Mendocino County Today: Wednesday 8/20/2025

Hot Interior | Pink Ladies | Local Funding | Save Landlines | Temporary Bridge | Recall Comments | The Mailbox | Camp Redwoods | $5 Billion | Ceramic Art | County Fair | Yesterday's Catch | Carousel | ICE Cowboys | Damn Dems | Latinos United | Authoritarian Takeover | All Terrorists | Stand Up | Blame Scarface | Giants Lose | Grants Pass | Lead Stories | The Territory | Trump's Military | Take Heed | Kids & Pedos | Man o' War | Without Israel | Buzzard Begone | Outrageous Review | Great Mystery | Demonstration Day | Divine Love | 1956 Faces

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HOT and very dry weather will build in through the week with a shallower and stronger marine layer along the coast. There is very slight potential for thunderstorms over the interior this weekend into early next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Another 48F under clear skies this Wednesday morning on the coast. If no news is good news, I have good news. Yep, more of the same until further notice.

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PINK LADIES IN BOONVILLE: A sign of early winter?

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STATE TRANSPORTATION MONEY COMING TO AV

Approximately $4 million in SB1 funding for support of allocations toward drainage and fish-passage improvements at various locations along Route 128 near Philo and Boonville in Mendocino County.

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LANDLINES MUST BE PRESERVED

Hi AVA Community:

Nevada County Supervisor Sue Hoek is very active in her efforts to preserve landline service in rural California communities. Perhaps Mendocino County Supervisors or other representatives can join her work.

Even though I’m primarily a City-dweller, I remember how important my landline was when I woke up in Washington, DC the morning of September 11, 2001. We need to oppose AB 540.

Supervisor Hoek’s press release on the issue is here: https://nevadacountyca.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=8162

Lisa Charbonneau

Oakland

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LAMBERT LANE TEMPORARY BRIDGE

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ON LINE COMMENTS RE: PROPOSED RECALL OF DA DAVID EYSTER

Chuck Dunbar: Thank you, Mark S., for again calling Eyster out, and for telling the fuller, more factual version of the story. Eyster tells only the surface of it, lying by omission—as some attorneys do— as to his own history/disputes in the fuller story with Ms. Cubbison. A large ego— “I’m the District Attorney and I can do as I please”— and petty bureaucratic dramas at play here, underneath Eyster’s glib “explanation.” Brave Ms. Cubbison, she was doing her assigned job, took it seriously. Eyster tried to sideswipe her, ran her down with the power of his office after she called him to task and offended him. She did not deserve that, but he deserves the petition that’s out there. Hope the recall is a success.

Anon1: DA Dave’s response to the recall is more reason to recall him. It’s nothing but a lie!

DA Dave put the wheels in motion, remember he showed up at a BOS meeting instructing the Stupidvisors not to make Cubbison the interim Auditor. Before the combining of the two offices. Did he forget his email constructing the Get Cubbison Plan? He lays out the conspiracy to CEO Antle and Glenn McGourty, and who knows who else he sent the plan to. He first fought recusal in court then recused himself, probably figuring out the case was going to be an embarrassment. He met with the lead investigator at least 12 times, unheard of. Then turned to his own group of investigators. Why? I’ll leave you to figure that out. My guess, DA Dave was leading the investigation from day one. His group of witnesses lied on the stand, mainly Weer and Antle. Those reasons alone got the case thrown out. In other words, DA Dave is not a very good DA or he is complicit. Dave it’s time for you to ride off in the sunset, you have lost your way.

Anon2: Agreed. The guy is a waste of air. It’s sad how moronic some people are.

John Sakowicz: I stand with Dave Eyster. He made one mistake with Cubbison in an otherwise stellar career. Dave gets convictions every time he goes to court. He is a great administrator of his department. He recruits, trains and retains young talent. He motivates by example. His investigators solve crimes, and Dave puts the bad guys in prison. And let’s not forget the overall prosecution “roadmaps” developed by David Eyster for other prosecutors that put psychopaths like Gerald Lester and Charles Diaz in prison for life. Remember them? Lester and Diaz were the two Hells Angels from Vallejo who were found guilty by jury of murdering a Fort Bragg family of four in 1986, acts that included the near decapitation causing death to a 5-year-old child with a hunting knife. It took over 20 years and several mistrials by earlier DAs, but Dave got the convictions of Lester and Diaz, and now Dave Eyster's overall prosecution roadmaps are used by prosecutors throughout California. Dave is a role model. What more can you ask of a DA? And oh yeah…to put it all in context, think of our recent past DAs. Susan Massini, anyone? Or Meredith Lintott? Geez! Bottom line: I feel safer with DA Dave. PS. And while we're at it, let's give Sheriff Kendall some well-deserved recognition for the great job he's doing, too, especially on a tight budget.

Bruce McEwen: When I started at the courthouse they were trying to recall Meredith Lintott, a far more widely reviled DA than Dave. There was a blaze orange sign across the street from her office RECALL LINTOTT in the window of the second story. But it never happened. The only way to dislodge her (and her Chief Deputies, Jill Ravitch and Beth Norman) was to run against her and Eyster had a lot of us backing him in the venture, which wasn’t easy for him because his wife was dead against it. But he ran and won and 15 years later he is far more stolidly ensconced than the immovable Lintott &c ever dreamed of—and Beth and Jill were highly effective prosecutors, Jill having gone on to run Sonoma County’s DA Office. So the petition has a long way to go and outside readership of the mighty AVA. The DA is doing fine. And even at the AVA I doubt the shrillest voices calling for his head have the nerve to come out from behind their fake names and sign it. So I’m taking Eyster for the win … for $10.

Anon1: He willing and knowingly tried to put an innocent person in jail, Chamise Cubbison, because she wouldn’t allow him to commit fraud. I don’t care about his great record when you lack morality. A blow up doll could have run against Lintott and won. If Norm Vroman didn’t pass away Eyster would have never run or stood a chance of beating him. Say what you want about Norm, he had character and knew how to work a crowd. I didn’t always agree with him but loved to have a beer or two with him.

McEwen (to Anon1): I have never said a word about Norm. Go sign the petition; put your name and address where your mouth is, or go piss up a rope.

Mike Jamieson: There are 53,000 voters here and Helen Sizemore and team need to get about 8,200 valid signatures to be checked by the county clerk Katrina B’s own team. The petition can circulate for up to 160 days. Given these numbers, it’s likely going to be tough to get a recall on the ballot. Part of the problem for a recall effort is that the offensive sting of Eyster taking that shockingly unfair action of charging Cubbison and Kennedy will be decreasingly felt by the voters (an assumption which may be very incorrect). And, it’s a singular mistake in a sea of well-regarded actions. I continue to be supportive of Mo Mulheren and Ted Williams even though they made the horrible mistake of going along in a gross injustice. I’m probably the only AVA regular commentator still supporting them but beyond the virtual walls of the AVA the dominant perspective may be more positive re those two.

George Hollister: How about, “I think having an annual safety meeting bash for my staff at The Broiler using asset forfeiture money is a good thing, and Cubbison and Kennedy should never have been charged. Sorry about that. BTW, I am not running again. I am getting too old for this shit.”

Chuck Dunbar: Yes, just some straight-forward, simple honesty would have been welcome in this matter. Big ego guys can’t do that, though, and this farce continues at great taxpayer cost, wasting money that should have gone for more worthy issues.

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GROOVING AT CAMP REDWOODS

by Terry Sites

If you are an active people watcher, you would be hard-pressed to find a better vantage point than behind the registration desk at a midsized music festival. Last weekend’s Camp Redwoods at Camp Navarro (former Boy Scout camp in Navarro CA) afforded just such an opportunity. Friday when about 1,000 people poured in with their tents, camping equipment, RVs, children, and in some cases dogs, to wait in line for their official wristbands. It was intense but things mellowed out on Saturday and Sunday so there was plenty of time to survey the scene.

Individual people drifted by many deeply involved with their own thoughts – in a trance – consisting of daydreaming, grooving to the music and on special missions of their own devising. T-shirts cited included, “The vibe is high and so am I,“ and, “I tried.“ A few elite wore what was referred to reverently as “The Owl Shirt,“ harkening back to the very first Camp Redwoods Festival which conferred on owners some serious bragging rights. An outstanding feature of all the Camp Navarro music festivals, including the Redwood Ramble we wrote about previously, Camp Redwoods, and the Deep End is the chance offered to “have time“ in this fast paced world, one that discourages relaxed wandering.

Hugging happens – a lot. Sightings of kids having one on one time with their dad or mom and sometimes even dancing with them are common. On the grass area, toddlers crawl or lurch around on their tiny feet while parents chase them. One dad said, “He is really into exploring.“ Older kids are drawn like moths to the flame to the double-sized hammocks strung between trees. No hammock sits empty for long. The kids pile in and do everything possible to do in a hammock including; twisting, flipping, jerking and twirling. Seems they just can’t get enough of that hammock stuff.

Service dogs are welcome. One that was obviously in training carefully carried a very small bag of trash in her mouth to the trash bin and, standing on hind legs, neatly deposited it in the can. The trainer offered full-body pets as a reward for a job well done. One very small child had an unnerving habit of standing in front of a person and giving them the hairy eyeball. Mom said, “She really is staring down a lot of people today.”

Unique things sighted included a wheelchair mounted on a platform that had double treads like a tank making it possible to navigate the uneven campground with ease. When the music got loud, tiny earphones came out of parents’ backpacks to protect those sensitive small ears. Some campers brought “e-bikes,“ which are electric bikes with fat tires that provide a power boost to a foot peddler. One guy called his bike (which goes 35 miles on a charge) “a game changer,” allowing his wife to get from their campsite to the performance stages without exhaustion. Another interesting vehicle was the “One Wheel.“ A fat wheel is embedded in the middle of a something resembling a skateboard. Standing sideways, a rider mounts one foot on one side of the wheel and as soon as the second foot hits the other side the One Wheel takes off. It looks like something you might ride in a crazy dream.

The family camp music festival format encourages whimsy, and lightheartedness. One dad pushing a stroller had dreadlocks that would have touched the ground if he hadn’t ponytailed them. This year small alligator clips with plastic flowers, mushrooms, and greenery purchased online that are called “sprouts,“ made their way through the crowd. This turned any hat into a silly smile producer. Glow necklaces were snapped together to produce 3-D line drawings after dark. Water bottles were converted into what bumpers used to be with stickers proclaiming this and that. (Example: “You are loved” with a picture of a heart). Tattoos of every variety both permanent and temporary were on view.

Each day had its own theme. Saturday was the Grateful Dead with many tie-dyed outfits. Sunday it was mushrooms — one woman actually dressed head to toe as a mushroom with jaunty red and white spotted mushroom cap. Clothing is in general very much more expressive at festivals: unusual in texture, style and color. It makes you realize how pitifully boring most of our day-to-day clothes really are.

The music was described as “feel good,“ and it was. Headliner band K-Bong really gave the people what they were looking for. A massage for the ears with lots of positive messaging and a danceable beat. Songstress, Anora with her “Island Soul” had an Amy Winehouse type voice, but much warmer. Her band was tight and seemed to really enjoy their own sound. Her dance moves reminded me of Indonesia when where feminine grace is a high art. Also on the bill, Joe Samba, Aaron Wolf, Beach Fly, Coyote Island, Surfer Girl, The Hip Abduction and Bobby Alu.

Of course, none of this happens without lots of people behind the scenes, running as fast as they can to keep 1000 people housed, fed, clean and happy. Manager Nedjma moves from problem to problem, waving her problem-solving wand (decisive mind and excellent staff members). Running out of water with 1000 people showering a day? Time to order more water. Dust enveloping the campsites? Time for the water truck to make a pass-through. And so it goes. A special shout out to Sierra Peters in the café who kept smiling and expertly cranking out those special coffee drinks hour after hour. None of this would be possible at all if founder/CEO of Camp Navarro Dan Braun didn’t love the music and nature. On the Camp Navarro website it says, “Nothing makes Dan happier than sharing experiences in nature and stewarding unique nature-based assets forward for the public.”

Thank you Dan Braun.

There is still time to get your tickets for the final camp Navarro festival this year, “The Deep End,” on September 19-21. Check it out online at campnavarro.com.

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ACCORDING TO A RECENT PRESS DEMOCRAT ARTICLE about the southern half of Great Redwood Trail (overseen by Sonoma Marin Area Rapid Transit, SMART), the Agency estimates that the agency expects the trail to be built in 20 years and that the total cost of the 300-plus mile trail will be around $5 billion. The Trail Agency also estimates that the project could bring in as much as $100 million a year in increased tourism-related economic activity. Not counting, inflation, their dubious self-serving timing, and the number of miles of trail that actually end up being built, that means that by their own highly speculative numbers, the trail will bring in $2 billion in return for the $5 billion spent.

(Mark Scaramella)

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PAINTED WITH FIRE

The Willits Center for the Arts presents ‘Painted with Fire,’ with wood-fired ceramics by Leslie Campbell, Jason Sanovich, and Margi Gomez.

This wide ranging exhibit, featuring functional stoneware as well as sculpture, opens on Saturday September 6 in the WCA galleries. See an outstanding presentation of the ages-old but newly popular ceramic art, and enjoy tasty nibbles, live music, artist talks, and a choice of beverages. Check in with your community and see what our galleries have to offer in September.

‘Painted with Fire’ will be on exhibit through Sunday September 28, with galleries open from 11am to 5pm on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. We await your visit at Willits Center for the Arts, 71 E. Commercial St., in Willits.

For further information, please check out our website at willitscenterforthearts.org, email [email protected] or call the Center at 707-459-1726.

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COUNTY FAIR GUIDE BOOK

Here is a link for the Exhibitor’s Guide Book 2025

There is still time, until Thursday, 8/28, to enter online for most categories as the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show is one of the best places to showcase some of your handiwork: plants and flowers, art, quilts, clothing and food!

Another way you can get involved with the County fair this year is entering fruits or vegetables that you've grown, and don't forget that the "Freaky Fruits and Veggies", or "The One That Got Away" contest doesn't require an entry form, and you can bring entries into the back of the AG building anytime Friday through Sunday until 12:00 pm. to win a prize for that enormous squash or a fruit or veggie that is really weird!

Don't forget to enter or watch the parade, which starts at noon on Sunday, but will be done just in time for you to get to the Freaky Fruits and Veggies in the Ag Building at 1:00!

We hope to see you all at our special fair, with so many things in which to participate and enjoy!

Retired Fair Boosters

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, August 19, 2025

LELAND BEAN JR., 48, Willits. County parole violation.

MICHAEL BROWN-SEALS, 55, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-solicitation of lewd act, parole violation.

MINDY GONZALEZ, 29, Ukiah. Controlled substance, probaation revocation.

ROBERT JAMES JR., 30, Ukiah. Switchblade, county parole violation, community supervision violation.

TRAVIS RILEY, 41, Redwood Valley. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, attempt to obtain stolen property.

CHERRI ROBERTS, 48, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

PATRICK SCHUETZ, 54, Ukiah. County parole violation.

ANDY TUCKER, 54, Covelo. Controled substance, paraphernalia, contempt of court.

DOUGLAS WHIPPLE III, 39, Covelo. Parole violation.

JESSE ZARKOWSKI, 48, Point Arena. Failure to appear.

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RAPID ICE EXPANSION WON'T MAKE ANYONE SAFER

Editor:

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement becomes the largest domestic law enforcement agency, there are likely to be many unintended negative consequences on top of the horrific spectacle of otherwise law-abiding community members being hauled off by masked men in unmarked cars.

The Department of Homeland Security announced a hiring surge, aiming to recruit 10,000 new ICE officers. To support this goal, they are offering $50,000 signing bonuses, $10,000 a year in student loan payoffs for up to six years, guaranteed overtime pay and accelerated retirement benefits.

These lucrative terms and likely lax hiring standards could cause our already understaffed local law enforcement cadres to jump ship, and they will certainly reduce the pool of new prospects for sheriff and police departments. Our local law enforcement agencies have suffered from low staffing and high overtime rates for years, and now they will have to compete with ICE's generous "Protect the Homeland" recruitment campaign.

A perfect storm of overpaid, under-trained, zealous ICE cowboys roaming our streets in search of anyone who looks "illegal" to them and fewer locally trained and supervised officers doing real police work. I feel safer already … Not.

Matt Stone

Petaluma

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A READER WRITES: A quick google search shows that only one lawsuit has been filed by the National Democratic Party against the Trump Administration’s onslaught of executive orders and overreaching policy changes. That one lawsuit? A lawsuit about elections that puts the Democrats at a disadvantage. Nothing about policy, regulation, appointments, or executive orders. Some states and national organizations have filed lawsuits against some of the more outrageous moves of the Trump Administration. But the only thing the national Democratic Party cares enough about to sue over is, essentially, themselves — and their electoral prospects.

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HOW COULD YOU?

Editor:

As immigrants in 1951 from postwar Germany we were met with a fair amount of understandable hostility. One of the most frequent questions we were asked was, "How could you let an authoritarian party take over your government?" At the time I had no answer that would satisfy the question. Now almost 75 years later the response is obvious: "Right back at you, America."

Wolfgang Bley

Santa Rosa

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

You don't understand, this journalist that Israel killed was a terrorist. So were the other 230 journalists. So were all the doctors and aid workers. So were all the ambulance crews. So were all the teachers and academics. So were all the children…

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ACTIVISTS UNFURL BANNERS CALLING ON NEWSOM TO STAND UP TO BIG OIL, STOP OIL DRILLING EXPANSION

by Dan Bacher

As the California Legislature returned to session after the summer recess on Monday, a group of climate and environmental activists unfurled four blue and yellow banners proclaiming “Newsom Stand Up To Big Oil” in the Capitol rotunda.

While they held the banners aloft, they chanted, “When Big Oil is on the attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back,” and other chants urging the Governor and Legislature to not cave into Big Oil pressure to pass bills that would expand oil drilling in California.

“The protest was held today because the Governor and Legislature are considering bills proposing more oil drilling in California in response to refinery closures,” said Ilonka Zlatar of the Oil and Gas Action Network. “They are trying to roll back the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and other environmental laws.”…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/8/18/2339081/-Groups-Demand-Climate-Action-as-California-Legislature-Returns-to-Session

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BLAME SCARFACE

Editor,

Writing in the London Review of Books recently, Bee Wilson describes Al Pacino in ‘Scarface’ as having an “overdone Cuban accent.” In fact, his portrayal of Tony, Montana was a racist character, and its consequences linger to this day. The film’s propaganda about Mariel Boatlift Cuban refugees begins as early as the film’s pseudo factual opening titles, which referred to Castro sending “the dregs of his jails” to the United States.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was researching US immigration prisons, Cuban prisoners told me in interviews that the movie’s influence became part of the circular logic which allowed US immigration officials to keep them locked up for years as “administrative detainees.“ They weren’t imagining this. In 1986, three years after the movie’s release, a former advisor to the New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato wrote that the behavior of Mariel Cubans was “so violent and unusual that Hollywood was inspired to produce a movie entitled ‘Scarface,’ which portrayed the tremendously violent behavior exhibited by these Cubans.”

Today the Trump administration relies on rhetoric about immigration crime, uses tattoos as justification for incarceration, and repeats baseless claims that countries such as Venezuela are “emptying their prisons” and “sending their worst“ to the US. All are intentional adaptations by Trump, Stephen Miller, and the rest of the propaganda about Mariel Cuban’s exemplified by ‘Scarface.’ Pacino, as he proudly says of the film in his memoir, “could live on the residuals — for life.”

Mark Dow

Brooklyn, New York

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GIANTS’ FASTBALL WOES at the forefront of listless loss to San Diego

by Shayna Rubin

SAN DIEGO — Petco Park saw more fans run onto the field than the San Francisco Giants scored runs against the San Diego Padres on Tuesday night.

Two fans — one young fan and, minutes later, another fan — jumped the fences and tried to evade ballpark red-coat clad security. Inappropriate as it is to crash the field, that bit of chaos provided the only late-game drama. The Giants lost 5-1 and at no point did their offense threaten the restless crowd with a good time.

Padres starter Nick Pivetta’s four-seam fastball neutralized the Giants’ offense. He struck out 10 Giants and limited their offense to just Jung Hoo Lee’s leadoff home run (off a four-seamer). A solid sweeper kept San Francisco off balance, but it was the deception on his four-seam fastball that kept them dizzy.

Pivetta’s fastball averages 21 inches of induced vertical break, which is considered to be one of the best marks in baseball. The Giants struck out five times on his fastball, four on pitches middle-to-up in the zone

Fastballs up in the zone have been particularly difficult for the Giants offense to catch up to this year, prompting opposing pitchers to throw more to them (35% of total offerings) than any other team in baseball. It’s been a hot topic during hitter’s meetings, and the team’s low walk and high strikeout disparity of late has to do with a team-wide effort to do damage on the pitch.

“We’re trying to make a concerted effort to get to the fastball,” manager Bob Melvin said. “That means we’re swinging a little bit more and the personnel has changed a little bit, too.”

The walk rate took a hit with Matt Chapman nursing a sore hand and Mike Yastrzemski in Kansas City, which puts more responsibility on the likes of Tyler Fitzgerald, Christian Koss, Patrick Bailey and Casey Schmitt. All four of them, and Lee, have been unproductive against the four-seamer all season.

“That’s something we have to solve, is when you go after it up there and when you don’t,” Melvin said. “The 24 (induced vertical break) today, I don’t know that we’ve seen that before. We’ve seen some 21s, 22s, he might’ve even hit 25. It looks good at certain levels and when you have that kind of vertical, it’s easier said than done to stay on top of it and get it.”

The offense going the way it did, there was little those lined up to pitch could do to keep the game in reach. Kai-Wei Teng had a slightly better outing than his last one against the Padres at home in which he surrendered seven runs in 1⅔ innings. This time, a handful of mistakes did him in.

Christian Koss, in at shortstop for an ailing Willy Adames, made a throwing error on Fernando Tatis Jr. grounder that set up the Padres’ game-tying run in the third inning. Teng hit two batters — Xander Bogaerts and Gavin Sheets — in a messy fourth inning that saw the Padres take a 3-1 lead.

Teng went 3⅓ innings while the Giants bullpen allowed two more runs in the loss.

Briefly: Adames sat out the game with a sore right side he’d been nursing for several games. … Lefty reliever Erik Miller’s hopeful return from the injured list took a detour as an MRI showed inflammation in his throwing elbow. He will be shut down from throwing for two weeks, putting in jeopardy a potential return before the season is over.

(sfchronicle.com)

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LEAD STORIES WEDNESDAY'S NYT

The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration Crisis

Trump Revokes Security Clearances of 37 Former and Current Officials

Trump’s Tactics Mean Many International Students Won’t Make It to Campus

Trump Says Smithsonian Focuses Too Much on ‘How Bad Slavery Was’

The Founders of This New Development Say You Must Be White to Live There

These TV Hits Are Censored in Putin’s Russia

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TRUMP’S SHOW OF FORCE

by Finian O’Toole

Donald Trump’s desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military is unfinished business. Militarizing American politics means defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign mantions. Politicizing the military means dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the president but to the Constitution. These aims are intertwined, but the first cannot be consummated until the second has been accomplished. Trump failed to do this in his first term, but he is determined not to be thwarted again.

In late May 2020, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump held a meeting of his advisers in the Oval Office. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book ‘Peril’ (2021), Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s most extreme anti-immigrant policies, advised: “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.”

Citing the daily Domestic Unrest National Overview produced for him by his staff, Milley told the commander-in-chief, “They used spray paint, Mr. President. That’s not insurrection.” He pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln: “That guy up there, Lincoln, had an insurrection.” Milley insisted that the BLM protests were “not an issue for the United States military to deploy forces on the streets of America, Mr. President.” Along with other real soldiers, Milley was able to resist Trump’s demand that the 82nd Airborne Division be sent to Washington. But that was then. Now there is no one in the Oval Office to tell Miller to shut the fuck up or to explain to Trump what an insurrection is.

On June 6 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeted what US district judge Charles Breyer cited as “several locations in downtown LA and its immediate surroundings” that were “known to have significant migrant populations and labor-intensive industries.” They arrested 44 working people, including some day laborers gathered outside two Home Depot stores, and employees of an Ambiance Apparel warehouse in the Fashion District.

On June 7, by which time only around a dozen arrests had been made at protests against these roundups, Trump issued a memorandum to the secretary of defense, attorney general, and secretary of homeland security declaring that these demonstrations “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” He authorized his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, to take federal control of the California National Guard and to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.” By June 9 around 1,700 National Guard soldiers and 700 US Marines had been deployed to Los Angeles, even though both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had made clear that they did not require additional resources to manage the protests or suppress the outbreaks of looting and vandalism that occurred on their margins. As Breyer emphasized in his ruling that Trump’s federalization of the National Guard was “dangerous” and illegal, “There can be no debate that most protesters demonstrated peacefully.”

(New York Review of Books)

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THE US TREATS ISRAELI PEDOPHILES Nicer Than Wounded Palestinian Kids

by Caitlin Johnstone

Antiwar has a story out right now with the headline “Rep. Greene: US Should Let Gaza Children in for Medical Treatment, Prosecute Israeli Child Predators.”

It’s a headline that says so much about what’s going on in the world in just a few words. Is the US really not letting Gaza children in for medical treatment? Is the US really failing to prosecute Israelis who prey on children? Why are these necessary things to say? And why is it being left to Marjorie Taylor Greene to say them?

What’s crazy is that these are entirely true and legitimate grievances, as Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:

“The Georgia representative was referring to a recent State Department decision to block visas for Palestinians from Gaza in response to outrage from pro-Trump activist Laura Loomer over wounded Palestinian children arriving for medical treatment, and the case of Tom Alexandrovich, a senior Israeli cybersecurity official who was arrested in a sting operation in Nevada for attempting to lure a child for sexual purposes but was allowed to go back to Israel.”

I mean, damn.

Things are so fucked up that the only way to get wounded Palestinian children in and out of the United States for medical treatment these days would be to disguise them as Israeli pedophiles.

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Israel apologists are still trying to make “we’re not starving children, we’re starving SICK children” work. Bari Weiss’s media outlet The Free Press has a new genocide apologia article out noting that twelve of the emaciated children we’ve seen in photos distributed by the mainstream press have had preexisting conditions like “cystic fibrosis, rickets, or other serious ailments.”

This argument is exactly the same as starting a fire in a crowded building and then claiming you can’t be guilty of murder by arson because many of the people who died in the fire were handicapped and elderly individuals who couldn’t escape quickly enough. Everyone knows the people who suffer first and worst in a famine are small children, the elderly, and the sick.

As others have pointed out, it really shows how desperate the Israel spinmeisters are getting that they would cite “rickets” as a pre-existing condition in their argument to dismiss concerns about starvation in Gaza, given that rickets is a condition caused by malnutrition.

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Israel: We have to kill all the journalists in Gaza because they’re Hamas.

Western journalists: Okay so let us in so at least someone’s there to report what’s happening in Gaza.

Israel: We can’t, it’s not safe for you.

Western journalists: Why not?

Israel: Because then YOU’D be Hamas.

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Saw a tweet from former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett complaining that “Europe is becoming Islamized,” fearmongering about the number of Muslims who now live in some of Europe’s major cities.

Israelis are something else, man. They don’t want Muslims to live in the middle east, they don’t want Muslims to live in Europe. Kinda seems like they just don’t want Muslims to live.

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The New York Post has an article out with the headline “Queens bodega named ‘Gaza Deli and Grill’ ignites fear among Jewish New Yorkers — including Oct. 7 survivor: ‘I’m still not safe’”.

It’s just as ridiculous as it sounds. There’s a bodega in New York called “Gaza Deli and Grill” and Jewish locals are saying it makes them feel unsafe. This happens as an active genocide continues in Gaza, with Israel calling upon 60,000 IDF reservists in preparation for the planned ethnic cleansing of a million civilians from Gaza City.

Whenever you see the western press centering the feelings of western Jews with extreme aggression, it’s a safe bet that Israel has something especially ugly in the works.

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The plan has always been to pace us from

“It’s a complicated conflict and Hamas attacked on October 7 and gosh you sure are obsessed with Jews,”

to

“Well it’s too late to do anything about it now,”

to

“Oh come on Gaza was so long ago and there’s nothing we can do to change the past.”

It really seems to have taken the empire by surprise that the public has not played along with this. They really expected us to forget about Gaza within the first few weeks and let it fade into the background. The fact that the outcry has only gotten louder says encouraging things about ordinary members of the public, and about the future of the human species.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

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CAPSULE HISTORY

Without Israel, there is no…

Nakba (1948): 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homes, their villages bulldozed, their names erased.

Refugee camps from Lebanon to Jordan: generations born stateless because someone else decided “a land without a people” was available for colonisation.

Sabra & Shatila massacre (1982): where Israel’s allies in Lebanon carried out slaughter under the watchful eyes of the IDF.

Occupation of South Lebanon (1978–2000): spawning Hezbollah as a resistance to invasion and endless bombings.

Golan Heights theft: Syrian land annexed, villages depopulated, water resources seized.

Endless wars on Gaza: Cast Lead, Protective Edge, Guardian of the Walls, “mowing the lawn” of human beings every few years.

Settler-colonial expansion: half a million squatters living on stolen West Bank land, subsidised by the state.

Apartheid wall: strangling Palestinian towns, cutting them off from farms, hospitals, and each other.

Daily humiliation at checkpoints: kids strip-searched, ambulances blocked, lives treated as security risks.

The right of return denied: Palestinians in Chile, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and across the globe barred from their ancestral homes while anyone with a European great-grandparent can “make aliyah.”

The manufactured chaos: Hamas nurtured in its early days as a counterweight to the secular PLO; ISIS and Al-Qaida flourishing in the chaos of Western/Israeli interventions in the region.

The Syrian catastrophe worsened: Israeli airstrikes destabilising Damascus, Golan occupied, refugees piling up.

Lebanon’s fragility: decades of Israeli invasions, air raids, assassinations — the 2006 war flattening entire districts of Beirut.

US empire’s Middle East addiction: Trillions spent, millions displaced, entire countries reduced to rubble — all in the name of “securing Israel.”

And behind it all:

Western complicity: UK’s Balfour Declaration, America’s blank cheque, France’s arms, Germany’s guilt chequebook, the Vatican’s silence.

Corporate complicity: Weapons manufacturers, oil companies, and tech firms profiting from surveillance and war.

Media complicity: CNN, BBC, Fox, Sky, NYT — sanitising apartheid, amplifying “self-defence,” burying Palestinian deaths under euphemisms.

Without Israel… there is no Nakba, no refugee camps, no Sabra & Shatila, no Gaza blockades, no Gaza genocide, no apartheid wall, no daily checkpoint humiliation, no stolen Golan, no bombed-out Beirut, no radicalisation factories, no endless cycle of wars dressed up as “self-defence.”

Without Israel, the Middle East could have been a peaceful place to live in harmony regardless of religion.

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TREMENDOUS STICKERS

by Frances Wilson

(Review of ‘Outrageous,’ a television series written by Sarah Williams and directed by Joss Agnew and Ellie Heydon)

On September 3, 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany, Unity Mitford, the daughter of minor English aristocrats, took a pearl-handled pistol to the English Garden in Munich and put a bullet through her brain. “She told me that if there was a war,” her sister Diana Mosley recalled, “which of course we all terribly hoped there might not be, that she would kill herself because she couldn't bear to live and see these two countries tearing each other to pieces, both of which she loved.” A mother walking in the park with her two sons heard the shot, and the older boy caught the nearly six-foot figure as she slid to the ground, blood streaming down her face. Instead of killing her, the bullet lodged at the back of her skull, from where it could not be removed.

Unity was visited in the hospital by Adolf Hitler, who also sent roses, paid the medical bills, and arranged for her transfer to Switzerland and for the suicide attempt to be kept a state secret. It was not until October 2 that her parents, David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and Lady Sydney Redesdale (known by their seven children as Farve and Muv, or Male and Fern), heard that their daughter, known as Bobo, was recovering from an “illness.”

In January 1940, Sydney and her youngest child, Deborah, known as Debo and later the Duchess of Devonshire, brought Unity back to the family home, a chilly mansion built by Farve in the Cotswold village of Swinbrook. “She was a completely changed person,” Debo recalled, “like somebody who has had a stroke… Her memory was very jagged and she could remember some things and not others.” The damage caused to her brain, according to James Lees-Milne, who had been at Eton with Unity's only brother, Tom, meant that she now had the mental age of a child. Some might say that this was Unity's mental age to begin with. (Nancy, the eldest, called Debo “Nine” — this, she teased, being Debo's mental age.) It took nine years for the bullet to kill her: nursed at home by Sydney, Unity eventually died at the age of 33 of meningitis caused by an infection around the wound.

Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford (who was conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, where the family owned a small gold mine) had used this pistol for target practice in the garden of friends in England. Asked what she was doing, she replied that she was “practicing to kill Jews.” Unity's experience of Jews amounted to attending Nica Rothschild's coming-out ball. “The English have no notion of the Jewish danger,” she wrote in a letter to the German propaganda newspaper ‘Der Sturmer’ in the summer of 1935.

“Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes… We think with joy of the day when we shall be able to say with might and authority: England for the English! Out with the Jews! With German greeting, Heil Hitler! … PS: … Please publish my name in full… I want every-one to know that I am a Jew hater.”

Her letter was reported in the British press several weeks later under headlines such as “Peer's Daughter Is a Jew Hater” and “The Girl Who Adores Hitler.”

No one else from England had the access to Hitler that was afforded to Unity, who went to Munich in 1934 with the sole intention of meeting her hero and spent her lunchtimes in his favorite restaurant until, after ten months, he asked her to join him. It was “the most wonderful and beautiful day of my life,” she wrote to Farve. “I am so happy that I wouldn't mind a bit dying. I suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world… For me, he is the greatest man of all time.” The Fuhrer, as Unity called him, and Kind (child), as he called her, sat arm in arm and drew up lists of who would be shot when Germany conquered her homeland. He stroked her hair; she stayed with the Goebbels family during the Berlin Olympics in 1936; he placed her beside him on the balcony when he announced the Anschluss in 1938; and he paid the rent for her apartment, in Munich's Schwabing neighborhood, which “belongs,” Unity wrote home ecstatically in June 1939, "to a young Jewish couple who are going abroad.”

Her most prized gift from Hitler was a gold swastika with his signature engraved on the back, which she wore as a badge and later swallowed in a second suicide attempt. It was removed from her stomach with a probe. Unity introduced Hitler to her parents and siblings, Debo, Pam, Tom, and Diana; Diana (known as Nardy) married her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, in the drawing room of the Goebbels apartment on October 6, 1936, with Hitler as guest of honor. Sydney, who thought Hitler charming, supported Germany during the war, thus alienating her spouse. After 1940 Lord and Lady Redesdale no longer lived together as husband and wife.

Would Unity have pursued Hitler had had she not been the fourth and least attractive of six girls raised to be debutantes and then wives and mothers? She was, said her younger sister Jessica, “a huge, outsize child.” Jessica was generally known as Decca, except by Nancy, who called her Susan, while Unity and Decca called each other Boud. “Oh dear… she is rather enormous,” Sydney complained as Unity squeezed into outfits that were then returned to the shops. Nancy gave Unity the nickname “Hideous,” but in Germany her tall and slender physique was the Nazi ideal. Because unlike Nancy, Diana, and Debo, she did not ride or hunt, there was nothing for Unity to do as she waited for her first London season. Aged 16, she hung posters of Hitler on her side of the sitting room she shared with 13-year-old Decca, who — equally bored — hung posters of Lenin on her own walls. Unity had always used shock tactics to gain attention; before the Fuhrer became her unpleasant pet, she took her white rat to balls and wore her grass snake as a necklace. Even as a child, wrote Decca in her memoir ‘Hans and Rebels’ (1960), Unity was “uncontrollable,” “completely outside the bounds of normal behavior.”

Decca described Swinbrook as a medieval “fortress.” All of life was in the house because no one was allowed to leave it. The sisters had one another, that was all. Nor were people allowed in, due to Farve's inhospitality to “outsiders.” Outsiders, Decca explained, consisted of “the whole teeming population of the earth's surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbors to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking.

“Have these people no homes of their own?” Farve would roar down the table at Nancy's friends, whom he called “sewers.” To have been a “Swinbrook Sewer” became a badge of honor. Trapped in “a time-proofed corner of the world” where “nothing ever, ever happened,” the Mitfords were like “a lost tribe, separated from its fellow men”; the sisters were “ill-assorted animals tied to a common tethering post.” Outside the fortress walls there were hunger marches as the Depression took hold in the 1930s. Refused permission to go to school, on the grounds that hockey (which was compulsory) gave girls thick calf muscles, Decca eked out her childhood in the family snow globe, where history was taught by Sydney: “See, England and all our Empire possessions are a lovely pink on the map.” Nancy, who had also longed to go to school, similarly described her childhood as unhappy, a charge Diana and Debo (who hated the idea of school) dismissed as untrue. But members of the same family do not have the same childhood.

Nancy's unhappiness had begun at age three, when her sister Pamela (known as Woman) was born and the world was no longer her own. The arrival two years later of Tom, the prized son and heir, did not improve her mood. A nanny described Nancy at age six in the nursery, her “furious little round face… concealed behind the book.” Diana, born after Tom, was so beautiful as a baby that another nanny declared, like a bad fairy, that she was destined not to live for long. Nancy was “vile” to her siblings, she admitted, with Pam her main target. By the time she was 16, when Debo appeared, Nancy was the long-established family terror. Her character was so strong that Pam simply receded into the backgound, while Tom, who had the good fortune to start boarding school at age eight, was handsome enough not to need to sing for his supper.

Whiling away their time in the “Hons’ Cupboard,” the large, warm linen closet in Swinbrook from which Decca and Debo ran the “Society of Hons,” the youngest Mitfords dreamed of a more interesting future: “I’m going to Germany to meet Hitler,” Unity declared. “I’m going to run away and be a Communist,” Decca countered. Debo's dream was to marry a duke and become a duchess. The Hons’ Cupboard — so called not because the sisters had the title “Honorable,” but because they liked hens and the word evolved into “hons” — provides some of the funniest scenes in Nancy's autobiographical novel ‘The Pursuit of Love’ (1945). But there was a corrosive element to the Swinbrook nursery that laid hold of Unity, creating a moral vacuum. Her fascism was less an ideological belief than a catastrophic assertion of personality, a bid for attention in a family of extremophiles.

(London Review of Books)

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“The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.”

― Andre Malraux

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DAY OF DEMONSTRATIONS

by Sharon Olds

Another Grand Jury
does not hand
an indictment down (“I Can’t Breathe”), and for a
moment it seems as if I could be dreaming,
the helicopters there in the dream,
the sharp, loud
sounds of the chopping
of the air, the cutting it in thousands of pieces,
fissioning its atoms—yet the tower is there,
safe as houses, thousands of houses
balanced on top of each other. The falcons
who hunt above the roofs in Lower Manhattan
might be the descendants of the falcons who were hunting and
eating that morning, tearing the fur and
feathers in chunks and dust off their prey.
Where were you, where were the ones you loved.
I was sleeping in, that morning, 13
years ago, a hundred blocks north,
the choppers loud in my dream, louder, then
the phone rang in my dream, and a friend said, A
plane hit the World Trade Center, I
pictured a biplane, like a damselfly,
knocking a few chips off,
cells from a small wound to a body, like
knuckle skin. And then, on the screen,
the world began, and ended, and began,
and ended. This morning, the story of this country
is being told again,
on the street corners, the story of destruction,
of race, and rage, the law choppers and the
news choppers are chopping, and the child
of the two towers stands alone, its narrow
isosceles faces glinting in the white air.

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“YES, LOVE, …but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one's neighbours; to love one's enemies. To love everything - to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? …Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her…. If it were only possible for me to see her once more… once, looking into those eyes to say…”

— Leo Tolstoy, ‘War and Peace’

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ANSWERS TO THE FACES OF 1956

1. Harlow Curtice
2. Dag Hammarskjöld
3. Marilyn Monroe
4. Nikita Khrushchev
5. Harry Truman
6. William Holden
7. Richard Nixon
8. Gamal Abdel Nasser
9. David Ben-Gurion
10. Estes Kefauver
11. Sir Anthony Eden
12. Rex Harrison
13. Adlai Stevenson
14. Duke Ellington
15. Sherman Adams
16. Jawaharlal Nehru