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SLIGHTLY COOLER, yet still hot conditions continue for Sunday. Gusty winds will continue through Sunday with less widespread and gusty winds by Monday afternoon. Warm and dry conditions for the first week of June are to be expected. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): I have a foggy 50F this Sunday morning on the coast. The satellite shot shows scattered fog out there but some must be over my place at 5am. Mostly clear & a breeze today, mostly clear for the new week as well.
2024: Oct 1.26" Nov 14.53” Dec 12.05”
2025: Jan 1.65” Feb 10.18” Mar 6.37” April 1.45” May 0.34”
YTD: 47.83”
LIFE AFTER THE POTTER VALLEY PROJECT - ‘THE WATER WILL NOT BE CHEAP’ - ‘ALL BOARDS’ MEETING HELD THURSDAY
by Justine Frederiksen
There are many unknowns regarding life after the Potter Valley Project, but one thing is certain: If diversions from the Eel River Watershed to the Russian River Watershed continue once the Pacific Gas and Electric Company successfully decommissions its hydroelectric plant in Mendocino County, any water still flowing through one of the most life-changing tunnels in the region will become a lot more expensive for humans to use.
“It’s not going to be free water that PG&E has abandoned conveniently into the Russian River; that will no longer be the case,” said engineer Tom Johnson, a consultant speaking at an “All Boards” meeting held at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center Thursday that featured most members of the Ukiah City Council, the Mendocino County Supervisors and other boards whose representatives make up the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission.
Because the “free water” that entire communities and industries have come to depend upon for nearly 12 decades was at the start just a by-product: An incredibly precious resource that was essentially dumped into the Russian River as “waste” after being used to make electricity.
“But that waste product brought life to our community,” said Scott Shapiro, legal counsel for the IWPC, explaining that PG&E has decided that the cost of operating the Potter Valley Project, “particularly of operating the dams, far exceeds its value. And stopping the project means taking out the dams, which are the way the water has been stored in the Eel River, specifically to bring into the Russian to generate power.”
Because the project generated power, Shapiro said, it is regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which will oversee PG&E’s surrendering of the hydroelectric plant, and will submit its application to do so by July 31.
“Now that the project is on this path, I’m told that the path cannot legally be undone now that we are on it,” Shapiro said, noting that one key success for the region is that PG&E’s application includes “the concept of continuing to divert water into this watershed through the New Eel-Russian River Facility, which was not a forgone conclusion.”
This new diversion facility, or NERF, will need to be built, Johnson said, because the “gravity-fed diversion will no longer work” without the dams, which he said “PG&E has been adamant” about removing. And after investigating a number of alternatives, he said, the Eel-Russian Project Authority (formed by a joint exercise of powers agreement between Sonoma County, Sonoma Water and IWPC) decided the best path was to build “basically, a pump station (that will) lift the water about 30 to 35 feet to the tunnel.”
While Johnson was explaining how much water the proposed facility could pump and when, noting that “the Russian River will no longer have the benefit of nearly year-round water flowing in the Upper Russian River, (because) without dams on the Eel River, water through the new diversion will only be available in the winter and spring months when sufficient water is flowing,” one attendee remarked on how much that pumped water is expected to cost.
“We’re paying about $18 an acre foot for water now, (but) we’re going to be paying about $200 to $300 per acre-foot when you’re through with this,” said the attendee. “You can’t farm on $200 to $300 for acre-feet of water and make any money.”
“Yes, it will cost to lift the water and put it through the tunnel, and to own and operate these facilities,” said Johnson, estimating that it would cost at least $40 million to build the diversion structure, then likely another $10 million a year to operate it.
“There are a lot of public funds available, probably not enough, so there will likely be some sort of a bond measure (needed to build it),” he said, noting that those estimates do not include the cost of increasing water storage, which is very much needed “as it doesn’t make sense to pump water that’s just going to get dumped down the river.”
The obvious place to store the water, he said, is Lake Mendocino, and the maximum amount that could be stored there currently would be about “60,000 acre-feet per year, but the reality is probably more in the 32,000 to 34,000 acre-feet range, so we’ve got to be able to store more water on the Russian River side.”
In addition to the uncertainties surrounding funding and storage, Johnson said the timelines for both the decommissioning of the existing hydroelectric plant and construction of any new water diversion facility are full of “best guesses” about multi-faceted government processes that could very likely take longer than expected.
“There’s a lot of regulatory agencies that are going to review a lot of things,” he said, describing a “28-month review process (involving) a lot of permits with a lot of uncertain timelines, but my best guess is we’re probably looking at probably 2031 to 2034 for when we actually have the start of construction (of the NERF).”
As far as any additional storage being provided at Lake Mendocino, consultant Eric Nagy explained that the latest study launched to “investigate” the possibility of increasing storage by potentially raising Coyote Valley Dam is in the “really early” stages of the very deliberate and methodical process that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers uses to determine the right path for reservoir changes.
“And the result is not guaranteed, as the (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) could determine the best alternative does not meet the federal threshold,” said Nagy, describing the Corps as spending a lot of time to fully understand “the costs, benefits and environmental impacts (of projects),” and estimating that the entire process could take up to five years, “or even longer.”
As for the decommissioning process for the PVP, 3rd District Mendocino County Supervisor John Haschak asked whether FERC had been affected by recent layoffs, and whether its “regulations (were) set in stone, or can they be manipulated, given the current (federal) administration?”
Johnson said his understanding was that “FERC is relatively unscathed (in terms of layoffs), and that the federal regulations outlining the decommissioning process are the result of “100 years of case law, (so it would) probably literally take an act of Congress” to circumvent the process at this point.
When Hascak pointed out that it will be quite an adjustment for people who are now paying only $18 per acre-foot for water to potentially pay $312 per acre-foot for water, Shapiro said “unfortunately, there will be an economic adjustment, but the alternative is no water. It is unfortunate, but it is either (the higher cost), or there isn’t any water.”
(The Ukiah Daily Journal)
LAST CHANCE: FILL A BAG FOR ONLY $5 starting at noon!
SUPERVISOR MAUREEN MULHEREN:
Thursday night there was an all Boards meeting of IWPC (Inland Water Power Commission). The agencies represented were the County of Mendocino Board of Supervisors, Ukiah City Council, Redwood Valley County Water District, Potter Valley Irrigation District, the Russian River Flood Control & Water Conservation District. We received an update on the PG&E decision to decommission the Potter Valley Project and remove Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam. What the next steps are to secure a water supply for the Russian River interests; including more water storage in Lake Mendocino and/or Potter Valley and the new Eel-Russian Project Authority (ERPA) which will lead the design, development and operation of the New Eel-Russian Facility (NERF). There are a lot of FAQ on the IWPC website and more is being added and updated as this projects move forward. Here is the link: https://mendoiwpc.com/iwpc-pvp-updates
DUCEY DESPITE
A Point Arena Resident writes:
So, Ms. Ducey accepts a budget quarreled by the Mill Street reconstruction project under the sign off affair of Paul Andersen and Richard Shoemaker. I was there on the reconstruction project, and I witnessed the open checkbook to pay for poor planning by the hired city engineer SHN; real shitbag engineers doing the clandestine orders of Shoemaker and Andersen. If only the folks of PA had any idea of how these shills raped them with Granite Construction, led by poor engineers' direction they would applaud her efforts.
POLITICS, PRIORITIES AND PINCHES
by Jim Shields
It's impossible not to recognize the seemingly institutional dysfunction in the governing process whether it be at the local, state or federal level.
Our elected representatives and their staffs far too often flummox themselves and disrupt the orderliness of the governing process by creating problems seemingly out of thin air.
Too many elected officials seemingly go out of their way to create problems when their primary purpose is to solve problems. Most people don't have lofty expectations of their elected representatives. Most would settle for an adaptation of the Physician's Oath, “First, do no harm.”
Most politicians don’t understand their role as elected officials. Elected officials are supposed to carry out the wishes/demands of clear majorities of constituents unless what they’re asking is unlawful or totally unfeasible, neither of which are applicable with 99.9% of the issues they deal with. It’s not the elected official’s job to substitute their judgment for that of their constituents when those constituents overwhelmingly demand a different course of action than that contemplated by their representative.
If you don’t mind, I’ll share several stories with you about Johnny Pinches, because he truly understood this critical dynamic between elected officials and their constituents.
What follows are excerpts from columns I wrote when Pinches was on the Board of Supervisors.
Current supervisors might find an insight here or there to reflect on.
Pinches frequently warned his Board colleagues, “We’ve got to do a better job holding Department heads accountable, because if we don’t do it, who is?”
Here’s an example of what he was talking about.
Back in the early 2000s, Pinches hastened the retirement of Budge Campbell, who ruled over the county Department of Transportation for 30 years.
For years Campbell ran DOT without even minimum oversight from the Board. By the Supes own admission, they deferred to Campbell because they found DOT’s operation, especially the intricate financial set-up and related Byzantine accounting system created by Campbell, too perplexing for them to get involved in.
Pinches doggedly went through DOT’s budget and discovered a special account with over $2 million of so-called non-designated funds. This was money that no one knew existed until Pinches found it. It was a critical source of revenue because at the time Mendocino County was broke, but it was just sitting there, unused, in what Campbell called a “rainy day account.”
Pinches argued the money should be liberated to fund what he termed “constituent projects” out in the rural areas. He wanted the funds spent on repairing and upgrading roads. Campbell fought Pinches tooth and nail over control of his budget. At one point Campbell told the Supes, “You know, somebody should consider that maybe ol’ Budge knows what he’s talking about and you (the Supes) should listen to him.”
Signaling that Campbell’s battle was lost, Supe Seiji Sugawara stated, “I wouldn’t say he (Campbell) pulled the wool over our eyes, but the fact is we didn’t fully recognize the implications of the facts.”
With that admission on the record, the rest of the BOS had no choice but to back Pinches. The special account was liberated for the so-called constituent projects. Budge Campell’s secret “rainy day” fund was split evenly between the five supervisors. Pinches used his share to chip-seal Branscomb Road from the town of Branscomb to the Coast. The other Supes spent their found money on their “pet” road projects.
Pinches led the fight to block a proposal from the Department of Social Services cutting general assistance payments to the needy. The DSS proposal arose during the heady days of Clinton’s so-called “Welfare Reform.” Pinches shamed his wavering colleagues into supporting his opposition when he juxtaposed spending priorities of the Feds with the realities of administrating welfare at the county level of government. “If we can afford to build billion-dollar Stealth bombers we don’t need,” he stated, “we can help our people. Welfare reform should cut back on administrative costs not on the few dollars that go to the people on general assistance.”
Pinches also locked horns with DSS Director Allison Glassey over a mid-1990s deal with Fort Bragg tycoon Dominic Affinito. The transaction called for Affinito build a new DSS facility in the coastside town, which he would then lease to the county. Glassey told the Supes there would be little cost to the county since the state would pay for 85 percent of the lease expense. She described the basic deal as a 20-year lease with Affinito that would pay him $16,423 per month for the first year. Each successive year thereafter, the rental payment would increase by 3.5 percent. At the end of the 20-year lease, taxpayers will have paid Affinito approximately $5.5 million for a building that cost $2 million to construct. Pinches called the proposal “a great deal if you’re a developer but a lousy one for the taxpayers — they’re getting ripped off.”
Pinches argued that it would make more sense — and a bargain for the taxpayers — for the county to construct its own building but was unable to sway fellow Supes, who voted to OK the deal. The Board majority defended the Glass Beach project by arguing that since 85 percent of the lease payments were funded by state tax dollars, the remaining expense was minimal to the county. Pinches sarcastically rejoined he wasn’t aware that county and state taxpayers were separate groups: “I thought government took money from the same taxpayers. I’ll remember that the next time the IRS asks me why I haven’t paid my federal taxes. I’ll tell them here in Mendocino County we only pay county taxes, the rest is all free tax money that comes from other groups.”
Pinches may have lost the fight but he was right then, and he’s right now.
There are numerous other instances where the Laytonville cowboy collided with the establishment over issues and policies where the public was getting a raw deal. His efforts assisting a neighborhood group opposing a monopolistic garbage transfer station in north Ukiah are well known. He successfully picked up the cudgel in behalf of people opposed to Caltrans’ use of herbicides. He used the BOS dais as bully pulpit to excoriate the gross mismanagement of the railroad by the NCRA. And, of course, there’s his long-standing war against the Pot Wars and his calls to legalize weed.
“The existing marijuana laws are the best price support system that I have ever seen for a farm product,” quipped Pinches. “They've driven the price of marijuana up higher than the price of gold.”
A couple of years ago, in the wake of the abysmal failure of both state and county cannabis legalization, Pinches said to me, “You were right about what a mess legalization has become. You think growers look up in the sky and wish those helicopters were still flying around?”
(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, [email protected], the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Fletcher is a big ol’clumsy goofball who identifies as a lap dog. He came to the shelter with two other dogs, so he may be able to live with another social canine housemate. Fletcher knows sit, is mellow indoors and seems to love everyone he meets! Fletcher does pull a bit on-leash, but we think with a little basic obedience training, that problem can be solved quickly. This uber-handsome dog is eager to please and very attentive to people! Fletch is a Rottie mix, 5 years old and 70 pounds of hunky cuteness. Fletcher is one of our longer-stay dogs, and we’d sure like to find him his new home.
To find out more about Fletcher and all of our adoptable dogs and cats, head to mendoanimalshelter.com
To set up a meet & greet with one of our great dogs, call 707-467-6453, or drop by the shelter at 298 Plant Road in Ukiah.
You can begin the adoption process on our website by filling out the Adoption Application.
Check out our FACEBOOK PAGE at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093510460862, and please share our posts!
The shelter dog kennels are now open to the public on Saturdays, from 10 to 2:30, closed from 1 to 1:30 for lunch. Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!
MARK YOUR CALENDARS for Saturday, June 7, when the Ukiah Shelter will be participating in California Adopt-a-Pet Day. There'll be franks, drinks, chips, nosework and other training demos, raffles, prizes and more. Plus, adoption fees will be waived for all spayed/neutered dogs and puppies and cats or kittens who are ready to go home! Come on down and meet our canine and feline guests, and maybe your new best buddy. Fun for the whole family! Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!
CHANGE OUR NAME - FORT BRAGG
June 10, 7 p.m. in the Community Room of the Fort Bragg Library, 499 East Laurel Street.
Our third annual Essay Contest winner will receive his prize and read his winning essay. The essayist is a Fort Bragg High School graduating senior. Congratulations!
Also Guest Speaker Nathan Rich
Nathan Rich is of Dakota / Muscogee / Filipino / Irish descent. Born in Oakland California, Nathan will share his family’s history, their challenges and triumphs to build community and maintain a healthy cultural identity in an ever changing world.
Nathan’s experiences of being raised in a Native Community in the diversity of the Bay Area provides a glimpse into the value of indigenous commitment to healthy communities.
29TH ANNUAL FORT BRAGG QUILT SHOW!
June 28-29, 2025, 10am–5pm Saturday, 10am-4pm Sunday, $10 Entry fee- includes both days!
We are excited to announce the 2025 Fort Bragg Quilt Show, “Quilts for All Seasons”. The show will be held at Dana Gray Elementary School in Fort Bragg, California-a perfect venue as it has excellent lighting and plenty of rooms for special exhibits, displays, classes, and vendors.
California’s North Coast is known for having stellar quilters, both modern and traditional, who have an eye for color and design. Over 175 quilts will be on display by local artists, featuring everything from hand quilting and embroidered designs to appliqué and paper piecing.
This year’s featured artist is Ronnie Kemper. Like many quilters, she is self-taught. She especially enjoys working with woven cottons, linens, and Japanese textiles. She says that quilting is her Zen—it feels like meditation. She finds her inspiration in the natural world, especially the place she calls home. A recent quilting trip to Kyoto deeply inspired her; witnessing traditional dyeing and weaving techniques in Japan added new depth and richness to her work. Ronnie’s quilts have been shown and sold at Highlight Gallery, Partners Gallery, Gallery Mendocino, Fabrications, and the Pacific International Quilt Festival.
Our vendors complement the show with creative offerings that include beautiful fabrics, stunning jewelry, and of course, quilting supplies. In addition, you can enjoy the show while your scissors are being sharpened.
As a prelude to our quilt show, Ocean Wave Quilters hosts an annual Fort Bragg Quilt Walk. Over 100 quilts are displayed in local businesses and restaurants as well as the library and hospital from the end of May until after the Fourth of July. Look for the Quilt Walk signage on the front windows of participating businesses.
For a list of places to stay close to the show visit our website at: https://oceanwavequilters.com/fort-bragg-quilt-show/. You can also find a list of interesting activities to do in the area while you are visiting. Also on our website, you can view our 2025 Opportunity Quilt “A Quilt for All Seasons”.
We look forward to seeing you in June! Come to the show and stay to celebrate the Fourth of July!
For more information, please reach out to us through our website at oceanwavequilters.com
ED NOTES
NOT TO BE too ancient grumbling codgery about it, but to get as old as I have is to be a stranger in a strange land. Suddenly us geezers find ourselves in a social context where we share zero cultural assumptions with young people. The under-forties stare back at something I've said (when I could still talk), something I assumed was commonplace and inoffensive, basic Americano lingua franca. I asked a young college person if the local media slime had been in touch with her regarding a local scandal. “Media slime?” she wondered. “What's that?” Well, that would be me, or anyone else from the County's papers or radio stations. “Oh,” she said, not getting it. My trite (an aged) ref to media slime was, of course, the media's own little joke about how we're perceived by the general public, being one step down from lawyers.
I REMEMBER A STORY in the New York Times describing an event at the then-Navarro Boy Scout Camp called ‘Camp Grounded,’ “Which prohibits phones, computers, tablets and watches, as well as the use of real names.” Several hundred young sillies attended and, presumably, somehow survived a couple of sybaritic days without their phones. And just a couple of weeks ago, outside media was full of stories about a young woman hanging by her hair from a redwood at Navarro, thus becoming an entry in the Guiness Book of Records.
A READER asks, “I have heard that haggis is so foul that even many Scots refuse to eat it. Is that just English slander or is it true?” Both, probably. Not being an adventurous diner myself, I didn't search out the national dish during my trip to the Olde Country, nor was it thrust upon me. Scones are also supposed to have originated with our wild tribes, but the scones I consumed in Selkirk were radically inferior to those available at Mosswood and the General Store right here in Boonville. The Scots truly know how to make whiskey, though, without which their long, cold winters would be longer and colder.
MEMORIAL DAY in Vermont, a reader writes: “I communed with my fellow citizens for a few hours at a little beach in a Vermont state park. It was a family kind of place. The mommies and daddies were putting on a competitive tattoo display (along with competitive eating). So many skulls, Devil heads, snakes, screaming eagles, flags, and thunderbolts. I suppose they acquire these totem images to ward off some apprehended greater harm, the metaphysically inchoate forces marshalling at the margins of what little normal life remains in this nation of rackets, swindles, and tears. All was nonetheless tranquility, there by the little lakeside, with the weenies grilling and the pop-tops popping. A three-year-old came by where I was working on my tan on a towel in the grass, supine. He asked me if I was dead. Not yet, I told him. Behind him a skull smoking a doobie loomed in blue and red ink on his daddy’s thigh. My people. My country.”
RECOMMENDED READING: “A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture” by Alexander Cockburn. Cockburn, a frequent visitor to Boonville, was the last of the political writers who was also a very good writer, much better than Christopher Hitchens to whom he was often compared and, unlike Hitchens, Cockburn was a true enemy of empire to the end. There aren't many political writers I go out of my way to read. (None, at the moment.) Today, it's all term-paper prose. Cockburn often complained to me about what bad writers many of his CounterPunch contributors were, and how much time he had to spend doing basic editing of their stuff. Cockburn was always a writer I'd read the instant I got it, a writer I always looked forward to. His prose was alive. He was alive, what used to be called an “all-outer.” He was robbed of another decade or so, but in the seven he lived he probably packed in more than ten people. He uniquely combined information with a lively and even elegant prose. And not just on politics; he was lively and interesting on a whole range of subjects. What you won't read in all the reviews of his last book is how Cockburn, in the final ten years or so of his life, was non-personed by much of the left, especially the lock-step sectors at places like the Pacifica Network, the sanctified Amy Goodman and Democracy Now. The Nation cut his word count way back as it went all the way over to a spine-free Clinton-Obama-ism. They wanted him to take it easy on Democrats because, boiled down, Democrats are better than Republicans! And so on, as left media disappeared faster than the left itself. He was often scathing about the personalities of the talk show left, the people who've become rich “speaking truth to power,” in the fatuous phrase of the self-aggrandizing, and why the publisher chose to apply that turgid quote from Greg Palast to Cockburn on the book's back cover means Cockburn didn't get a look at it before he died. No way he'd have approved it. Cockburn was the real thing, a lion of opposition all his days. The would-be little Lenins hated him of course, and he mopped the floor with mainstream media figures on those occasions he was permitted to go head-to-head with one of them. He was intransigent, never gave one inch all his days, and this book conveys him perfectly.
“THE DREARIEST place on any campus is the J-school, and whenever any young person comes to me to write a testimonial for them to get into journalism school I rail bitterly at their decision, though I concede that these days a diploma from one of these feedlots for mediocrity is pretty much mandatory for anyone who wants to get into mainstream journalism.”
COCKBURN said that, that and many other right-on assessments of contemporary reality, never hesitating to criticize his allies. He'd call me up when I'd written some faulty something to let me know about it, which means he called me a lot, and that's what I think I admired most about him, that he never let anyone slide. Every minute with that guy was an adventure. I'll always be proud we were friends.
LANDSLIDE KILLS ROAD WORKER IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
Slide activity has been impacting the highway for several months
by Matt LaFever
A contractor’s employee doing work on a Caltrans emergency project was killed early Saturday morning during an active landslide along state Route 36 in Humboldt County, officials confirmed.
The death, first reported by local news outlet Redheaded Blackbelt, occurred around 5 a.m. east of Swimmer’s Delight, according to a statement provided to SFGATE by Manny Machado, spokesperson for Caltrans District 1. The worker’s identity has not been released pending notification of next of kin. The California Highway Patrol is investigating the circumstances of the death, Machado said.
Caltrans announced a full closure of Route 36 in the affected area, with no estimated time of reopening. “Route 36 is FULLY CLOSED east of Swimmer's Delight … due to an active slide,” Caltrans District 1 posted on social media at 7:56 a.m.
Machado confirmed that slide activity has affected Route 36 for several months, and Caltrans has been working to stabilize the slope and keep the road open.
Route 36 is a winding mountain highway, about 225 miles north of San Francisco. It splits from U.S. Highway 101 in Alton, just south of Fortuna in Humboldt County, and heads east through the county’s rugged interior.
The route follows the Van Duzen River through the forested communities of Carlotta, Bridgeville, and Dinsmore before climbing into the Trinity National Forest. From there, it continues across five additional counties, Trinity, Shasta, Tehama, Plumas and Lassen, connecting remote mountain towns across the northern tier of the state.
UNEXPLAINED CALIFORNIA PLANE CRASH EXPOSES FLAW IN AVIATION OVERSIGHT
Backcountry airstrips throughout California are basically the wild west of aviation
by Matt LaFever
After a fatal plane crash in October 2023 claimed the lives of two Utah residents, investigators were left with a haunting question: How could a seasoned commercial pilot fly straight into a remote California mountainside?
Last month, a new report from the National Transportation Safety Board offered a disturbing clue. It suggested that the Federal Aviation Administration’s own guidance for the remote airstrip may have omitted crucial warnings about the challenging environment awaiting pilots, details that could prove the difference between safety and disaster.
For Kyle Porter, the 28-year-old son of Vaughn Porter, the pilot in the crash, the explanation offers little comfort as he mourns his father, who committed his life to flight.
“It’s always been planes and flying and air shows and pictures and paintings of their planes in our houses,” he told SFGATE by phone. “It feels like our whole life kind of revolves around aviation.”
Aviation isn’t just a profession in the Porter family; it’s a legacy shaped by loss. Kyle said his grandfather died in a plane crash, as did one of his father’s close friends. Those tragedies made safety paramount for his father, Vaughn.
“He wasn’t a cowboy pilot,” Kyle said. So when news struck of the fatal crash 2,000 miles from home, Kyle couldn’t make sense of it.
“I couldn’t figure out how he possibly could have made a mistake,” he said, “because it seemed like he always was on top of everything.”
That tragic day
As described in the NTSB’s final report, on the afternoon of Oct. 20, 2023, Vaughn, 54, and his girlfriend, Jaime Redford Rust, 52, departed Utah’s Heber Valley Airport shortly after 12:30 p.m. Their destination was Shelter Cove, a fog-prone airstrip in the southwest corner of Humboldt County, nestled along California’s remote Lost Coast.
After flying for more than four hours, the couple reached the coast at about 4:45 p.m. Instead of beginning a descent into Shelter Cove, Porter stayed aloft. Dense cloud cover may have obscured the landing site, forcing him to reroute.
He turned inland toward Round Valley Airport, a small rural airfield near Covelo in the northeast corner of Mendocino County — gateway to the vast Mendocino National Forest — and surrounded by rugged peaks, roughly 75 miles southeast of Shelter Cove. There, Porter refueled and prepared for the final leg with Rust.
Taking off westbound from Runway 28, the initial climb appeared normal. But a nearby witness told NTSB investigators the plane barely cleared the trees by 20 feet before banking sharply to the left. The turn quickly steepened to a dangerous angle, somewhere between 70 and 80 degrees. “As it was banking, it started coming lower,” the witness said in the report, describing the aircraft descending rapidly as it turned into the hillside.
Seconds later, the plane slammed into the mountainside and burst into flames, claiming the lives of both Porter and Rust. The wreckage was consumed in a post-crash fire, leaving little behind.
How could this happen?
The NTSB identified the probable cause of the crash that ended the lives of Porter and Rust as “the pilot’s failure to maintain clearance from trees after entering a steep banked turn for unknown reasons. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s decision to take off toward rising terrain.”
Vaughn left no flight plan and made no contact with family during the trip. The full reasons for his decisions, which had fatal consequences for both himself and Rust, remain unknown. Still, for someone with tens of thousands of flight hours, a commercial license as a JetBlue pilot and, as his son Kyle said, “plenty of mountain flying experience,” the tragedy raises questions.
Key among them was Vaughn’s decision to use Runway 28. According to the NTSB report, a resident near the runway told investigators that aircraft typically depart to the east using Runway 10 over “mostly flat” terrain. But Vaughn chose the opposite: a westward takeoff that put him on a direct path toward steep, unforgiving mountains.
More puzzling, shortly after liftoff from Runway 28, Vaughn made a left turn, opposite the right-hand traffic pattern recommended in the Federal Aviation Administration’s chart supplement. It was a baffling deviation from protocol for a man his son described as someone who “always erred on the side of caution.”
Further deepening the mystery, the conditions that day were ideal for flying. According to a witness cited in the NTSB report, “the skies at the accident airport were clear with little to no wind at the time of the accident,” eliminating adverse weather as a factor in Porter’s unusual flight path.
One witness reported hearing a “popping” sound before the crash, prompting speculation about mechanical failure. However, investigators found no such evidence. A post-crash examination of the aircraft and engine revealed no pre-impact mechanical issues. Furthermore, toxicology testing performed on Vaughn Porter was negative for drugs and alcohol.
Another theory NTSB considered was a shortened takeoff. Investigators couldn’t confirm whether Vaughn began his roll from the very end of Covelo’s 3,670-foot runway or a closer taxiway near the fuel pumps. If it were the latter, he would have only had 2,400 feet, which might not have been enough to safely get airborne.
What is clear is that the final moments of the flight ended in a steep, fatal turn, offering little chance for recovery.
Frank Delosso is a seasoned Northern California pilot who knows the Covelo airport well. He’s flown in and out of it more times than he can count. He explained that the biggest obstacle is hard to miss. “Visually, if it’s a clear blue day and you’re leaving on 28 out of Covelo — I mean, there’s obvious there’s a big mountain in front of you,” he told SFGATE.
In the aftermath of the crash, Delosso asked the question many others have: “Why did he take off to a mountain?”
‘Insufficiently described’
The NTSB report puts blame on Porter.
“Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s decision to take off toward rising terrain,” the investigators wrote.
Pilots rely on sectional charts and their accompanying chart supplements to navigate. These tools outline terrain, airports and critical flight information, and were the resources Vaughn would have used when flying in and out of Covelo. According to the NTSB, one of those tools failed him.
The agency sharply criticized the FAA’s chart supplement for Covelo Airport, saying that it “insufficiently described” the terrain west of Runway 28. It “failed to include any description of the peaks and valleys immediately off the end of the runway,” the report states, and omitted mention of a 4,000-foot mountain peak just 1 nautical mile from the runway’s end.
NTSB
The FAA appears to have taken that criticism seriously. A comparison between the October 2023 chart supplement (available at the time of Porter and Rust’s flight) and the current version shows a clear update. Today’s version now warns that the airport is in a valley surrounded by terrain and mountains. Mountain flying experience is “strongly” recommended. That language was not included in the chart available at the time of the crash.
FAA spokesperson Cassandra Nolan made a clear distinction between the two tools pilots use to understand terrain. Chart supplements provide “runway dimensions, communication frequencies, navigation aids, services available, and special procedures,” she told SFGATE by email.
Sectional charts, she emphasized, show “mountain contours, elevation gradients, and obstacles” to help “pilots safely navigate terrain, especially in mountainous regions.”
The subsequent update to the Covelo chart supplement, however, addressed more than just basic airport data. After the NTSB deemed the Covelo supplement insufficient, the FAA updated the document, adding a warning about mountainous terrain.
NTSB spokesperson Peter Knudson told SFGATE via telephone that while the chart supplement deficiency was considered relevant and material to the investigation, it was not explicitly listed in the “probable cause” section. Therefore, the NTSB did not formally deem it a “contributing factor.”
Delosso cut to the chase regarding the chart supplement’s real-world impact. For him, in clear conditions, what a pilot sees with their own eyes trumps any textual warning. “If they would have put ‘there’s a mountain in front of you’ on the chart supplement,” Delosso told SFGATE, “I don’t think that would have made a difference.”
‘Anytime we find a safety issue, we will address it’
The Covelo chart supplement’s insufficiency raises a bigger question: How many of America’s rural airports are missing critical details that pilots need to fly safely?
Most of these backcountry airstrips fall into what’s called Class G airspace, essentially the wild west of aviation. There’s no radar, no control tower and no required communication. Pilots fly by sight and charts, relying on clear weather and visual cues from the land such as river bends, ridgelines and tree shadows.
SFGATE asked the NTSB whether the Covelo findings might prompt a broader review of FAA chart supplements for these rural zones. “This was more of a ‘one off’ kind of finding with the chart,” Knudson said, adding that the NTSB is “not resourced to do a study of all their charts. That said, anytime we find a safety issue, we will address it.” This suggests that these kinds of omissions may only get noticed when a crash makes them impossible to ignore.
For Kyle, still mourning his father after the October 2023 crash, that kind of gap in oversight is hard to understand. “It feels kind of two-faced,” he said, “because the NTSB, or rather just the FAA, you know, holds themselves to this high standard of safety, but then when it comes to making sure that things are properly documented, it’s not on the top their list, which just seems very asinine to me.”
He added, “Seems kind of wild to me.”
(SFGate.com)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, May 31, 2025
MELISSA CROW, 37, Willits. Public nuisance.
CLIFFORD FORD, 70, Willits. Hit&run resulting in injury, suspended license.
LAZARO HERNANDEZ-SANTIAGO, 72, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
CHRISTIAN PEDERSEN, 24, Willits. Domestic battery, false imprisonment, damaging wireless communication, domestic violence court order violation, probation revocation.
CYNTHIA PHILLIBER, 33, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, battery on peace officer, probation revocation.
WILLIAM SCHEMPF, 36, Ukiah. DUI.
DAMON SHORT, 47, Fortuna/Ukiah. Controlled substance, under influence.
RYAN SUNDSTROM, 26, Fort Bragg. Grand theft, taking vehicle without owner’s consent.
UNDAMMED: KLAMATH RIVER RUNNERS CELEBRATE SALMON RETURN AFTER LARGEST DAM REMOVAL PROJECT IN HISTORY
by Dan Bacher
The 22nd annual Salmon Run on the Klamath River, from May 22-25, 2025, was one for the history books. Under the theme “Undammed,” the run honored the first return of salmon following the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.
Four PacifiCorp dams were removed on the Klamath in 2024, allowing Chinook salmon, coho salmon and steelhead to ascend into the upper river above the former dam sites for the first time in over 100 years.…
MARCHING WITH PRIDE
Editor:
In 1974 I became a cop because I wanted to help people. While patrolling one shift I decided to count the number of times I was called names or given one-finger salutes. Three hours later, after reaching 200 times, I stopped. Many people could not see past the badge to the human beneath. I vowed to make a difference.
Fast forward to the early 2000s when as chief I was approached by a number of employees in the Santa Rosa Police Department who wanted to support gay pride by walking and wearing uniforms in the local parade. The answer was easy. For our community and our department.
Law enforcement in California has made great strides in community inclusiveness, but with much more work to do. With thousands of agencies across this nation, the brush they are painted with is broad. As we experience cruelty emanating from our White House, it is important that we not inadvertently add to it.
Santa Rosa has recently struggled with having cops in our schools. Now, it is struggling with having cops in one of our parades (“Divide over parade rules,” May 24). I want to thank the Sonoma County Pride board for standing up for inclusiveness.
Mike Dunbaugh
Chico
GIANTS BLANKED by Miami’s flashy D; Robbie Ray gem ends in first loss
by Shayna Rubin
MIAMI — Robbie Ray did all that he could.
Whipping his new Tarik Skubal-inspired changeup for 12 swing-and-misses, Ray spun the Miami Marlins off-balance for seven innings. He struck out nine batters, gave up just two hits and only ran into trouble when he issued two of his three total walks. That’s when Javier Sanoja hit a two-strike knuckle curveball into center field, scoring a run in the second inning.
The single run is perhaps just a blip in any other game, but became a massive hole given the San Francisco Giants’ woes at the plate. Despite the Giants’ best efforts to scratch a single run on the board, they lost 1-0 to the Marlins on Saturday afternoon, handing Ray his first loss of the year and the team’s second loss when he started a game.
“That’s what hurts even more is not getting him the win,” Tyler Fitzgerald said. “Because you have a guy that goes out and competes his butt off every single time, so to not get him the win stings. Especially when you allow one run.”
The Marlins made sure that the flailing Giants’ offense had no chance to overcome that lead, and Fitzgerald was one of the victims.
In the fourth inning, outfielder Heriberto Hernandez threw his glove up over the left-field fence, robbing Fitzgerald of what would have slipped over the wall for a go-ahead two-run homer.
Then in the seventh inning, with Heliot Ramos aboard, Jung Hoo Lee unleashed a line drive into the center-right gap. Center fielder Dane Myers snagged it as he contorted his body and collided with the wall, ending the inning and extinguishing hope in the visiting dugout.
“We weren’t catching a break, but at the same time I left a lot of base runners out there in my last two at-bats, so that’s what I’m thinking about right now,” Fitzgerald said. “If I get a knock or two there, we win the game. But it is what it is.”
Added manager Bob Melvin: “That’s the way it goes when you’re going like this, unfortunately. We get eight hits and hit two balls like that and have nothing to show for it. Robbie gives up two hits and a run and we lose. We have to fight our way out of it, unfortunately.”
The loss marks the 13th straight game that the Giants have scored four or fewer runs, which is the longest such streak for the organization since 1988. Not since 1980 have they gone 14 straight. Lately, scoring four runs would seem a miracle; they’re averaging two runs per game over this 13-game stretch.
Against the Marlins, whose pitching staff has one of baseball’s highest ERAs, the Giants are at least putting together better at-bats. They had eight hits and made hard contact throughout. A tweaked lineup that put hot-handed Heliot Ramos at leadoff against right-handed starter Edward Cabrera, with struggling Mike Yastrzemski bumped down to the six spot, looked to be paying off early.
Ramos and Lee hit back-to-back singles in the first inning and, with one out, Matt Chapman drew a walk to load the bases. Willy Adames, though, saw four pitches as he struck out for the 66th time this year. Yastrzemski — who followed a stellar April at the plate with a dismal May — struck out looking at 99 mph paint to strand the bases loaded.
In all, the Giants were 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position, leaving 11 on base.
“We had a bunch of hits last night and only scored two runs,” Melvin said. “Today our at-bats again were pretty good, couldn’t come through in a big situation. I thought Fitzy’s ball was gone and I thought Jung Hoo’s ball was at least off the wall. Again, just have to fight through these things when things aren’t going your way.”
Maybe the calendar flip to June on Sunday or a return to the Bay Area on Monday after a grueling three-city trip can turn the karmic tides, but the Giants are admittedly looking for ways to break out of a mental slog. There can only be so many tweaks to a lineup that mostly isn’t producing and collectively looking for a breakthrough.
“It’s more mental,” Fitzgerald said. “When you’re clicking it feels like you can’t lose. Like in spring training, first month of the season, everyone is clicking and coming up with big hits with guys on. Just feels like maybe we’re pressing a little bit or — I don’t know. It’s myself, too. I have to look in the mirror and see if I can get more RBIs and drive more guys in. We haven’t been getting the big hit the last two or three weeks, which sucks. It’s a long season, you’re going to go through this. It’s just kind of crazy, it’s lasted pretty long now. Hopefully we can get a win tomorrow and then go home and get in front of the home fans and get back to winning more.”
(sfchronicle.com)
AS CLINT EASTWOOD TURNS 95, IS THE AMERICA THAT MADE HIM SLIPPING AWAY?
by G. Allen Johnson
America has changed a lot since 1930, but Clint Eastwood hasn’t.
Or so it would seem.
The cinema legend, who turns 95 on Saturday, May 31, was born in San Francisco, raised in the East Bay and spent most of his life as a resident of Monterey County. He was always an outsider in Hollywood — he had to go to Europe to find his breakthrough as a film star — and cultivated an aura of rugged individualism as an action antihero, including his iconic roles as the Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s “Spaghetti Westerns” in the 1960s and San Francisco cop “Dirty Harry” Callahan in five movies.
He’s the kind of man who built America, one school of thought goes; the kind of guy you could count on to fight valiantly in the Civil War, or tame the western frontier, like he did in his movies. He doesn’t have time for your bull—, and when he stares at you with that Clint Squint, he’s daring you to “make my day.”
He’s a man of law and order, upholding American values. “Dirty Harry” (1971), produced by Eastwood and directed by Don Siegel, was the conservative antidote to the hippie, free love ideals of “Easy Rider” (1969) as Hollywood was remaking itself during a remarkable decade of cinematic change.
But what if we’re looking at Eastwood the wrong way? What if, in his own way, Eastwood has been questioning America all along?
We all know Eastwood is conservative, aligning with the party that claims to be defenders of traditional American values. Although he has said he’s a registered Libertarian, he has supported mostly Republican politicians, including most presidential candidates (remember his anti-Obama talking-to-the-empty-chair moment at the 2012 Republican National Convention?), and ran as a Republican in becoming mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea in the 1980s.
Yet he is liberal on most social issues, including abortion, same-sex marriage and, surprisingly, gun control — ironic for a guy whose most famous character openly bragged about his .44 Magnum, “the most powerful hand gun on Earth, which can you blow your head clean off.”
He has supported Democratic politicians in the past, including late Sen. Dianne Feinstein and former California governor Gray Davis, and broke from President Donald Trump during his first term.
But while he might have liked Feinstein off-screen, he hated most of the San Francisco mayors he dealt with as Dirty Harry. The Civil War-set “The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), which Eastwood starred in and directed, can be read as a diatribe against the military industrial complex, a theme echoed in his espionage thriller “Firefox” (1982). Government corruption and incompetence are at the heart of “In the Line of Fire” (1993), directed by Wolfgang Petersen, and “Absolute Power” (1997), directed by Eastwood.
Indeed, many of Eastwood’s movies, both as star and director, have questioned the system itself.
Like most artists, however, Eastwood’s films are also concerned with the human condition. He won Oscars for best picture and director for the revenge western “Unforgiven” (1992) and “Million Dollar Baby” (2004), both moving emotional experiences.
He has some surprising films on his resume, too.
Who would have thought that as a much younger man he would sensitively explore a May-December romance in 1973’s underrated “Breezy,” starring William Holden? Or that he would explore the jazz legend Charlie Parker in 1988’s “Bird,” starring Forest Whitaker? (Eastwood once said America’s two greatest artistic inventions were jazz and the western movie genre.)
And then there is 1995’s “The Bridges of Madison County,” one of the great modern weepy romances in which he starred opposite Meryl Streep.
As he’s aged, Eastwood’s films have deepened with a sense of changing times and of characters who are isolated or lost, at least temporarily.
In “Gran Torino” (2008), he channels his own tough-guy persona to portray a hardened conservative white guy’s journey to embracing immigration. While reconnecting with his daughter (Amy Adams) in “Trouble With the Curve” (2012), he’s an aging baseball scout traversing the small town trappings of a sport and an America he no longer recognizes. In “The Mule” (2019), he’s an elderly man forced to turn to drug running during tough economic times.
In retrospect, Eastwood’s heroes and antiheroes alike have valued one undisputed ideology: competence. Perhaps the system isn’t really corrupt, it’s just run by buffoons. The line between societal order and anarchy is a thin one manned by the capable — Dirty Harry vs. the mayor and the San Francisco political machine, for example.
But increasingly, Eastwood’s competent heroes are working quietly, and unspectacularly, in the shadows until history demands they reveal themselves in a series of heartfelt ripped-from-the headlines stories. His films have celebrated the heroism of Iraq War hero Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper in 2014’s “American Sniper”), East Bay commercial pilot Sully Sullenberger (Tom Hanks in 2016’s “Sully”), the soldiers who foiled a terrorist plot (2018’s “The 15:17 to Paris”) and the unlikely misfit who saved lives during the Atlanta Olympics (Paul Walter Hauser in 2019’s “Richard Jewell”).
All the while, Eastwood’s box-office drawing power remains vibrant with his films reliably turning a profit. “American Sniper” made a half-billion dollars, while “Sully” and “The Mule” each took in about four times its budget. It’s a notable feat in an ever-changing Hollywood theatrical and streaming model that often struggles to identify what an audience wants.
Take last year’s courtroom thriller “Juror No. 2.” Even with an unprecedented record as an A-list director and star stretching back for more than nearly 60 years, his longtime studio, Warner Bros., made the film available in just a few theaters without much of an advertising push. Now, it’s a streaming hit on Max since its debut there in December.
Hopefully, Eastwood at 95 has at least one more in him — he did tell the Austrian newspaper Kurier that he wants to keep directing. Perhaps one shot in the Bay Area, where he hasn’t filmed since the 1999 Oakland-set “True Crime”?
At least that would be my birthday wish.
THE CASE OF LAURA FAIR, SAN FRANCISCO 1870
by Gary Kamiya
On a chilly evening in 1870, an attractive 33-year-old blond woman, her face and body obscured by a veil and a cloak, hurried through the decks of a San Francisco-bound ferry, looking for her prey.
On the upper deck, Laura Fair found what she was looking for: a middle-aged, well-to-do man, sitting between a plump middle-aged woman and a 14-year-old boy.
She stared at the family from the shadows. When the woman took the man's arm and linked it through hers, Fair moved toward them.
When she was a yard away, she pulled a four-shooter out of her cloak, took aim and shot the man through the heart. Then she dropped the pistol and walked away.
It was the start of one of the most sensational criminal episodes in San Francisco history: the Fair-Crittenden murder case.
The trial riveted the nation's attention in a public theater of morality, in which Victorian notions of sexual propriety, adultery and the proper behavior of women were debated by the likes of journalist Horace Greeley and suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony.
By 21st century standards, the lead-up to the killing could not have been more banal.
Fair and Alexander Parker Crittenden had been carrying on a long-running adulterous affair, one in which Crittenden had lied from the beginning. When the 47-year-old lawyer first met the twice-divorced, twice-widowed boardinghouse keeper in Virginia City, Nev., he lured her into bed by telling her he was a widower.
When she discovered the truth, he swore that he was about to leave his wife, Clara, and get a divorce. He never did.
After seven years of this, Fair was at the end of her rope. The night of Nov. 3, 1870, Fair learned that Crittenden and his wife were going to be aboard the ferry El Capitan leaving Oakland. She caught the same boat, found the couple sitting in domestic tranquillity and shot him.
Double standard
As Carole Haber notes in "The Trials of Laura Fair: Sex, Murder and Insanity in the Victorian West," an unwritten law in the 19th century excused murders committed by men and women who caught their spouses in adulterous relationships.
But this case was different. Fair was a mistress who had killed her married lover for being a lying cad.
For the suffragists who packed the courtroom, what was really on trial was the double standard - the sexist hypocrisy that winked at married men who took mistresses but condemned the mistresses as evil marriage-wreckers. Fair's trial showed that was not an issue that Victorian America was ready to deal with.
The prosecution realized that if the jurors came to see Fair as an injured woman, they might acquit her. Accordingly, prosecutors painted her as a fallen woman, a "she-devil," an immoral, sexually aggressive "syren" who had lured the hapless Crittenden into her erotic web.
"Her power was that of a female Hercules," one prosecutor said, "transcending the power of all the men of the world."
What really transcended the power of all the men of the world was the prosecution's egregious sexism. It portrayed Fair not only as a fallen woman, but as barely a woman at all. After she made a disastrously self-assured appearance as a witness, a prosecutor asked, "Were there any other evidences of her character wanting, would they not be found in her bold, defiant, unfeminine demeanor on the stand?"
His colleague said Fair had showed herself to be "the greatest man that ever entered this courtroom."
After comparing Fair to Lady Macbeth and Eve, the prosecution warned the jury that the moral fate of the nation was in their hands and rested.
The defense argued that Fair had killed Crittenden during a moment of temporary insanity, exacerbated by a debilitating menstrual condition. It also protested vehemently that the prosecution's focus on Fair's character and reputation was prejudicial and unfair. And it hammered at the point that Crittenden had been the one who led Fair astray, not the other way around.
Conviction and outrage
The jury quickly found Fair guilty, and the judge sentenced her to hang. The San Francisco press, which had devoted unprecedented resources to the case, loudly approved the verdict.
Suffragists, however, were outraged. "It was A.P. Crittenden, that notorious roué and adulterer, who advanced the unholy doctrine of free love as a married man living in open adultery with Mrs. Fair," wrote Emily Pitts Stevens, founder of the California Woman Suffrage Association. "Hang this woman, and the very name of San Francisco will be odious for ages to come!"
An appeal, based in part on the argument that the prosecution's attack on Fair's reputation had indeed been prejudicial, was successful. At Fair's new trial, her attorneys wisely kept her off the stand and painted her as a pathetic, weak victim. She was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity and freed.
Much of the press was outraged. "The very principles on which society and order are established seem to have crumbled away," wrote the New York Times. According to The Chronicle, the men of San Francisco were unanimous in declaring the verdict a "simple mockery."
But some of their wives did not agree. The substance of the female argument, the paper reported, was: "Crittenden deserved to be killed, anyhow, for acting as he did; I think it served him just right - there now!"
Fading from notoriety
For her part, Fair refused to go quietly. She wrote a book called "Wolves in the Fold," in which she railed against the prosecution and the press. She popped up as a character in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's satirical novel, "The Gilded Age."
Then she faded from sight. She lived in the poorer parts of various middle-class neighborhoods - the Western Addition, the Mission, Eureka Valley.
Laura Fair was living in a storefront on Upper Market Street when she died in 1919, at the age of 82.
(Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book "Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco," which was awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. San Francisco Chronicle)
“l onIy got one man to thank for what happened to me… Me. l done it the hard way. Nobody never gave me nothing. There haven't been too many peopIe that meant anything in my Iife. l've done some rough things, and l've had some rough things done to me.”
— Sonny Liston
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT
Unease at F.B.I. Intensifies as Patel Ousts Top Officials
Trump to Withdraw Elon Musk’s Ally as Nominee for Top NASA Job
Over 20 Killed Near Aid Distribution Site in Gaza, Palestinian Health Officials Say
Iran Ramps Up Uranium Enrichment While Continuing Nuclear Talks With U.S.
U.S. Says Hamas Response to Cease-Fire Proposal ‘Only Takes Us Backward’
Muhammad Sinwar, a Top Military Leader of Hamas, Is Dead, Israel Says
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Give Trump credit for being the most successful con man and branding genius in our history, far surpassing Ponzi, PT Barnum and all those who preceded him. From "MAGA" to "waste fraud and abuse" to "wide open borders" to "lock her up!" to "Biden crime family", he and the Republican party have mastered the art of gaslighting with pithy taglines. If our higher education system survives Trump's current onslaught, MAGA will make for a plethora of case studies in every curriculum: business, politics, sociology and psychology. Frankly, if we as a nation survive his onslaught.
TECH BRO HAD TO GO
by Maureen Dowd
Elon Musk came to Washington with a chain saw and left with a black eye.
Shrinking government is hard, particularly when you do it callously and carelessly — and apparently on hallucinogens.
As with President Trump’s tariffs, DOGE has created more volatility than value.
A guy who went bankrupt six times doesn’t really care about spending. And Trump certainly didn’t want to see the headline, “Trump Cuts Social Security.”
He just wanted to get revenge on “the bureaucracy” by deputizing Musk to force out a lot of federal employees and give the impression they were cutting all the waste.
As always with Trump, the former reality star, the impression matters more than the reality, especially the reality of his own sins. This past week, Trump tried to recast the very nature of crime.
As The Times’s Glenn Thrush wrote: “President Trump is employing the vast power of his office to redefine criminality to suit his needs — using pardons to inoculate criminals he happens to like, downplaying corruption and fraud as crimes, and seeking to stigmatize political opponents by labeling them criminals.”
It is sickening that the Justice Department is considering settling a wrongful-death lawsuit by giving $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt — who was shot on Jan. 6, 2021, by a Capitol police officer when she ignored his warnings and tried to climb through a smashed window into the Speaker’s Lobby in the Capitol.
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If Babbitt was trying to help Trump claw back a “stolen” election by breaking into the Capitol, then breaking into the Capitol must be a good thing to do, and any police officer who tried to stop her and protect lawmakers cowering under desks must be in the wrong.
To abet Trump’s fake reality, the craven House Republicans refused to put up a plaque honoring the police officers and others who defended the Capitol that awful day.
I take it personally because my dad spent 20 years as the D.C. police inspector in charge of Senate security. He would run to the House whenever there was trouble. So if on Jan. 6 Mike Dowd had been preventing insurrectionists from assaulting lawmakers, he would now be, in Trump’s eyes, not a hero deserving of a plaque, but a blackguard who was thwarting “patriots,” as Trump calls the rioters he pardoned.
It is a disturbing bizarro world.
Trump was rewriting reality again on Friday afternoon as one of the most flamboyant, destructive bromances in government history petered out in the Oval Office.
It had peaked last winter when Musk posted on X, “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” and again when Trump tried to reciprocate by hawking Teslas in the White House driveway.
But on Friday, even these grand master salesmen couldn’t sell the spin that Elon had “delivered a colossal change.”
Musk has acknowledged recently that his dream of cutting $1 trillion had been a fantasy. He said changing D.C. was “an uphill battle” and complained that Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which could add over $3 trillion in debt, undercut his DOGE attempts to save money.
As Trump said, Musk got a lot of “the slings and the arrows.” His approval rating cratered and violence has been directed toward Tesla, a brand once loved by liberals and in China, which is now tarnished.
Musk cut off a reporter who tried to ask about a New York Times article asserting that he was a habitual user of ketamine and a dabbler in Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms even after Trump had given him enormous control over the government.
That could explain the chain saw-wielding, the jumping up and down onstage, the manic baby-making and crusading for more spreading of sperm by smart people, and the ominous Nazi-style salutes.
When a reporter asked Musk why he had a black eye, he joked about the viral video of Brigitte Macron shoving her husband’s face. Then he explained that while “horsing around” with his 5-year-old, X, he suggested the child punch him in the face, “and he did.”
The president and the Tony Stark prototype tried to convey the idea that they would remain tight, even though Musk would no longer be getting into angry altercations with Scott Bessent outside the Oval, sleeping on the floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and hanging around Mar-a-Lago. (Trump wants the $100 million Musk has pledged for his political operation.)
Musk, wearing a black “DOGE” cap and black “Dogefather” T-shirt, looked around the Oval, which Trump has tarted up to look like a Vegas gift shop, and gushed that it “finally has the majesty that it deserves, thanks to the president.”
Trump gave Musk a golden ceremonial White House key, the kind of thing small-town mayors give out, and proclaimed: “Elon’s really not leaving. He’s going to be back and forth, I think.” Trump said that the father of (at least) 14 would never desert DOGE completely because “It’s his baby.”
Musk brought the Silicon Valley mantra “Move fast and break things” to D.C. But the main thing he broke was his own reputation.
THE BOSS SPEAKS
I’m gonna charge tariffs
You’re gonna have to pay
And pray for your sorry-ass
4 0 1 K
You’ll do it my way.
I’m gonna close food banks
No more surplus cheese
Until I hear thank you
And pretty pretty please
From down on your knees.
I’m gonna make you pretend
That you love the Jews
I’m gonna make you depend
On Fox News
I’ll ban the blues
I can see myself as pope
Sending God a text
When I want more missiles
He’ll cash my checks
(We’re friends on X)
Who needs public schools?
Who wants integration?
Why should we cancel
The Birth of a Nation
Instead of Fruitvale Station?
I’ll deport Latinos
Who have bold tattoos
Then I’ll sink Green Peace
Torpedo their canoes.
They were born to lose.
Who says the glaciers
Can’t be bought and sold?
Greenland is but real estate
Servers need the cold
Denmark will fold.
I’ll own the Gaza beach front
Bibi's clearing space
I’ll let them build a temple
To glorify their race
And keep them in their place
I’ve got the Orthodox
Priests making room
For me to build a grand hotel
On top of Lenin’s tomb
Putin is my choom
I’ve got the Saudi princes
I’ve got El Salvador
I’m never satisfied
I always want more
And more and more and more
I’m gonna mine crypto
I’m gonna mint wealth
I’m gonna rewrite the script
Why bomb with stealth?
and pay for public health?
I’m gonna live forever
Which might not take that long
I’ll see the end of everything
And sing the final song
(I’m never wrong).
— Author Unknown
TAIBBI & KIRN
MATT TAIBBI: There’s a huge brouhaha in media elsewhere over the smash hit bestseller, Original Sin, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios. It was funny, I actually thought this book was going to be a big media like Mea culpa about media failure and how yet we all screwed up and we’re sorry, forgive us. It’s totally not that, it’s a book full of unnamed people high up in the democratic world giving various excuses about why they lost the election, blaming Biden.
The whole premise of the book is that it’s all Biden’s fault. The first chapter is called, “He Fucked Us.” Because gosh, he lied to us about how healthy he was and he ran when he shouldn’t have, when he should have stepped aside for another candidate, and we should have had a robust primary. And this is all coming from journalists who didn’t cover the fact that all the various undemocratic things that happened during the primary process, the fact that we had a second New Hampshire primary, what they call a nominating event, after the actual vote. So this has become a big controversy everywhere, and we just want to show a couple clips. This is Megan Kelly, a friend of the show, Megan Kelly, grilling Jake Tapper about the book.
Megyn Kelly: Of course you think that he would be transparent about his health records and then he wasn’t, and when you sat with him again. Including one month after the Jackie Walorski thing, you didn’t ask him about it, you didn’t follow up on the fact that he was falling up the stairs, that he was losing his train of thought regularly, that he was slurring, that he was incomprehensible, that he was getting lost on the White House lawn. You sat right across from him, and you asked none of that, notwithstanding the fact that he had promised you he would be fully transparent about his health issues.
Jake Tapper: That’s true, but I did ask him about his age and the fact that the American people had concluded that even though he said, whenever anybody brought up the subject of his age, “Watch me.” And I said, “They’re watching you and they are concerned that you were too old for this job.”
Megyn Kelly: You know, as well as I do, that there’s a way of you can say, “Hey, there’s this poll on your age.” Or you could say, “You just forgot that Jackie Walorski was dead. You asked where she was moments after watching a videotape tribute to her, you lowered the flags at the White House after she died.” This happened 13 days before you sat with him. There is a way of pressing a man like that on the actual infirmities to bring it home to him and to the audience, and you didn’t do it.
Jake Tapper: That’s correct. I didn’t, and like I said, I feel humility about my coverage. It’s not like I was asking him his favorite movie or his favorite color, we were talking about Putin, we were talking about other issues of national importance, but yeah, I mean, of course I’ve said I look back at my coverage with humility and I wish I did cover the issues of age and acuity, but I wish I had covered them much more and…
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, so he went on to say that I rejected that I was part of any kind of cover up or anything like that after that interview and complained-
Walter Kirn: But of course he was. But of course he was part of the cover up.
Matt Taibbi: Of course, they all were. My God.
Walter Kirn: And the reason his book’s a bestseller is that the cover-up was so successful in some ways that we had no insight into what was going on there. And in a strange way, the fact that he didn’t cover it the first time is the reason everybody’s buying his book the second time, because we want to know what actually went on there. We were curious for years how they were possibly pulling this off. We’ve wanted to know what happens when the guy asked to go to the bathroom. We wanted to know who takes him to the bathroom. We wanted to know who was signing these documents. We wanted to know where Jill and Hunter were. We wanted to know if it was their cocaine or even possibly Biden’s own to keep him awake. There was so many questions that this cover-up created, but now you can make a bestseller just out bringing us backstage in a small way.
Matt Taibbi: And it’s really funny because the book is full of stuff. Well, first of all, there’s a couple of things about this book that suggest a high degree of panic within the Democratic Party. Barack Obama’s all over the book. He’s not really quoted directly that much, but there’s an awful lot of omniscient narration that suggests a background interview with somebody. Obama’s phone was blowing up with texts. How does he know that, right? It’s one of those things where you have to put the mystery together. But the whole concept of the book, the premise of it, is that even though everybody would’ve preferred a different candidate, Joe Biden uniformly refused not to run, refused to be honest about his health, and he pretended, and this is a direct quote from Tapper, “That he wasn’t mentally melting before our eyes.” Here’s another quote. “It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist who publicly defended Biden told us, “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.” Walter, do you believe that the entire Democratic Party would’ve allowed Biden to unilaterally make the decision to run for re-election?
Walter Kirn: Of course he did. Of course they wouldn’t.
Matt Taibbi: Come on.
Walter Kirn: Why wasn’t Kennedy allowed to run against him? Why were there no real candidates to challenge him? Why, if he was in this advanced stage, did they just sit back and let him choose his successor, Kamala Harris? Well, none of it makes any sense except as a cover-up, except as a gaslighting campaign and a rather desperate attempt to pull themselves out of a fire that they’re afraid is going to consume them. And the real answer to my question as to why they’re making these videos and why they’re writing these books and why they’re telling these whoppers is this, they are scared to death because it didn’t work. Why did George Clooney have to be the one to tell Biden to step down? They’d fooled everyone but a Hollywood actor?
Matt Taibbi: Right, yes. And no one else had the gumption? It sounds like an agreed-upon story. And again, Obama’s presence hovers over this entire book. Are we to really believe that he didn’t somehow sign off on Joe running again? What this book feels to me like is a whole bunch of people who wanted to put out an alternate view of history in which they didn’t push Biden into the nomination, and that it was his fault and his inner circle’s fault and not the rest of the party. And then there are these quiet mentions in the book, offhand about how…
One passage will talk about how it would’ve been so much better if we had a robust primary, and then they’ll have a passage like this. “The previous year in 2022, leaders of the Democratic Party hadn’t even been sure that Biden was going to run for reelection. In the final months of 2022, the DNC started asking if it needed to prepare for a primary, which would mean setting up debates and figuring out the primary system. When the committee approached the White House, Jen O’Malley Dillon made sure that no further conversations were needed, Biden was running. That was the end of the conversation and the beginning of an effort by the Democratic establishment to exclude Dean Phillips from the process as much as they could. Every White House pressures its party establishment to make things harder for potential challengers, but members of the Biden team acknowledged that they tested and pushed those boundaries.” That’s as far as he would go to say they basically fixed the primary to make Biden the nominee while allowing everybody else to say, oh, it was his fault.
Walter Kirn: There’s a concept in anthropology, and I’m not sure which people were studied in this case called the sin eater, the person who takes upon themselves all the sin, the fall guy, in more colloquial language. They’re trying to make Joe Biden the sin eater. They’re trying to use him to consolidate all their own sins as journalists, all their own failures as politicians. Their entire class’s inability to read the room, meaning the United States of America and where it was politically, not just last time, but for a long time. And this is all going to be reduced to a Joe Biden mistake. Maybe a Jill Biden mistake. He’s being burned in effigy.
Did we forget about his cancer, by the way? Remember how for five days it was Joe Biden’s prostate cancer? But I guess when you got a book to sell, you got to get over that. I thought that was going… They called for pity and the end of criticism, I saw David Axelrod do that in abeyance to Joe’s poor state. But they’ve got to get rid of this guy, so screw that. Back to him being the center of distorted values. Well, if these were people who hadn’t been in the business of covering the White House, I might listen to them. But how does he account for his own blindness? And what does he propose was the moment when he set the scales from his eyes? Because there’s got to be that moment in the book, right?
Matt Taibbi: Well, they put it at the debate. But the funny thing is there was that passage like pretending he wasn’t melting before our eyes. Well, when did you decide that he was melting before our eyes? Because lots of us saw it before he even became the president.
Walter Kirn: I go on the Gutfeld show every six weeks. We were making fun of him melting before our eyes since before he was elected. I was privy to high-level, high-level dinners and meetings with political figures, I guess you might say oligarchs even, commentators, press people in August 2020 where there was an actual doctor, a neurologist who sat at the table and described all of the problems he was having and rooted a lot of them in the brain surgeries that he had. This was the world’s biggest open secret, and this is the world’s biggest bullshit campaign from the same people who kept the secret.
Now, why they think they need to do this, I guess, is that they want a clean slate for… It’s like the mystery of the video we watched. They need a clean slate for something. And that is, I think the beginning of this, not uprising, but down rising of the elite that I know is coming, this government and exile idea, this, okay, we turned the page idea. They’re mounting a kind of cathartic exorcism, the exorcism of the Joe Biden demon. And once they’ve got him out of there, which will be in a few weeks, couple of weeks, they’re going to mount the resurrection of something.
Matt Taibbi: It’s so funny, right? So Biden wins in part because he is incapacitated and unable to campaign during the pandemic. And now because he’s in-
Walter Kirn: How convenient.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, he’s incapacitated. So now we can blame everything including the failure of Kamala Harris to get elected and a million other things on him. And then it’s funny because after the WMD thing, there was never a formal moment where everybody in the press stood up as one and said, okay, this is where we all screwed up. What really happened is informally, it was decided that we were all going to put it on Judith Miller.
She screwed up, and the Bush administration lied to us. They didn’t even do that here. There wasn’t even a media villain in this story because it would’ve been impossible to do. In this case, the WMDs weren’t over the hill behind some dune. He was on television every day, the missing president. And so the mistake was clear, so they blame it all on Biden. And there’s another thing that Tapper’s been doing. He’s been on every conceivable podcast because he is good at making money, this guy. The book’s selling, and they’re introducing, in little fits and starts, revisionist attitudes about things and I thought this was fascinating. If we can look at number eight? This is Tapper and Thompson talking about lawfare.
Jake Tapper: I look at the way I covered the President. Some of the trials of the President, I thought were… I think it is problematic when people run for prosecutor and promise to go after a specific politician. And both Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York and Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney of New York, both of them did that. And that, to me, is problematic because you’re not saying this is the offense and we need to bring justice to this perpetrator. You’re saying, I’m going to go after him. And I think that there was a degree to which that was tolerated by the media at large. I did note it at the time, and when Trump does the same thing and he’s the president, so it’s also a different degree, people perceive it as more problematic.
Matt Taibbi: Okay.
Walter Kirn: Is this Penn and Teller, Jake Tapper and Alex? Is Alex’s job to sit there mutely and have a different color hair and be a slightly different height?
Matt Taibbi: He’s going to do the palm cigarette trick at the end of that podcast. Yeah. But how funny is that? Gosh, I remember even to suggest that these cases, whatever you think of Donald Trump, were obviously politicized, some of them, especially the Manhattan case was ridiculous. It was a ridiculous case. And what, he privately thought that and didn’t say it, or he said it in such an obscure way that nobody heard it? That’s the problem with these-
Walter Kirn: They’re having their own Nuremberg trial.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly.
Walter Kirn: This is like a farcical satire of confession where you get to go up and be the judge, and then you run and you’re the accused, and then you’re also the witness and you play all the parts. And at the end, you’re found problematic but not guilty.
Matt Taibbi: You’re exactly right. It’s the end scene of Bananas with Woody Allen. Remember when Fielding Mellish cross-examines himself at the end and he jumps into the witness chair, jumps back out and everything? That’s what this is. You’re right, they’re having their own Nuremberg trial about the sins of this era, but they want to ask the questions in addition to providing the answers. And-
Walter Kirn: And they want to be the witnesses, too.
Matt Taibbi: And the witnesses, too. Right, exactly. And when people like Megyn Kelly point out like, well, we got this right the whole time, and we’re not even mentioned in your book. They don’t have anything to say to that. It’s just I think this is all about… There’s something going on in the background about how badly they screwed this up, really, and how illegal the actual transfer of power was in the changing of the candidate. And they’re putting on a new story that they want to… They want to polish the turd a new for a new generation of deceptions.
Walter Kirn: What they’re really doing is they’re protecting a element of the party which they wish to preserve for the future. And it’s probably the Obama wing, to be honest. They’re probably-
Matt Taibbi: Oh, my God, Obama’s apples are so polished in this book. It’s unbelievable. But go ahead.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. Well, there’s a clue right there, because I haven’t read the book. They’re trying to, just in any kind of trial in which a mobster and another mobster have been in league, but they want to convict the one, put them away because he’s old and they want to keep the mob’s power in general. So this is really a power preservation process so that they can get all the guilt over on one side and all the, I told you so’s, and the qualms and the moral integrity they can keep on the other side.
But once again, it’s a clear charade. It’s a total charade. They can’t answer questions if they weren’t people who were just good at being on TV, they’d be destroyed. They’re good at sitting there saying nothing and being completely contradicted and not losing their cool. But it’s got to be, it can only be that they plan to, after this season of self-questioning, mount some kind of action to come back and this is the prelude to that. And I’m starting to get inklings of what form it will take and who will lead it and so on. But it is a charade and a charade like I’ve never seen. We saw a New Yorker story just the other day whose headline was, “How did they miss? How did we miss this?”
Matt Taibbi: Oh, yeah. Could we see the headline? As the last thing, let’s just look at this because it’s so funny. Yeah, “Who’s to blame for missing Biden’s decline? The suggestion of a press cover up belies a more difficult reality.” And the whole thing is, it’s just like a long essay about how it’s more complicated than you think. And it wasn’t like it was absolutely clear from the beginning.
Walter Kirn: It’s a mistakes were made, but it has a buried assertion in its question, in its rhetorical question of a headline missing. Nobody missed it. We all saw it. Everybody saw it. In fact, people who saw it and said so were often censored for saying so or mocked for saying so, or told that they weren’t sympathetic to stutterers or told that they didn’t understand-
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, that happened to me.
Walter Kirn: Exactly. Exactly. Nobody missed anything. So the entire premise of your article is actually false. The question is, who’s to blame for hushing up Biden’s decline?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and just keeping the narrative out of the news. Because again, it’s a very different kind of-
Walter Kirn: For hiding it.
Matt Taibbi: For hiding it.
Walter Kirn: That should be the verb, hiding.
Matt Taibbi: And until this moment, the ultimate example of a media error in America, I would argue that Russiagate’s pretty bad, but probably for most people, it’s still the WMD thing.
Walter Kirn: I would argue it’s Covid.
Matt Taibbi: Well, Covid, yeah.
Walter Kirn: People died.
Matt Taibbi: There have been so many different things in the last eight years that have been nuts. But this one was, it was an active effort by everybody to decide not to cover a thing for years on end, and then suddenly to start covering it, which is a very different and more complicated screw up than WMD.
Walter Kirn: Remember when we were treated to lectures about deceptive video editing, when we saw Biden wandering off or at Normandy or wherever, and they showed us how the angles of those cameras and the way that the pieces had been edited were complete frauds, just verging almost on deep fakes? Hiding is the word. Burying, deep-sixing Biden’s decline. Let’s call it that.
Matt Taibbi: And the larger questions about who was running the government and who was signing the documents and who was making decisions.
Walter Kirn: Who does Tapper say was running the government?
Matt Taibbi: They don’t really talk about that. They talk about who had access. There’s finger pointing at Anita Dunn, at Jeff Zients, at Mike Donilon. There’s a little bit of throwing those folks overboard, but not others.
Walter Kirn: Does it assert that Biden… Does it assert that Obama himself was fooled?
Matt Taibbi: I didn’t see, I can’t recall a quote about that. But there are scenes in the book where Obama is talking with people like Nancy Pelosi about how to replace Joe, and this is before he stepped down, like how to select a successor. And to me, I thought that was pretty significant. Is that legal? What’s going on here? And there’s a line about how Obama and Pelosi agreed there should be some sort of process, but others, voting rights activists were insistent that the public should have something to say about it. It was very weird.
Walter Kirn: Does Tapper suggest that when her testimony was known and the decision was made that he was too old and poor of memory for that proceeding to go forward? How did Tapper react to that? Does he mention that?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it’s in there, but that’s not at the turning point. The turning point in the book is the debate. Anyway, it is what it is. It’s a big hunk of shit and everybody’s making a big deal of it. But you just watch, this will be enshrined as the new conventional wisdom about what happened. And I think… And also, by the way, there’s 10 billion unnamed sources in this book. So there’s an awful lot of history by suggestion that goes on.
Walter Kirn: Who’s the hero of the book?
Matt Taibbi: David Plouffe or Plouffe or whatever, however you pronounce that. The former Obama aide. Obama, the concerned outsiders who just did their darndest but fell short. It’s more about who’s the villain and the villain is Joe. So all right, we’re going to move on and we’ll be right back.
Jim Shields: “Too many elected officials seemingly go out of their way to create problems when their primary purpose is to solve problems. Most people don’t have lofty expectations of their elected representatives. Most would settle for an adaptation of the Physician’s Oath, “First, do no harm.””
That is an understatement. “Seemingly” is correct because the intent is usually to do good things but negative unintended consequences are never considered, and when these consequences are manifested they are either not dealt with or are made worse by doubling down on the action that created them. The building and planning code in California is a good example, or anything to do with state and federal grants is another, but they both have a lot of company.
Seems there are a plethora of nooze stories about airplane mishaps, commercial and private, and close calls these daze along with whining about needed upgrades to airport equipment. Appears to me that the Zionist media are emphasizing this as a means of distracting our attention from the genocide the Zionist Israelis are inflicting on Palestinians, as is done with respect to any effort to support Palestinians, on campuses, and elsewhere. To me, it seems this country is willing to go any length to pander to the Zionists, not to mention supporting authoritarianism in general. It’s spooky, and probably will get worse, as it has been doing for most of my adult life.
UNDAMMED: KLAMATH RIVER RUNNERS CELEBRATE SALMON RETURN AFTER LARGEST DAM REMOVAL PROJECT IN HISTORY
Nice to read some good news…
As I recall, Clint Eastwood looked a lot younger back in the “Rawhide” and spaghetti western days of my youth…
So Leonard Leo, head of the Federalist Society, who provides Trump with a handy list of ultra conservative RW lawyers that he can pick from for his judicial appointments has inspired one of Trumps midnite tirades on truth social because one of the Federalist Society recommended judges ruled against Trump’s illegal tariffs and in favor of the Constitution. He called Leo a sleaze bag and a bad person who hates America. So even a broken clock……. Trying to remember where I’ve heard that kinda name calling before?
We’re fucked.
Yesterday I went over to the farmers market, listened to my friends’ band,
hung out with the old timers in the shade, old lefties, and all they do is spew
negative shit, all the things bad and gonna get worse, pretty boring…
Bud Rogers walked over and I said, “How about something positive Bud? Everyone’s just complaining over here…” (Chem-trail guy had nothin’)
Makes me wonder? Does it make them feel better? Doubt it. Sadly maybe they’re just boring old men with nothing uplifting to say?
Someone said, “…those blood suckers!” and I said, “Could you try to say ‘bloodsuckers’ in a positive way?” (got a laugh…)
well, yeah, there is an outrage of the day these days, more than one…
then I run into my sister and all she’s got is negative also, complaining about some friends’ kid who said on his radio talk show, “Just thinking of Hilary makes me gag,” and then he fake-gagged and my sister is saying that’s an attack on all women, misogynistic…
She’s taking the political situation really personally, out at the weekly demo, singing protest songs…I might have to go just to spend some time with her, she never comes by, much to my dismay…
we’re not changing the name – give it a rest already…..
If you are a MAGA looking out for Anonymous, and guard your children. You have no idea what havoc the rednecks of the left can harvest in your end of existence scenario. I am sorry to be speaking in this vain, but you Have to understand the Constitution of a world who would not have a King. Sorry bastards.
“ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY”
“Frankly, if we as a nation survive his onslaught”
Us MEGA’S will, so get on board and quite being so negative. look what DOGE is saving us are you against that, Enjoy:)
You MAGAts take the cake. He’s not saving YOU. He’s further enriching his fellows in the silver spoon crowd who are already wealthy, along with trashing the Constitution… He’s also supportive of further plunder of the planet…which has a silver lining since it hastens the extinction of human monkeys as a species.
You are kidding, right.??????????
Largest proposed budget EVER. What savings?
Haggis is neither foul nor is it refused by any Scotsman. In fact, it’s savory, sublime and precious hard to get, available only in late January for a few days, served out in stingy little parsimonious teeny paper cups after an hour or more of tasting the various brands of single malt whisky and getting a right earful of bagpipes at which time it, the haggis, having been duly addressed by a Scotsman in the immortal words (most of them incomprehensible to any but the Scottish ear) of Robert Burns, in whose honor it is traditionally served on his birthday, at a special supper, comes to your table. And bear in mind that only the Politically Correct form of the dish is allowed in these United States. Anyone wishing to sample it will be obliged to ingratiate themselves to a member of one of the many Scottish Clubs to get invited to a Burns Supper.
TO ALL: Not quite time yet to exit D.C.
Please know that because I’ve been a good friend at the shelter, the seriously dangerous dudes (i.e. the ones who wear the “Southeast 4 Life” tattoos) told me last night that if anybody bothered me again in “the district”, that they would kill the individual and let me watch!!!
Craig Louis Stehr
Email: [email protected]
Had a blend of deep fried Haggis on England’s northern border near Devil’s porridge restaurant stop. The relatives over there shudder to think a Yank would like such a dish. Same is true for clotted cream.
When I was a boy on the Colorado Plateau we had milk cows, a Guernsey, a Jersey, a Holstein, an old fashioned separator, a hand churn for butter, the dovetailed wooden butter mold, bottles for milk to sell, bottles with nipples for the orphaned lambs, milk cans for milk sold to the cheese factory, and my mother and grandmother, having emigrated from the Midlands, wee particularly fond of eating cling peaches with clotted cream. I churned the butter from clotted cream as a boy, milked the cows as I grew older, slopped the hogs with whatever excess milk we had— sometimes Sally, the Holstein, would grow impatient, whip her tail around to flick its manure-dipped tip around the back of the milker’s head just so as to put cow shit in your eye then put her filthy footin the bucket and spoil the milk. Unscrupulous dairy farmers would strain the milk after such an unfortunate incident and sell it to the unsuspecting… thus we now have to pasteurize all milk for sale or label it pet milk. In high school I worked at the cheese factory and drove all over the county picking up cans of milk, emptied it into huge vats added the rennet, broke up the curd, packed it into mounds and covered the wheels in red wax to age in the walk-in cooler. But oleo margarine and Velveeta cheese and Wonder bread were already making that way of life obsolete and here we are today. The insufferable society maven in Dylan Thomas’s The Peaches short story says it all. And I recall my city cousins coming to visit and leave with barely restrained contempt for my mother’s clotted cream and peaches (which they put in the garbage, a burn barrel off to the side, as soon as they were not quite out of sight.)
Eastwood
The last time Eastwood filmed in the Bay Area was not 1999 but 2010, when he directed Matt Damon in “Hereafter.” The locations included Taylor St. in San Francisco, chosen by producer Rob Lorenz because it was the same block where Jacqueline Bisset lived in “Bullitt.” When I saw the latter film at the Castro Theatre in 1997, the biggest laugh from the sizable audience was prompted when Steve McQueen finds a parking place directly in front of her apartment.
Maureen Dowd didn’t mention the real reason –the only reason– that Trump disavowed Musk. His crass, highly-publicized, multimillion-dollar attempt to buy a judgeship in Wisconsin for the MAGA candidate backfired. It was the first loss of momentum for MAGA… You gotta check out the footage of Musk rolling his eyes, obviously very stoned, in the Oval Office… And here’s some gossip you’ll read nowhere else (yet): Stephen Miller’s wife has left him for Elon Musk!
It’s amazing she married Miller in the first place.
Once I was walking in the park when a dog ran at me.
“I hope you grew a lot of weed because half of it will be mine if your dog bites me!” I said.
“Oh he doesn’t bite,” said the woman with a couple small kids in tow. “He hasn’t even bitten my children.”
“Well, I hope not, jeez…” I said, and walked on to the stage to practice my latest rant.
Later, I was waiting at the credit union to change some old moldy money into fresh new and there was only one guy talking with the lone teller. He was going through a complicated transaction: they had gotten his credit card balance wrong and charged him $27. He told his story, signed multiple papers, and the teller went to the phone to consult some colleagues a couple times.
Finally I said, “Hey, I’ll GIVE you $27 if you just leave right now!”
“Alright,” he said…
“DUCEY DESPITE”
If you’re gonna slag on me in public, don’t be a pussy, and sign your name. Better yet, say it to my face. You obviously don’t have the facts straight, and then I can correct you in person!
Regarding the Laura Fair case, a similar situation during the same era with Eadweard Muybridge, but with a different court outcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Muybridge
Cover-up is such a strong term, I will just call the NTSB’s and other agencies’ reports on the Covelo plane crash a year and a half ago somewhat incomplete.
There are discrepancies I would be happy to discuss if anyone else has that feeling.