JIM SHIELDS MEMORIAL: A PERFECT DAY
Pictured above are Jim’s kids with their spouses and his bike: Roland (holding grand dog Chiquita), Maria, Jim and Jayma.
The Shields and Spence Family would like to thank everyone who came near and far to celebrate Jim’s life and many accomplishments. The weather was a perfect fall day at the Laytonville Rodeo Grounds, which was decorated with local flower arrangements, pictures and mementos of Jim. Many friends gathered to help set up, take down, prepare and serve food and drinks.
We are forever grateful to everyone who came early to set up, those who stayed late to clean up, and came back Monday to haul tables, chairs and a tent.
We recognize many friends and family were unable to attend and your love was felt regardless of your physical presence. We would like to thank all who were able to attend, share stories about Jim and give the family so many hugs and love. With the exception of one Dick, the day was perfect.
(Photo: Wes Lind)
SUPERVISOR NORVELL alerts us to the following report by an organization called the “Capital Research Center” entitled “Infiltrated: The Ideological Capture of Homelessness Advocacy” in which the authors describe “the institutional networks and ideological projects perpetuate the problem under the guise of solving it.” And, “The rhetoric of ‘housing is a human right’ and ‘abolish homelessness’ is seductive, but it functions as a smokescreen. Behind it lies a set of interests dedicated to dismantling enforcement, expanding bureaucracies, and keeping streams of funding owing into activism rather than into effective service delivery to those in desperate need.”
But the authors’ own “ideological” bias leads them far-afield to note that “Extremist networks involved in pro-Hamas activism are also active in homelessness advocacy coalitions.” And one of the report’s chapters is entitled “Marxists In Their Own Words.”
According to Wikipedia, the Capital Research Center “is an American conservative 501(c)(3) non-profit watchdog group located in Washington, D.C., that monitors liberal money in politics.”
Predictably, the report authors, lead by former Heritage Foundation execs, don’t have much to recommended beyond the cliched observation that liberal money is making the problem worse, concluding only that “Reform requires more than funding: it requires accountability, a focus on recovery-oriented programs with measurable results, and vigilance against the misuse of humanitarian platforms for ideological ends.”
The full report is at: https://capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/Infiltrated-Report.pdf
DISTRICT ATTORNEY RECALL EFFORT REJECTED
Registrar of Voters said recall group needs to start again
by Elise Cox
A citizen-led effort to recall Mendocino County District Attorney David Eyster will have to start over after the county registrar of voters rejected its paperwork.
“The published Notice of Intent to Recall had several errors and did not match what was served to Mr. Eyster,” Mendocino County Registrar of Voters, Assessor, Clerk and Recorder Katrina Bartolomie said in an email to Mendo Local News.
Helen Sizemore, the recall’s lead organizer, did not respond to requests for comment.
If the group resubmits its paperwork and it is accepted, organizers will have 160 calendar days to collect 8,200 valid signatures to qualify the recall for the ballot.
Bartolomie said the cost of a countywide election could be as high as $300,000 to $350,000 — more than twice the amount the group alleges was misspent prosecuting elected Auditor-Controller Chamise Cubbison and defending the county against her ongoing civil suit.
A Change.org petition calling for Eyster’s recall, posted at least seven months ago, has received fewer than 350 signatures, suggesting the effort may not have broad voter support.
AMONG the signatures on the rejected Eyster recall petition was that of Raleigh Vroman (Page-Russell), widow of former Mendo DA Norm Vroman. There was also the name of Fidel Castro which seems to be a Ukiah Fidel, not the long gone Cuban jeffe. In Eyester's response to the now mooted recall petition was his eye-roller of a statement that his prosecution of Ms. Cubbison was thoroughly investigated by his and the Sheriff's personnel, as if a Mendo investigator would have dared tell Eyster there was no evidence that Cubbison had committed a crime.
MENDOCINO SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE KEITH FAULDER: “Homeless encampment enforcement can be expensive: "From the San Francisco Daily Journal, a legal publication, dated September 23rd - the City of San Francisco paid $2.85 million dollars to settle a lawsuit with two ‘formerly homeless plaintiffs.’ They each got $11,000.00. The lawyers were paid $2,828,000.00.” (via John Sakowicz)
CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE: “I’d go in Pepper’s (lounge) with Joe and as soon as Muddy (Waters) would see Joe he’d make a big fuss, get him a place to sit, buy him a bottle and have them bring over a setup, which was a bowl with ice and tongs and a couple little red cherries to make it classy. He’d announce from the stage that Big Joe Williams was in the audience and he wrote ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go.’ Muddy would act like a little kid around Joe, and Joe loved to be treated like that.”
ON LINE COMMENT:
I wasn’t paying close attention when the county government structure changed from a COO to a CEO, so I asked Duck.ai to give me a synopsis. The answer is below. Looks like the move didn’t really pay off.
Mendocino County’s Transition from COO to CEO
Mendocino County has recently transitioned from a Chief Operating Officer (COO) to a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) structure. This decision is aimed at enhancing leadership effectiveness within the county’s administrative framework.
Reasons for the Change
- Leadership Structure: The shift represents a strategic move to streamline decision-making and enhance overall governance.
- Community Impact: By elevating the COO role to a CEO position, the county aims to better address community needs and service delivery.
- Operational Efficiency: A CEO can provide a more unified vision and direction, facilitating improved collaboration among various departments.
Implications of the Change
- Focus on Strategic Goals: The CEO will be tasked with setting broader strategic aims and ensuring that county departments align with these objectives.
- Public Accountability: This role will likely increase accountability as a single executive will be directly responsible for the county’s operational success.
This change is part of ongoing efforts to improve governance and operational efficiency within Mendocino County, reflecting a commitment to better serving the community.
MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: The County government did not change from COO to CEO. (Chief Operating Officer to Chief Executive Officer.) It changed from CAO to CEO (Chief Administrative Officer to Chief Executive Officer). The reasons that “duck” offers are the usual meaningless word salad that the County and, by extension Duck, may have given at the time. They might as well have said they did it because the garbage was ready to be picked up, the time zone was changing, the wind was blowing, the sun came up, and the moon was in the seventh house. The change occurred because back in the 2010 budget crunch, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, they wanted someone to use unprecedented measures to cut expenses and balance the budget. Then-Health and Human Services Director Carmel Angelo raised her hand and, given her semi-dictatorial predisposition, started making cuts. It was clear at the time that she had obtained the support of the Board as a condition of taking the job. As CEO she could and did dictate budgets to the departments across the County since all but the elected department heads worked directly for the CEO. She immediately implemented a series of budget balancing moves, many of which have not come up in today’s budget balancing discussions: Reducing office hours, implementing a “voluntary time off” policy which didn’t get them where they wanted to get so they moved on to “mandatory time office” where county employees were paid for four days a week instead of five and office hours were juggled accordingly. She also imposed a major cut on the Sheriff who immediately retaliated by switching from a patrol model to a dispatch model. Allman also imposed salary cuts and promotion delays on staff in hopes that doing so would create public backlash and force the Supervisors to back off. Sheriff Allman got quite irritated, but in the ensuing years, the Sheriff’s department was the first to get some budget restoration as the finances improved. So Allman and Angelo started getting along better. Then Allman retired and appointed Matt Kendall who immediately ran afoul of Angelo and a different collection of Supervisors when Angelo high-handedly threatened to personally charge Kendall for budget overruns and to move his computer system to Angelo’s IT department’s control. Kendall balked and hired his own attorney, tensions rose, and it ended up costing the County almost $400k before the dust settled back to the status quo ante. Anyone who follows county affairs knows that none of the gibberish-laden “reasons” given by duck/AI panned out, not that any of it is measurable. In fact, everything is worse, including the CEO and Supervisors themselves. Angelo’s approach may have been over-zealous, but she did what she told the Supervisors she’d do. Her hand-picked predecessor, Darcie Antle, who was hired by Angelo after most of Angelo’s budget cuts had been made, is at best a caretaker, but more accurately simply inert and incompetent. Mendo might as well have duck/AI as their CEO. At least duck seems to be able to generate more articulate empty bureaucratese while doing nothing about the deteriorating budget situation.
HOUSE OF GUINNESS, the widely watched epic on Netflix, irritated me throughout, but the acting was so good it carried me along although the history depicted is laughably off, the actors miscast — the tough guy should have been the straight Guinness heir — and gratuitous f-bombs ruined too many scenes, and I never did learn who was the father of the sister's baby. (The Potato Famine wouldn't have been a famine if the Anglo-Irish cared, and America wouldn't have had 150 years of Irish police departments.)
SO, me and the missus are nearly at the door of Joe's on Fourth Street, San Rafael, average diner age 75 — My people, my people! — when this elderly woman in a walker stops dead in her tracks to zap me with a fish eye, demanding of the missus, "Is his name Jeff?" No, the missus replies, and I'm left to wonder who Jeff was and what he did to prompt an old woman to accost strangers with demands to identify themselves.
THE LATE GREAT SUPERVISOR, Johnny Pinches, never could get any of his four colleagues to join him on an ad hoc committee to examine the County's water exportation question, the long and the short of which is that Sonoma County sells Mendocino County water for millions of dollars but Mendocino County gets a giant mud puddle at Lake Mendocino most summers. All Pinches wanted was a few bucks for Mendocino County out of an historically skewed deal that goes back to the installation of Coyote Dam and Lake Mendocino in the 1950s. That short-sighted deal gave Sonoma County almost all the water stored behind Coyote Dam at Lake Mendocino. (SoCo put up most of the money to build the dam.) The deal was later amended to say that if Sonoma County sold any of Mendo's scant allocation, Mendo would be compensated.
NEVER HAPPENED. Sonoma County's water agency, at huge profit, has sold Mendo water downstream to Marin and its own water district customers for years; Mendocino County hasn't gotten a dime out of it.
IT WAS CLEAR then that the inland supervisors didn't want to disturb the inland morass of water districts, all of them in seeming competition for a resource they know is seriously overdrawn and, of course, dependent on a precarious early 20th century diversion at Potter Valley where a hand dug, mile long tunnel, supported by ancient redwood beams, carries water from the Eel River through Potter Valley (where that community's noble sons of the soil have enjoyed virtually free water for more than a hundred years) to Lake Mendocino where it's stored for Sonoma County. Some of the water, of course, supplies the Russian River which, before the 1950s and Lake Mendocino, was dry above Healdsburg during the summer months.
THIS PRECARIOUS water delivery “system” has fueled suburban growth from Ukiah to Sausalito, but it leaves so little for Mendo that Redwood Valley, for instance, gets maxed out occasionally, and the water districts up and down the Russian River from Redwood Valley to Hopland jealously guard their present allocations. As does the huge influx of wine grape growers. The wine people have put another large demand on the Russian River's overdrawn waters. At some point, all of these people are going to want more but, given the givens of present arrangements, there is not more to get. Lately, the wine people have experienced a well-deserved downturn, but they still get the lions share of the diverted Eel.
PINCHES was really up against an entrenched, mutually jealous, water apparatus that works for its shortsighted beneficiaries but is not viable over the long haul. Or viable only until the next big earthquake takes out the diversion tunnel at Potter Valley. And here comes Congressman Huffman's Two-Basin plan, which will end things as they are, and again to the detriment of Mendocino County.
THE VAILLANCOURT FOUNTAIN fraud-of-a-sculpture in San Francisco has been called many names and is no longer working or even being used by skateboarders.
But destroying it, deluded supporters say, would be erasing history and modern architecture, and counter, they claim, to the City’s “reputation for being weird.” (Only a weirdo would say so. Herb Cain always denounced the city's purchase of this abomination, and right there's your irrefutable statement on the thing.)
MENDO CRIME STATS FROM THE DA'S OFFICE
When comparing prison statistics for the first three quarters of calendar year 2025 against the first three quarters of 2024, 2025 has unfortunately been a very productive year for having defendants sentenced by the Mendocino County courts to state prison, and just an average year for defendants being committed to Realignment county prison.
State Prison:
Through October 10, 2025, 98 defendants have received commitments to state prison out of the Mendocino County Superior Court, as compared to 74 defendants through October 10, 2024, a 25% increase.
Of those sentenced to state prison through October 10, 2025, 36 defendants had their prison sentence enhanced pursuant to California’s Three Strikes law, versus only 28 defendants receiving Strike-enhanced sentences during the entirety of calendar 2024, a 24% increase from 2024 to 2025 with just under three months of legal work still left in 2025.
Realignment County Prison:
Through October 10, 2025, 37 defendants have received commitments to the Realignment county prison, as compared to 41 defendants through October 10, 2024, a 10% decrease.
Jury Trials:
Twenty-four jury trials have gone to final verdict in the first three quarters of calendar year 2025. Four of those trials resulted in not guilty verdicts, while in twenty of the 24 jury trials the trial defendant was found guilty, a successful presentation percentage of 83%.
More Information Available:
Since taking office in 2011, DA Eyster has made it a priority to maintain and make available far more public information and production metrics than most, if not all of the District Attorney offices across the great State of California. To see that local information and/or the metrics, you can click on the address: https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/government/district-attorney
ED NOTE: The overwhelming number of the proles processed in and out of the local jail ought to be locked up for their own safety. Pretending that this lucrative apparatus isn't a class-based justice system whose funding units are incompetent, drug dependent or nuts, is pure fantasy. And now a brand new eyesore of a County Courthouse no one wants except their majesties of our over-large Superior Court because it's convenient and comfortable for them, the ghastly structure's only beneficiaries. Only in Mendo.
A READER WRITES: Isn’t it fairly obvious that the Dems have read their own polling data and see political advantage in blaming Trump for the shutdown so they’re holding out for health insurance subsidies because that’s the issue that polls best? I’m a Democrat and I agree that the subsidies should continue and the Republicans are wrong to hold it up. But does anyone think the Democrats really care about healthcare rather than their own political advantage? If they really cared about healthcare they’d push for single-payer and eliminate the parasitic health insurance companies. But of course that horse left the barn decades ago thanks to Clinton.
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR: ICE raided a Walmart on E. 106th Street in Chicago this week. One of the agents chased down a young black man in the store for “running” during the raid and tackled him to the sidewalk outside the building, as a woman yelled, "He's a U.S. citizen! He's American! He's my brother-in-law!” While he knelt on the man's back, the ICE agent barked at people filming the brutal takedown: "Get the fuck away! Get the fuck away!!" The store was shut down for several hours. A customer told a reporter for a local TV station: ”This is crazy, he [the manager] said they're closed for some ICE stuff going on. I’m just trying to get some dishwasher liquid."
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Shopping at Whole Foods yesterday, I observed one of our favorite energetic so called "team members" racing around filling bags with groceries for "call-in/pick-up" customers, which, I believe, began with the covid hoax. Being curious, I asked her who was still calling in for groceries. One of the types that she listed was, "people afraid of the covid!" I was floored and responded with, "You're kidding?!" With her positive personality, she is prone to laughing and joking. With an incredulous look, she responded, "I know; can you believe it?!"
[2] 1972 was Humboldt heaven! There were fish in the rivers. The roads were clogged with log trucks coming to the mills and flatbeds hauling lumber out. The pulp mills were going full blast and stinking up Eureka. Hippies in the hills were figuring out how to grow dynamite weed. Good times all around. The only thing I don’t miss is teepee burners.
[3] All the California Democrats are different now — or they're not Democrats any longer, like me. When I was in my twenties I was friends with Mickey Ziffren whose husband ran the California Democratic Party. Everyone wanted to know what Mickey thought, from Gore Vidal to Nancy Reagan (Mickey considered Nancy a good friend). Mickey wrote a wonderful novel called ‘A Political Affair.’ I once laughed at Nancy Reagan and Mickey let me have it. “She's very intelligent and funny and I don't have lunch only with people I agree with. And you shouldn't either.” Those Democrats are gone.
[4] It’s funny to see how many people want to be elected Governor of California, despite the fact that they live in the state and can see what a nightmare job it would be. There is no fixing what is wrong, just application of more patches over the worst parts. Nobody is going to finish a four year term and have the people of California say “Hey, that Governor really knew what they were doing and turned this state around”. It’s all managing the decline from here on out.
[5] GazaAftermath
Wow! The aftermath of the October 7 attacks was severe. It’s wise to consider potential consequences before picking fights. (Yeah, she really shoulda known better, but she’s real sorry about it now.)
[6] Congressman Jared Huffman’s saying that the Trump Government was “avoidable” is truly remarkable…
Huffman is how we got here in the first place…
I still can’t understand how a Fossil and a closet Republican like Biden managed to unseat Trump at all, but choosing that VP was the end of sensibility for everyone…
It’s supposed to be a Democracy, with separation of church and State, but we are now a Nazified Theocracy, with a deranged King fucking up everything…
The world reels and cowers, shocked that 500 Billionaires now own everything and control space itself…
Thanks to impotent Democrats and weak losers like Huffman, everyone will enjoy the loss of everything, and descend into the Dystopian Future you all deserve, for not voting in the first place…
[7] The current generation of Americans has never truly experienced a period of economic hardship. They feel goods and services are their right and they will simply swipe their credit cards and charge things to zell while complaining that no one is bailing them out.
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