CITIZENS AGAINST POUND SEIZURE have announced they need additional signatures for the ballot initiative prohibiting the sale of County animals to alleged research centers in the Bay Area. Circulators of the petitions claim they have slightly more than 2,000 valid signatures at this time. 2,800 signatures are required to qualify the pound seizure initiative for the ballot. The idea of initiative drives, for the benefit of those who apparently don’t understand how political democracies are supposed to work, i.e., roughly half the people in Mendocino County, is to place measures on the ballot for the people to decide. Got that?
IT’S ABOUT TIME: the Ukiah Planning Commission has nixed a series of signs proposed to advertise Ukiah’s latest retail atrocity, the Crossroads Shopping Center, presently arising at the north end of State Street. The newest monstrosity is brought to us by Ted Connolly, formerly a lineman for the San Francisco Forty-Niners, a fact you might consider before insulting his project within his hearing.
ASSEMBLYMAN SELL-OUT, ARCATA, on his apple maggot spray vote: “There are a number of people in our community that will not accept the spray program as necessary or viable, whereas we believe it is needed and viable. I had to take a stand I believed in the best interests of the entire district, not just one isolated group.” Hauser, as usual, has cast his vote in a manner designed to enhance his chances for re-election and to curry favor of the large ag interests and the editorial writers at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
THE AMAZON JUNGLE will be destroyed within 60 years if tree falling is not decreased. 15 percent of the forest has already been cleared, announced the World Commission on Environment and Development.
A REPORT PREPARED by researchers at Tufts University and the University of Florida has discovered that 25 innocent persons have been executed in this century in the United States and more than 340 innocent persons have been convicted of capital crimes. Since more than 7,000 “legal” executions have been carried out in the 85 years of this century, roughly 1 person in 20 has been erroneously convicted. These figures do not include lynchings which accounted for another 5,000 wrongful deaths in the United States up until 1948.
ONE IN FOUR AMERICANS lives alone; ten thousand Vietnam-era draft resisters continue to live in Canada; twenty-two percent of Reagan’s judicial appointees are millionaires; Carter appointed four percent millionaires to the bench; 90,000 Latin Americans have “disappeared” since 1963 for perceived political offenses.
THE REVEREND SUN MYUNG MOON, prominent Boonville chinchilla rancher and convicted felon, called upon the world’s religious leaders to join a “movement of purification.” Exactly what is meant by the cryptic yet somehow ominous summons was not declared. Moon’s Unification Church was once very popular in Boonville at the same time it was being denounced in the more alert and astute areas of the world as a neo-fascist political movement. Many Valley residents admired the Moonies, mistaking their perpetual idiot grins for expressions of happiness.
BILL MANDEL, A COLUMNIST for the San Francisco Examiner, recently wrote a piece called “Tyranny Inn Style -- Bed and Breakfast Don’t and Don’t” in which he accurately enumerated the many sins of Mendocino County bed and breakfast establishments. The emphasis of Mandel’s complaints was on the prevailing pretentiousness, with the general chintziness of many of these establishments running a close second. Tourism, as we know, is the County’s brilliant economic salvation trump card, the idea being that tourists will forever pay a hundred bucks a night for a bathroom down the hall, microscopic meals and a sip of mediocre wine.
LOCAL DRUG USERS are complaining that he tragedy of Columbia has driven the price of cocaine radically upwards. The areas destroyed in the volcanic eruptions are known as cocaine centers.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA is fighting off a proposal from the state college system which would permit state colleges to grant Phd’s. The fact that state colleges managed to elevate themselves to universities was in itself one of the grosser scams of perpetrated on an unsuspecting public in recent years. To permit Chico State to pass out Phd’s would drive the final nail into the coffin of higher education in this state.
THE CALIFORNIA COASTAL COMMISSION WILL ADOPT “findings” which permit increased development of the Mendocino Coast at the Holiday Inn, Los Angeles International Airport, this week beginning Wednesday. The site of the adoption of “findings” could not be more appropriate as the Coastal Plan is largely and generously in the interests of Los Angeles developers.
ACCORDING TO PLOWSHARES, a dining room in Ukiah established to feed the poor, more women and children are appearing to eat each day. Plowshares reports only about twenty percent of its diners are transients while more patrons are single women with children.
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