected reps at all levels of government while they use the dominant media, also owned by oligarchs, to convince the dummies that government is the problem, hence Fox News, most syndicated newspaper columnists, rightwing radio blowhards, internet fascists, and soft propagandists like NPR… The message being, “Gosh, there’s just no money anymore for any of this stuff.” If you’re a person of ordinary means and you believe there’s no money for you and yours, it’ll take a lot more than night classes to wise you up.
“HOLLYWOOD is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.”
— Gene Hackman
A READER ASKS: “How come you’re always taking pot shots at liberals? Aren’t you a liberal?” No, the editor sniffed, I’m not a liberal. How dare you? I’m a person of the left, a person who thinks it all pretty much comes down to economics, a question of who has what, with the great task being to take the money from the major haves to run the whole show in the true interests of all of us, those true interests being lifetime guarantees for everyone of food, shelter, work, medical care, education, effective mass transportation, affordable ball game tickets, and decent in-home assistance for grams and gramps. “But,” cry The Libs waving their videos of the Gandhi movie, “wouldn’t that mean a violent revolution?” Gratifying as it would be to put Donald Trump and other undesirables up against a wall, the basics of life could easily be accomplished simply by returning to the 95 percent tax on the big incomes we saw in this country up through the Truman years. That won’t happen any time soon because we’re represented by people who are funded by the super-rich, as are all major media all the way down to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat with their EJ Dionnes and David Brookses. What we’re left with are The Libs. They claim to represent the good and the true, but they don’t. They are major obstacles to the fundamental changes we need. The Libs focus on gender, sex, race and, in San Francisco, even foreskin issues, because that way they can avoid talking money. Unfortunately for US, there isn’t a left in America because the political right has shoved the discussion so far over to the advantage of the rich that a minority of financially secure, neener-neener, highly irritating, NPR-type people — Democrats — have somehow become the “left’’ when they’re barely liberals in any traditional sense of the term. Think this analysis is off? This country was criminally looted in 2008 and what did Obama do? He appointed the crooks who did the looting to “save” the system while his Justice Department went after Lance Armstrong, a bicycle racer, and Barry Bonds, a baseball player.
I USED TO BIKE to the ballpark from the Inner Richmond up, then down through the Presidio, east along Crissy Field, on through Aquatic Park, then the always fascinating tourist mobs of Fisherman’s Wharf, along the Embarcadero, and finally to 3rd and King, home of the (former) world champion Giants, a phrase I still wasn’t not quite used to, and one I can’t think about without lamenting my late brother, Ken, certainly among the most loyal Giants men in all of Northern California all the way back to the Giants at Seals Stadium. Really, how many people listen to ball games on the radio?
Wherever Ken is I hope he saw that championship season in 2010. It was cold and windy the whole way on that Saturday I went to the game, but not cold enough to deter two naked men on bikes at the Ferry Building. A sign on one guy’s bike said something about a world nude tour to protest fossil fuel. The Saturday crowd mostly reacted to the naked men with chuckles, but family groups were more disapproving. A black couple with three small boys in tow waited to cross the street a few feet from the naked guys. I’d also paused to monitor crowd reaction. As the naked guys remounted their bicycles and sped off across the street, one of the small boys said, “Momma, is those faggots?” Mom, unhappy at the unclothed spectacle, replied grimly, “I don’t know what they’re trying to prove,” as Dad remarked, “There’s probably a lot more of them in this city.”
The game that day was a 10-2 rout by the Reds, over in the first inning. Lincecum, one of the best pitchers in the game if not the best at the time, looked loaded to me, lost, not his usual overpowering self. Stoners don’t adopt the stoner look to play pretend-sies. Long hair and, on older men without much hair, those appalling little ponytails that translate: “Hey! I’m cool. I smoke the bazooka!” I prayed to the baseball gods that Lincecum hadn’t resorted to a pre-game pipe, but forgave him if he had, the pressures on the kid being so large and unrelenting. He said after the game that he thought he was “thinking too much.” Thinking too much can be dangerous in all kinds of contexts, but Tim quickly got back to not thinking and enjoyed another good year.
Yeah, now that you ask, it would be fine with me if there was a rule change that decreed you had to slide at home plate on close plays, although the collision that took poor Buster out was all the way within the traditions of the game. (Blocking the plate is now illegal since that terrible collision.) Much as I sympathize with Posey, I thought the subsequent vilification of Scott Cousins by a ton of baseball big shots for running over the popular Giants catcher was outrageously unfair to Cousins, a rookie and barely on a big league roster who simply did what ballplayers do in that situation — run over the catcher. Saturday, I sat up in View, the nosebleed seats. I’d only scored the ticket the previous day, and felt lucky to get it because the game was sold out. But I like it up there in the View with its vistas of the Bay, the big, slow boats hauling mast-high containers of plastic flowers from China to WalMart, the afternoon sun on the Berkeley-Oakland hills. The only drawback was the kid sitting next to me, a certifiable moron who kept up a running commentary to the apparently unrelated young woman seated next to him. He’d ignored me, but then I’m not a young woman. The young woman had made the mistake of asking the lad who he was. So he told her for the next hour, never once asking her a question. When Lincecum was yanked early on, as everyone around rolled their eyes and said a silent “Thank God,” the tedious youngster departed, but not before he’d told the captive girl (and all of us for rows around) that he was a college student from San Jose whose favorite tv show was Jersey Shore, a remark neatly revealing the true state of higher education in this country. He went on to say that he got “a hundred bucks a gig for d-jaying.” Then he named the songs he liked, a list so long it took him most of an inning to recite them. When he got into monologues about his fave pizza toppings it occurred to me he might be nuts, so I took a closer look. The boy did have a glazed look to him, but by that assessment lots of people would have to be declared 5150. As it is on the streets, it’s the luck of the draw at the ballpark.
THE GIANTS BASEBALL SEASON is almost upon us. Here’s how to experience the Giants ballpark. First off you never, ever pay for parking anywhere near the place, and you never ever give the phone monopoly even the imaginary satisfaction of calling the ballpark by their name.
What you do is: drive out to the beach and catch the N-Judah for a $2 ride downtown. The N drops you off at Willie Mays right at the ballpark's front door, or you can get off a block earlier at Orlando Cepeda if you're sitting on the left field side of the stadium.
Post-game on the N is sardine time until you get to the Embarcadero stop. You're only in the post-game transit mosh for a few minutes because most of the ballpark people get off to catch eastbound BART. The N will get you back at your car at the beach in 45 minutes, easy.
I either ride my bike to and from or I catch the N. And I always bring my own food. It's a sin to pay $9.50 for garlic fries and pay even more for a rubbery mystery meat hot dog or burger, and I never down so much as a single ten dollar beer because it's wise to have your wits fully about you in any sports mob these days, foreign or domestic.
At the end of the game, rather than doing a slo-mo meat sandwich shuffle all the way out of the park and into the street, you remain seated. First, and assuming the Giants won because Tony Bennett doesn't sing when they lose, you listen to Tony sing about how he left his heart on the cable car, and then you watch the thousands of seagulls circle overhead preparatory to their mass Hitchcockian swoop on the post-game negative food value remnants.
At the appearance of the gulls, you wait another 15 minutes to depart, by which time the place is pretty much empty except for those tweeker-looking guys running up and down the aisles collecting plastic Giants cups. That's when you make your way to the dank of the overflowed urinals from which you can then saunter on out of the park unencumbered by your fellow fans.
I often buy a ticket from a scalper guy on Third Street at the McDonald's parking lot with whom I've established a free enterprise relationship. San Francisco's a small city, so small you see the same people around and often run into people you know. I've known this scalper guy for years now. He'll sell me a ticket for the top of the stadium, my preferred spot, for 15 bucks when they're going for forty. He'd charge you at least fifty, but if you're not put off by appearances, these guys, presumed legal histories aside, are cool. (The Mitt Romney-looking characters are the ones who scare me.) If this particular scalper sold my newspaper when it was still in paper form, we'd have had twice the circulation.
My wife has become a big fan, but she doesn't like to go to the ballpark, especially at night. She watches on TV. Before her allegiance to the Giants, she was Niners only. She said baseball was too slow, too boring, like her husband of fifty years, not that she'd say so. But now, although still preferring football, she knows who's who at a glance, and always groans when certain players come up, which I tell her is very unfair because most of them are a good ballplayers, and a true fan never goes negative on the home team. She says she doesn't like the looks of their stance. My mother used to say she didn't like Nixon “because of his jowls.” But then I used to hyperventilate at the mere mention of Wes Chesbro. Millions of Americans make comparable political decisions based on appearances, which makes the appeal of that porcine voluptuary in the White House even more mystifying.
We were at the ballpark together for one Friday night game, a good one; the Giants won 4-3 in typically dramatic fashion. My wife sat through Tony Bennett leaving his heart in Frisco but she refused to wait for the seagulls, so we shuffled out with the crowd, borne along on a river of beery flesh.
The post-game crowd can get quite wild. It was wild that night, with the wildest-behaving people being young drunk women, one of whom was taking her clothes off at Third and Brannan as her “friends” chanted “Go! Go! Go!” The dudes, dressed like small boys festooned as billboards, were running into each other to get closer to the disrobing girl. The cops are clustered around the park, a fact known to the people predisposed to anarchy who know they're free to do whatever they want in the murk of the side streets.
One night, footing it up Third after a game, I saw a guy jump out of his car with a gun, which he brandished at some adversary visible only to him, but which put me to high-stepping outta there at a speed I didn't know I was capable of. I was surprised that most people just stood there looking for whatever would happen next, like a bullet in the kisser, I guess.
Night time Frisco is dependably surreal, please excuse the cliché, more surreal with the years, what with the size of the average citizen seeming to have tripled with millions more stuffed into creative costume changes. They all come out at night looking for whatever people have always looked for in the dark — sex, trouble and Friday night baseball.
BERNIE NORVELL FROM DC: Madeline Cline and I got to spend a couple hours with Robert Marbut discussing homelessness, substance abuse and mental health treatments. Also with us was Brandon Thomas who operates hundreds of successful centers around the country. His facilities exceed a 90% success rate and a very low rate of recidivism.
ELSEWHERE in today's cyber-paper, there's a brief history of recent events in Ukraine by Ted Dace. I don't pretend to be a scholar of that beset country, but Dace's history, accurate enough so far as it goes, leaves out the information that however contemporary Ukraine was formed, undoubtedly with CIA engineering, and it was certainly helped along by miscellaneous crooks like the Bidens, it's obvious that Ukranians want to be independent of Russia, certainly independent of Putin's Russia. If they didn't, you wouldn't get millions of Ukranians dying and risking their lives to repel the Russian invaders. The Trump Gang, natch, instinctively goes with Putin, placing our fragged country on the same side of the guy who shells apartment buildings.
RE THE CUBBISON FIASCO, Jean Arnold neatly sums up — “Shame is not a ‘thing’ anymore. I wouldn't bet on his [Eyster] accepting any blame for any of this expensive mess. He had to have been shameless at the time he plotted it (and when he kept trying to pass off his parties as training events). I can't imagine he's changed his persona since.”
DEADWIND is an interesting NetFlix series from Finland, mostly interesting to this viewer as a kind of travel guide to a country he knows nothing about. Replete with implausible occurrences and Americanized subtitles that you just know is not something the Finns would say — “Drop his ass” — a female cop character urges her male counterpart, still and all it held my enfeebled attentions.
FOR SIMPLY depressing viewing there's “American Murder; Gabby Petito’ Most of US know the story in broad outline, which is the sad story of an attractive, lively young woman who is psychologically occupied by her boyfriend, a creepy little man-bun character who murders her. As a couple, they struck this ancient mariner as unattractively narcissistic in the ostentatiously “happy” manner of silly, superficial people, all the while little mister man-bun is bullying the girl and beating on her. Why didn't she say something? That's the mystery. She wasn't without a protective family or the resourcefulness to liberate herself from her killler, but…. (Man-Bun's mommy is quoted to the effect, “You haven't heard his side of the story…”
WHEN I WAS A KID — wait, don't run! — my football coach, addressing a bunch of us in random life advice as he was wont to do, and often apropos of nothing previously said, advised, “Boys, women are like buses. There's always another one just around the corner.” This same coach several times wished me, specifically, bad fate. “Anderson, I want to be there when you get yours.” (I'm sure I provoked him.) Looking back, though, “inappropriate” as he could be, coachie's ad hominem cynicism seems more realistic life-prep advice than the love bombing the average kid endures these days.
ILLEGAL DUMPING REPORTING
From Mendocino Waste Management Authority (which has been turned over to City of Ukiah staff): If you see illegal dump sites in your community, be sure to let us know. If you are able to, take a picture, note the exact location using an address, a mile marker, or GPS coordinates, describe the approximate size of the dump site, and identify the illegally dumped materials. Send an email with all pertinant information to sstrader@cityofukiah.com to report illegal dump sites.
BROILER PARTY, TAKE TWO. DA Eyster returned this past January to the Broiler Steak House for another staff party so… Who paid for it? That’s the question of the day.
IT WAS EYSTER’S prior staff celebration at the Broiler that the DA tried to pass off as a staff “training,” charging the festivities to Mendocino County’s long-suffering taxpayers. Ms. Cubbison, elected County Auditor, challenged Eyster’s demand that the County pay for his New Year’s party that ignited Eyster’s failed campaign to oust her, featuring the longest preliminary hearing in County history, fattening the incomes of a raft of lawyers, all of them except Cubbison’s defense attorney, paid for out of the public’s disappearing purse.
AND DARNED if the DA didn’t return for another Broiler party, which may or may not have again been charged to the taxpayers. We’re trying to find out if the DA again tried to ding the taxpayers for this year’s debauch, but if he did, and with the vigilant Cubbison back at her post after her big win over the chiseling lawman, no way is our DA going to get away with it.
MIKE GENIELLA has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out who picked up the considerable tab: “Under California’s Public Records Act, please provide documentation of the costs of District Attorney David Eyster’s most recent gathering at the Broiler Steak House in January 2025, and how that expense was covered.”
AND THE COUNTY promptly wrote back: “Request accepted. Referred to District Attorney’s Office, Carmen Macias, administrative manager. Up to 10 days to comply.”
REFERRED, it seems, to the person who threw the party.
OF COURSE it’s entirely possible that Eyster, assuming at the first of the year that his purge of Ms. Cubbison was a done deal, again charged the taxpayers for his annual Broiler debauch. With Cubbison seemingly out of the way, and the beans being counted in Darcie Antle’s, ah, flexible CEO’s office, the chiseling Eyster may have figured he could again write his party off as a “training.”
UKRAINE AID: The United States is temporarily suspending all military aid to Ukraine, according to a senior administration official, who said the aid would not resume until President Trump determined that Ukraine had demonstrated a commitment to peace negotiations with Russia. The order takes effect immediately and affects more than $1 billion in arms and ammunition in the pipeline and on order. Mr. Trump’s directive also halts hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that Kyiv can use only to buy new military hardware directly from U.S. defense companies. The decision comes amid the fallout of a heated Oval Office meeting on Friday between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
— NYT late Monday
Trump’s halting of weapons aid to Ukraine stands in contrast to his administration’s approach to Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza. On Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was using an “emergency authorization” to bypass Congressional approval to send $4 billion of arms to Israel, including orders of nearly 40,000 2,000-pound bombs — powerful weapons that U.S. military officers say are unsuitable for urban combat.
— NYT late Monday
FIRST time I’ve ever disagreed with Caitlin Johnston and Taibbi as they denigrated Ukraine’s beset leader yesterday morning. Put alongside the clown show in the White House, Zelensky is positively Churchillian who, by the way, often dressed informally during the war years. Whatever Zelensky’s and Ukraine’s deficiencies, Putin is deliberately shelling civilians and Ukraine isn’t.
UKRAINE will have peace defined for them by Trump and Putin with exile or assasination for Zelensky, but the “peace” will probably consist of Russia keeping the predominantly Russian sympathizing area’s it’s captured with no NATO for Ukraine, and relief for average Ukranians and life for the Russian and Korean soldiers that Putin deploys in suicidal frontal assaults.
WHAT DO I KNOW? My credentials are pretty thin, for sure, but for all I or anybody else seems to know at this point is that the Ukranians just might go on fighting despite having been bludgeoned into rigged negotiations by the Trump Gang. Maybe Europe will make up for the loss of American help, and maybe it will all blow up into some kind of apocalypse. It all seems headed in the general direction of catastrophe, doesn’t it?
FROM the Guns or Butter perspective I’ve seen around, it’s not as if Trump wants peace in Ukraine so he can take all that money squandered on weapons and spend it on help for Americans freezing in the dark because they can’t pay their power bills. The arms industries won’t be laying off anybody as Israel’s mass murders and ethnic cleansing, funded by US, continues in Gaza and is now consuming the West Bank.
ONE OF MANY episodes I’ve always wondered about is the following: How did the kid turn out? The police report said mom was unhappy that not only had her son tried to kill her by putting Drano in her coffee, he’d done some joy-riding in her car and had gone on-line for sexual instruction. She had “disciplined the suspect by taking away certain privileges, such as no computer and no more playing sports at school.”
SO, YOU’VE got a frazzled mother with limited resources, financial and emotional, trying to raise a male child with no man in the family equation. Now lots of NPR-type people will say you don’t need the man in the child-raising equation — remember “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”? — but if the woman has a kid, the preponderance of scholarly opinion says boys and girls tend to do better with a mother and a father.
BUT TAKING A KID who likes sports out of sports is a huge mistake. You want your demon spawn at that age up on his feet and moving around, and even if he occasionally looks in on Debbie Does Dallas he won’t be visiting Debbie if he’s at the ballpark or in the gym.
EXCEPT FOR THE DRANO, which mom immediately realized wasn’t Coffee Mate, and the typically teen death threats, the lad didn’t seem unlike millions of adolescent American boys who grow up without a father to advise them as to who and what lurks in the erotic thickets of our sex-drenched land, not to mention a nearby dad who might help the kid to more or less steel himself for everything else sure to come at him in an imploding society.
OF COURSE this particular young American was likely to be a complete mental case when official Mendocino County was finished with him, and Mendocino County will emphatically be finished with him a minute after midnight on his 18th birthday when the funding for him ends.
JUVENILE MATTERS, I believe, are heard by Superior Court judge Cindee Mayfield. She seems like a smart, sensible person, but then lawyers are good at faking normalcy. Our courts have always had a psycho or two sitting up there all judgemental in black robes. Anyway, like all juvenile court judges, her honor is pretty much a captive of the helping pros she works with every day. And the proceedings are closed to the pesky public. “In the interests of the child,” natch.
MAYBE THE JUDGE got the boy into a stable, male-dominated foster home, but it’s much more likely the kid got the usual — a three-year shunt from serial foster homes until the magic birthday and out onto the streets to fend for himself, angry and without skills.
IT’S A BAD SYSTEM, much like the system surrounding it, but there’s so much money involved in “caring” for dependent children — seems like half of Ukiah is paid to just love the kids to pieces — that the system resists all reform and just keeps on failing, again much like the larger system that includes it.
ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] The rich and elite have won by getting the poorest and least educated to look at their fellow Americans as the enemy. My heart breaks for this country. But maybe that situation has been substantially caused by the liberal’s angry rhetoric that everyone who disagrees with them is a fascist, racist, xenophobe, etc or as Hillary Clinton put it, “a basket full of deplorables.” That seems pretty far along the way of making Americans see each other as enemies.
[1] Republicans are living and operating in a post-truth world. One obvious example of the lies and fraud they foist upon the public concerns the efficiency of two of the largest government programs designed to directly benefit the public: Social Security and Medicare.
The overhead and administrative costs to run Medicare are less than 4 percent of its spending; Social Security overhead and administrative costs are less than 1 percent. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency considers those statistics signs of waste and fraud is working to “improve” them by privatization, where overhead and administration costs run much higher.
Programs like Medicaid and Social Security show why government exists in the first place. The state performs essential functions that the private sector isn’t capable of doing or chooses not to do. It also protects the public and the public interest from private sector abuses; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which President Trump and his cabal have moved to shut down, is one of the agencies no longer looking out for individuals.
[2] Civilization, goes an old maxim, is never more than three meals away from barbarism—once the food deliveries stop, so does law and order. Therefore, the baseline of preparedness is as follows: Put all your support behind your local farmers, then become your own. A garden in every lawn should be standard. You can no longer trust anything from a corporation, so cutting out reliance on a retailer is a good place to start thinking about your resiliency. ‘Incorporated’ City water isn’t viable either for its quality or reliability, so wells must be dug (there is no resource more important in your life than clean water, hands down). Beyond that, begin ending your dependence on their enslavement protocol Federal Notes by creating local currencies and discovering the art of bartering, start stitching together webs of alliances with your neighbors for resiliency, defense, and resource sharing (they might grow what you do not and vice versa)—put the “common unity” back in community, and get control of those town councils and school boards (the one place we still hold all of the cards) and get your kids out of them. Finally: stop eating, listening to, and watching things that are bad for your mind, body, and spirit, and, if so inclined, spend a good chunk of your time on your knees each day.All of the above is a recipe for success. Let’s get to work building a future worth living in, together, because if we do not, Elon & Co will ensure we will not have one.
[3] I live in a small farming village where we barter most services. Everyone has goods or services to barter, in my opinion. I had a new ceiling fan put up and it cost me Two chuck roasts, a pork loin, a chicken and a dozen eggs.
[4] I laughed out loud at the “reporter’s” question (he’s actually nutball MTG’s boyfriend) as to why Zelensky didn’t wear a suit to the Oval Office — because this seemed “disrespectful”.
Are you freaking kidding me? President Musk regularly shows up at Oval Office and cabinet meetings dressed like every incel tech bro loser from Silicon Valley. The White House blob has become a confederacy of dunces and traitors.
[5] The tragedy of war is that the young men and women die fighting each other - rather than their true enemies back home in their capitals. —Edward Abbey
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go
—Suicide in the Trenches
[6] Part of the problem with air travel now is that all the Nam pilots aged out and there are now more non-military pilots than ever. Many of the military pilots have gotten into cargo captain positions so they don’t have to deal with the Greyhound in the sky cattle cars… One of my buddies flew 20 years in the military and went to Fed Ex for slightly less money than an airline because he gets better hours and doesn’t have to deal with doughy mouth-breathers in cut off shirts.
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