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LINGERING SHOWERS continue into the afternoon, but gradually are tapering off. Dry weather is expected Friday afternoon through Saturday. Another system returns rain Saturday into Sunday. Near freezing low temperatures are possible mid next week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A fresh .42" of rainfall from afternoon showers yesterday. 48F under clear skies this Friday morning on the coast. Some clouds & some clear until rain returns Sunday morning, Saturday is looking lovely. A mix of sun & rain next week, the exact timing keeps changing of course.
TAYLOR BALSON (Boonville): Nice little find in the back yard this morning….
JOSHUA EDWARD MIZE
With heavy hearts, we announce the passing of Joshua Edward Mize on November 7, 2025, at the age of 44.
Josh was born and raised in the Anderson Valley of Mendocino County and lived a life marked by kindness, humor, and compassion. Josh is survived by his wife, Kristina Mize. He is also survived by his children: Zaiden, Tadhg, Kyson, and Cyrah Baddely; his twin sister, Heidi Mize DeFrancesco, and brother-in-law, Michael DeFrancesco; nephew Jack and niece Lily; and his mother, Kristin Mize.
Over the years, Josh touched the lives of many children and adults through his work at Greenacre Homes and School. In remembrance, donations may be made to: Greenacre Homes & School Development Office 438 Eddie Lane Sebastopol, CA 95472 Redwood Community Services/The Arbor P.O. Box 2077 Ukiah, CA 95482
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, 'Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.' I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch in awe as it unfolds. Each of us is a breath-taking sunset that is perfectly imperfect.” (Carl Rogers)
GINO PORZIO
On Saturday, November 8, 2025, Gino Porzio passed peacefully into the next life at 82 years.
Gino was born on October 14, 1943, in Ukiah, California. He was raised by his loving father Luigi (1891-1956) and mother, Gina (1899-1987), alongside his sister Rosalie Montgomery (1921-1997), Luisa (1923-1926), and brother Frank Porzio on Porzio Lane in Ukiah.
Gino was preceded in death by his beloved wife of 49 years, Frances “Diane” Porzio, who passed on July 20, 2020. He is survived by his four sons: Ryan (Gay), Kevin (Desiree), Scott, and Shane.
Gino was a proud native of Ukiah. In his early years, he worked at the Palace Hotel, rode his Vespa through town, and longed for Diane while she was away at Rio Lindo Adventist Academy. On weekends, he would ride out to visit her or take scenic drives to the coastsmall adventures that reflected his deep devotion. Gino and Diane were married in July 1973. While working as an electrician for B&F Electric, they purchased a small home, big backyard, where they raised their four boys. Family was everything to Gino. He took them camping every year in their trailer, cheered them on at countless BMX races, soccer, basketball, and football games, and even coached baseball for several seasons.
In 1990, Gino took on a unique project purchasing the historic Bittenbender house for just one dollar. He removed the roof and interior walls and relocated the structure to 211 South Spring Street, where it found new life. This endeavor was a testament to his resourcefulness and determination.
Gino loved his family deeply, and he had a special place in his heart for all of his dogs. He was a man of quiet strength, unwavering loyalty, and gentle humor. His legacy lives on in the lives of his children, the memories he created, and the values he instilled. He will be remembered for his kindness, his craftsmanship, and the love he gave so freely. May he rest in peace, reunited with Diane, and forever cherished in our hearts.
SERVICE will be held at the Empire Mortuary on November 22, 2025, from 1:00pm to 4:00pm.
BUDGET AD HOC MOLE HILL GIVES BIRTH TO DEAD MOUSE
by Mark Scaramella
There’s an old parable about a mountain being in labor “uttering immense groans and on earth there was very great expectation. But it gave birth to a mouse. This has been written for you who, though you threaten great things, accomplish nothing.”
We were reminded of that parable during the last Supervisors board meeting when, during “supervisors reports,” Board Chair John Haschak asked his colleague Supervisor Ted Williams about the status of the budget ad hoc committee on which Williams sits with fellow Supervisor Madeline Cline. In early 2025 the Williams/Cline budget ad hoc committee was formed for the “ad hoc” purpose of “working on the budget challenges and solutions with Public Safety and Strategic Hiring Process improvements for the most efficient outcomes.”
After giggling about the invocation of the phrase “most efficient outcomes” uttered by some of the least efficent government officials we know, we looked back to the Board’s September meeting when, in response to a routine question from Board Chair John Haschak about the status of the budget ad hoc committee, Williams replied, “We haven’t got anywhere. We will have to make massive cuts and nobody will like them. We are like a deer in the headlights.”
Undaunted, Haschak then asked Williams and Cline to “bring back a proposal,” but, as usual, with no due date.
At their November 4 meeting, months after accepting the budget ad hoc assignment and two months after agreeing to “bring back a proposal,” Williams had a new excuse, explaining that there simply wasn’t enough information for his committee to make any recommendations.
Ms. Cline added that their ad hoc committee has been “working with the CEO budget team,” which has so far made no specific budget balancing recommendations either, public safety or otherwise.
Haschak then speculated that maybe they don’t need a budget ad hoc.
Ms. Cline mentioned the Board’s 6% across the board budget reductions imposed on all general fund departments and their random “attrition” policy (aka the “strategic hiring process”) that is supposed to limit rehires for general fund positions that randomly become vacant — a policy that at last count was running at less than 50% of the hoped for $6 million savings for this fiscal year.
But that hardly amounts to any kind of specific budget balancing recommendations or proposals from the ad hoc committee or the “budget team.”
Although the original intent of the ad hoc was to look at “public safety” which makes up the large majority of the general fund, Williams has never mentioned even meeting with any of the County’s public safety officials and managers to explore proposals or budget balancing ideas.
Williams added, “We are always waiting. We have no financial information to work with, nothing we can believe. We don’t know what’s going on so it’s hard to project. We still don’t get good reports. … We need new software.” This last was an apparent reference to the County’s costly yet unwieldy “MUNIS” government financial software program that has never provided meaningful, up-to-date budget status reports, despite having been in place for at least ten years.
In addition, as noted by County Auditor-Controller/Treasurer Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison, the County’s understaffed general fund departments are having trouble feeding timely, accurate expense information into MUNIS, even though most of the budget “expenses” are salaries which should be straightforward and current — and therefore providing no excuse for not exploring budget cutting proposals.
Supervisor Bernie Norvell thought the Board should keep the useless ad hoc committee even if all it was doing was “working with the CEO’s office.”
TWILIGHT SOCCER at Ukiah High (Martin Bradley)
LaFEVER CASE SUBMITTED TO DISTRICT ATTORNEY
by Justine Frederiksen
The Ukiah Police Department has submitted the results of its investigation into Ukiah High School teacher Matthew P. LaFever to Mendocino County District Attorney David Eyster.
On Wednesday, UPD Capt. Jason Chapman confirmed that his department had forwarded its case against LaFever, a 37-year-old Hopland resident and longtime teacher at Ukiah High, to Eyster’s office. So far, Chapman said, the resulting charge remains one misdemeanor count of “annoying or molesting a minor,” in this case a 17-year-old girl that LaFever allegedly sent inappropriate communications to while aware of her age.
When asked Wednesday about the status of the case against LaFever, DA David Eyster said the UPD investigation had been submitted to his office and had been assigned to a senior attorney in his office. When asked for a timeline, Eyster said he could not speak to when his staff would complete its review of the case.
At the time of LaFever’s arrest on Nov. 3, the UPD reported learning that the teacher and journalist (who founded the formerly robust but now-deactivated local news website MendoFever.com) may have contacted multiple minors in Mendocino and Sonoma counties, and requested that other potential victims come forward.
When asked this week if any other victims had contacted the UPD, Chapman said he could not comment on that as “that is still an active part of the investigation.”
In its initial press release, the UPD reported being informed in October by a concerned parent that a Ukiah High teacher identified as LaFever “had made an inappropriate sexual comment towards her daughter,” and later officers interviewed “a different UHS student who had information regarding LaFever contacting minors on social media.”
After obtaining a search warrant for the teacher’s cell phone, computers, and residence, the UPD reports that detectives contacted him at Ukiah High School on Oct. 16 and “seized his cell phone and multiple laptops,” devices upon which they reportedly found evidence confirming that the interactions described by the 17-year-old had occurred, and “she had clearly informed LaFever that she was a minor.”
The Ukiah Unified School District reported at the time that LaFever was placed on administrative leave “Oct. 16 when law enforcement first informed us of the situation. The staff member remains off campus, and will not return to the classroom while investigations continue.”
When asked Wednesday about the status of LaFever’s employment and if he will be returning to the school campus, UUSD Superintendent Deb Kubin said only that “Mr. LaFever is on leave until we complete our investigation.”
The UPD requests that any minors who may have had contact with LaFever online, whom they report “used numerous variations of the screen name ‘Johhnyender’ across multiple social media platforms,” to please contact them.
The non-emergency line for the UPD is 707-463-6262.
ICEBERG!! Fort Bragg’s Wave Energy Desalinization Buoy Arrives!
As first city in California to try wave energy, Fort Bragg about to step into role as world leader in ocean technology
After three years of refining both engineering and financing, the Oneka wave-powered desalination buoy, called Iceberg has been delivered and will be ready for its test launch in Fort Bragg this week—by its Canadian inventors, here to finalize logistics for the groundbreaking device. Iceberg’s test launch for the media is scheduled for Friday.
— Frank Hartzell/mendocinocoast.news
PEKIN TO THE RESCUE
by Elise Cox
The sudden retirement of Judge Clayton Brennan on October 31st has created legitimate concerns in the coastal communities about the future of the Ten Mile courthouse in Fort Bragg.
The Mendocino County Superior Court will remain open and operational in both Ukiah and Fort Bragg. Court Executive Officer Kim Turner emphasizes, “There is no plan to close the Ten Mile courthouse - none.”
Presiding Judge Keith Faulder acknowledges that losing the judicial officer at the coast has created logistical problems for covering all matters assigned to the Ten Mile courthouse. He states, “This is a dynamic situation, and some elements of a complete answer are still evolving. We remain committed to ensuring that both coastal and inland communities continue to receive judicial services. However, the reality is that we cannot fully staff courtrooms without sufficient judicial officers. All of us—your judges and court staff—have taken on additional calendars and responsibilities to meet the need.”
The Mendocino County bench is authorized by statute to have eight judges. Ms. Turner states that the new courthouse, currently under construction in Ukiah, is designed for seven courtrooms only. “The new courthouse is designed to house seven judicial officers. The Mendocino bench has eight judges. This should assure the coastal community that the branch courthouse in Fort Bragg will not close with the completion of the new courthouse in Ukiah.”
In the last sixteen months, the court had two judicial vacancies which were finally filled by Governor Newsom. Judge FredRicco McCurry joined the bench in early October. County Counsel Charlotte Scott will be sworn in as the court’s newest judge on December 8th. In addition, Judge Ann Moorman is on special assignment to the First Appellate District until at least December 31st.
Judge Brennan’s decision to retire on October 31st created a new judicial vacancy which can only be filled in one of two ways – by Governor’s appointment in the remaining years of Judge Brennan’s term or through an open election in 2030. With the workload and judicial resource challenges facing the court, temporary measures have been put in place to keep the Ten Mile courthouse open to fulfill its public service obligations.
The court clerk’s office in Fort Bragg remains open Monday through Friday to accept filings in all matters, criminal and civil, and to offer self-help services, accept criminal and traffic fine payments and assist the public with court record searches.
Certain case types—such as criminal, domestic violence, and unlawful detainers—have statutory or constitutional priority and often require in-person appearances. Other matters, such as civil and small claims cases, may be handled remotely.
Judge Patrick Pekin will preside over criminal, domestic violence and civil restraining order cases in the Ten Mile Court Mondays through Wednesdays. On Thursdays and Fridays, Judge Pekin will preside over civil, small claims, and unlawful detainer matters, Adult Drug Court and Behavioral Health Court in the Ukiah courthouse. The Ten Mile court’s unlimited civil and probate cases and some family law matters are currently reassigned to the Ukiah court.
Kim Turner notes that the court intends to take advantage of remote proceedings for litigants that cannot appear in court in person. “The use of remote hearings, where feasible, makes it easier for the public to attend their proceedings and fully participate in their cases. Remote proceedings have radically changed the way courts operate. They have become commonplace now that Zoom and other video software have improved these courtroom experiences.”
Judge Faulder and incoming Presiding Judge Carly Dolan have been working closely to make sure all courtrooms are adequately covered with available resources. Ms. Turner states, “We will use this time to review filing data and other workload measures to ensure a fair and equitable distribution of work in the clerk’s offices and among our judges.” While there may be additional caseload adjustments as the new judicial officers take on their assignments, the change in court leadership will not radically affect the decisions already being made. Judge Faulder adds, “We appreciate the public’s patience and understanding as we all work to maintain essential judicial services during this period of transition.”
(Mendo Local is free to read and staffed by volunteers. But we have startup costs and ongoing bills for software, mileage, and the insurance that allows us to do investigative reporting. If you would like to help us pay these costs, please consider making a pledge. There will be more information to come about our fundraising efforts. www.mendolocal.news.)
OPEN HOUSE AT OSCAR’S PLACE DONKEY SANCTUARY
by Monica Huettl
I almost skipped my planned visit to the open house at Oscar’s Place Adoption Center and Sanctuary. There were lots of unfinished chores at home, plenty of things to do. Introverts such as myself will use any excuse to cancel plans. I’m glad I fought off this urge and went to visit the sanctuary.
Oscar’s Place has two locations in Mendocino County, in Hopland and Potter Valley. The open house was at the Potter Valley ranch. A food truck selling baked goods, drinks, and donkey merch greeted visitors in the parking lot. Lots of volunteers were on hand, clad in red t-shirts, ready to help visitors experience the donkeys.
What does it mean to “experience the donkeys?” It means you can enter their pasture, walk among the herd, pet them and give them gentle scratches as you would your dog or cat, or simply stand next to them, feeling their peaceful donkey energy. If you are not comfortable around large animals, you can watch the herd from a distance. The donkeys in the corral at the open house were selected for their tame nature. The volunteer who welcomed me into the pasture instructed me to read the donkeys’ body language and to use common sense.
When I stepped into the corral, I saw Lisa, a cashier at my regular grocery store in Ukiah, petting the donkeys. Lisa is always so kind to the slow-moving, elderly people at check-out, the ones who are flummoxed by the rewards system app for your phone that has replaced traditional coupon clipping. Lisa helps them over the technological hurdles, never rushing them, always cheerful.
Volunteer Paula Fiori said she used to own horses, and she decided to volunteer at Oscar’s Place in order to spend time with members of the equine species. She is new to Ukiah and volunteering is a way to connect with new friends.
The donkeys have a beautiful open barn where they can shelter at night and in bad weather, but still remain together in a herd, feeling comfort from their companions. There are a few stalls for donkeys that need to be separated.
Why is it necessary to save donkeys? Volunteers handed out post cards with this message:
Millions of donkeys are killed for the collagen in their hides to meet rising demand for a traditional medicine. Unwanted donkeys are sent to auctions where kill pen buyers are waiting. If we don’t step in first, they face a horrible fate.
A February 17, 2023 Newsweek article by Jess Thompson provides a disturbing look at why collagen from donkey hides is in great demand worldwide, and the sad plight of the donkeys sent to slaughter. Traditional Chinese medicine called Ejiao, made from donkey skin collagen, is believed to control inflammation and bleeding from ulcers and other ailments.
Oscar’s Place has rescued over 380 donkeys and facilitated over 160 adoptions.
Standing among the herd of donkeys on a sunny autumn day in Potter Valley refreshed my mental outlook. The hillside paddock has a panoramic view of Potter Valley.
A man riding a bike stopped to check out the open house. Kestrel was on a long-haul bike ride from Comptche to his home in Covelo. Yes, you read that right: riding a bike from Comptche to Covelo. It would take hours in a car over roads full of potholes, but he was going the long way, on back country trails. He took a break at the sanctuary before resuming his journey over many hills toward home. I asked to take his picture for my story on the open house, and it turns out he is a fellow writer.
Kestrel sent a message after he made it home: “I just proved I can haul a full gear rack with cameras over 200 miles and over 20,000 feet of elevation. I captured 20 hours of raw video content, from the redwoods into the Yuki wilderness. The folks I met, the places I saw, were amazing. I intend to make my ranch into a serious off-road bicycle destination.” His Instagram handle is @kestrelcraftgravel
I’m definitely not an endurance athlete, but I did manage to hike up the hillside to take a look at the donkeys’ water tanks. All the fences, equipment, and buildings at Oscar’s place were top-of-line, providing safety and security for the animals and volunteers.
Oscar’s Place Potter Valley location will be closed to visitors in November. The Hopland location will remain open for limited visits. Check the website linked above and call before visiting. Visitors must be over the age of 12, and no dogs are allowed. Teens between the ages of 12–17 must be accompanied by an adult. Signed waivers are required of all visitors.
Despite being funded by donations, there was no pressure put on visitors to donate money at the event. For those who would like to support Oscar’s Place, the website has links to become a donkey sponsor, or to make a donation as a gift or memorial.
Closing with a picture this sweet little donkey enjoying her salt lick.
UNREALIZED GAINS
To the Editor:
The unrealized capital gain on investments in the County’s “Treasury Pool” — a portfolio of tax receipts held by the County Treasurer — was created when the Federal Reserve Bank dropped interest rates. Bond prices and interest rates move in opposite directions — meaning when interest rates drop, bond prices go up. They have an “inverse” relationship. But these unrealized gains cannot be easily (or legally) realized.
The underlying securities of those investments would have to be liquidated for the gain to be realized., and the Board of Supervisors (BOS) couldn’t do it. Why? Because the County has hired Chandler Asset Management to manage that portfolio held by County Treasurer, and Chandler was hired for good reason. I’ll explain.
The portfolio is highly “structured” and empirically “structured”– meaning that the portfolio is structured not just to collect and hold taxes but to pay off liabilities with as liabilities come due. Remember that the County collects taxes not just for the County itself but also on behalf of Mendocino College, MCOE, and a host of other agencies and districts.
As of the close of last year, the portfolio had the following characteristics:
Average Modified Duration 1.44
Average Coupon 2.59%
Average Purchase YTM 3.12%
Average Market YTM 3.88%
Average Quality AA+
Average Final Maturity 1.55
Average Life 1.47
This structure is not easily toyed with. I know all this because I served as a public trustee at MCERA from 2012-2017. It was the timeframe when the County got into a lot of trouble with its so-called Teeter Plan — another name for “kicking the can down the road” with the County’s debts. The Teeter Plan was such an abuse of the County Treasury Pool it was almost criminal. It was an abuse of the public trust. It was former County Treasurer Tim Knutsen’s little secret until it wasn’t, and it took years for the BOS to fix.
Knutsen was also responsible for a little fiction at MCERA known as “excess earnings”. MCERA got into a lot of trouble with the IRS as a result and almost lost its tax-exempt status.
The County Grand Jury investigated the mess. Also, a guy by the name of John Dickerson investigated the mess. Mr. Dickerson published his findings in his blog, “Your Public Money”.
Let’s just say it was an era of creative accounting — always a bad idea with public money.
My advice? Leave the County’s Treasury Pool alone. The maturity distribution of the portfolio is designed to match when liabilities come due. It’s all about managing cashflow.
John Sakowicz
Ukiah
FORMER COUNTY AUDITOR STAFFER NORM THURSTON REPLIES:
Bonds that are traded in the open market may be bought or sold at any time. As you noted, when market interest rates drop, the value of bonds goes up. At that point the investor may decide to sell the bond, recognizing a capital gain equalling the sales price less the original cost. Bond traders will do this if they believe interest rates will go back up, and they can reinvest the proceeds in new bonds at a lower price. Alternatively, the investor may decide to keep the bond, and continue earning the higher rate of return until maturity.
I’m not familiar with the County’s agreement with Chandler Asset Management, but it could be that it gives Chandler the rights and responsibility to invest the investment pool within specified guidelines. In that case, it may be Chandlers decision to sell or keep the bonds. The County could not unilaterally sell bonds because that duty has contractually been assigned to Chandler.
LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)
20TH ANNUAL BLOOD DRIVE IN MENDOCINO DECEMBER 16TH
The Mendocino Fire Protection District and Volunteer Fire Department will be hosting the 20th annual Bucket Brigade Blood Drive on Tuesday, December 16, 2025 from 1:15 pm to 5:00 pm at the Fire House, 44700 Little Lake Road, Mendocino. The Bucket Brigade is a friendly competition among local fire departments to see which can host the largest blood drive. All donors receive a Bucket Brigade T-shirt as a thank you gift. The Blood Drive will again be run by Vitalant Blood Services, a non-profit that supplies blood to local area hospitals. They encourage donors to make an appointment to minimize wait time. This can be done online at Vitalant.org or by phone: 877-258-4825. Slots are already filling up, so sign up today. Give the gift of life this Holiday Season. We hope to see you there.
BLOOM BLAST: News from Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens
GLUB, GLUB, GLUB?
Updated: Public Hearing: General Plan Sea Level Rise Amendment
Notice Of A Public Hearing For Proposed General Plan/Local Coastal Program Amendment GP # 2025-01
Notice is hereby given that the Point Arena City Council will conduct a public hearing in-person and via teleconference on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at 6:00 p.m., or as soon thereafter as possible, on the following:
General Plan/Local Coastal Program Amendment
Public Hearing will be held Approving/Denying the Following Project:
Case: GP # 2025-01
Date Filed: October 16, 2025
Applicant: City of Point Arena
Request: Review and consider a recommendation to the City Council of an amendment of the City of Point Arena Local Coastal Program General Plan #2025-01, which proposes to incorporate sea level rise into the Community Safety & Health Element.
Location: Within the City of Point Arena boundaries. The entirety of the City of Point Arena is within the Coastal Zone.
Public Hearing Date: November 18, 2025
Environmental Determination: Statutory Exemption pursuant to Public Resources Code §15061.b.3, the common sense categorical exemption.
www.pointarena.ca.gov
FROM EBAY, A PHOTOGRAPH OF SEMI-LOCAL INTEREST (via Marshall Newman)
THE BOONVILLE QUIZ RETURNS
It's baaaaack!….
I am referring to the General Knowledge and Trivia Quiz which will be making two appearances over the upcoming holiday period, each of which will be a couple of days prior to both Thanksgiving Day and also Christmas Day.
We'll kick-off at the usual time of 7pm on November 25th and December 23rd. Libby's special Mexican Fiesta will be available all evening (4.30-8.30) along with beer, wine, and cocktails to help get you through your brain exercises.
Looking forward to seeing you all,
Cheers,
Steve Sparks, The Quizmaster
NEW PODCAST SERIES ON BARI BOMBING (Episodes 1 & 2)
Introducing the Rip Current podcast about Judi Bari, Earth First! and the timber wars. There will be (I think) 11 weekly episodes and a few bonus episodes at the end.
— Toby Ball, Rip Current podcaster
Ed note: Actual show starts at the 3:27 mark in the first episode.
DEPUTY SHERIFF WILLIAM. A. WHITE (from the Redwood Journal May 1, 1950)
Deputy Sheriff William A. White was shot and killed Saturday night while engaged in an investigation of reported sheep stealing in the sparsely settled country eight miles southwest of the village of Hopland. Deputy White was killed in an exchange of shots with Carl Burgess Jr., 25, and John R. Kelly, 23, at the old Burgess ranch near the headwaters of Feliz Creek. Burgess is at the Ukiah General Hospital with a bullet hole through his body.
In company with Game Warden Garrie Heryford of Ukiah, Deputy White went into the Feliz Creek section Saturday night to continue the investigation in which they had engaged for more than a month and which involved reports of game law violations as well as sheep losses by the Berger and Hines ranches, and others.
Parking their car some distance from the Burgess home, the officers separated with White going to the house and Heryford taking up his investigation in another direction. They agreed to meet again at the car. Deputy White went to the cabin where Burgess and Kelly slept and posted himself in the orchard near the cabin window for the purpose of listening to their conversation. The window was open and Kelly went to it and looked out and saw White.
According to Kelly's story, he picked up an unloaded shotgun and leaning out the window called to White, telling him that he had him covered. It had been the purpose of the officers to keep their identity from becoming known to the men they had under surveillance and White moved away from his position to a spot behind a rocky knoll, which was covered with brush. Here he was concealed when Burgess and Kelly converged from different directions, with Burgess coming up from below and Kelly climbing the knoll.
Again, Kelly's story showed him to have a shotgun. Burgess was armed with a .22 rifle. Kelly claims that a noise like the breaking of a twig in the brush where White was concealed touched off the shooting. He says he fired three shots from the shotgun, aiming high, while calling to White to come out. Burgess fired into the brush and in turn received the fire from the deputy's revolver.
In the exchange, White was hit in the right side, just below his arm, the bullet piercing both lungs and; injuring his spine. It is said that on order from Kelly, White dropped his empty revolver and came out of concealment telling Kelly who he was, saying “I want to talk to you.” White approached Kelly, then said, “I can't talk any more,” and collapsed. This occurred at approximately 9:30 o'clock.
Burgess, meanwhile, had reached the house where his parents and grandparents live and told them he had been shot. They put him to bed and Kelly arrived at the house to tell them of White's condition. Kelly and the elder Burgess tried to take White into the house, but were unable to move him more than a few feet. They brought a blanket to make a sling to move him but White was dead before they could put the plan into effect.
Kelly went to the C. E. Cooper ranch home where he telephoned to the sheriff's office in Ukiah, telling of the shooting, without giving more of the facts than that the wounded man kept calling “Garrie,” before he lapsed into unconsciousness. Game Warden Heryford meanwhile, had finished his trip and had returned to the car and was seated in it when a radio call was put through to him from Ukiah. He went to the Burgess house and took charge until arrival of Sheriff Bev Broaddus and deputies. The city ambulance was sent out for Burgess and the Eversole Mortuary brought in the body of Deputy White. The officers remained at the Burgess home most of the night to complete their investigation and just as they were winding up the affair a quartet of youths from San Francisco arrived, to visit Kelly.
Kelly, who was taken into custody as a material witness, was released Sunday, but rearrested after Sheriff Broaddus and deputies had conducted a daylight investigation of the scene of the shooting. He may be charged with attempted murder. Doubt as to Kelly's story of shooting high followed discovery of buckshot marks on White's revolver and of marks on his gun hand which Sheriff Broaddus believes were made by a shot from the gun fired by Kelly. Investigation of the surroundings were made and marks of shotgun slugs were found among the brush surrounding the spot where White stood. Sheriff Broaddus is satisfied that it was Kelly who held and fired the shotgun.
(via Ron Parker)
THE BOONVILLE DISTILLERY
I started with a simple idea: take what our valley already has—apples, whey, wine, abundance-and turn it into something meaningful. Today I’m building a closed-looped distillery that reduces waste, supports local agriculture, creates spaces where people feel welcome. I’m proud of how far this dream has@come and excited for where it’s going. Thank you @gustohq for supporting small businesses owners like me.
ELSIE ALLEN, BASKET WEAVER AND POMO SAGE
by Averee McNear
Born in 1899 near Santa Rosa, Elsie Allen was a fourth-generation basket weaver taught by her mother and grandmother. Elsie’s mother, Annie Burke, was a renowned weaver, and together they would travel to art fairs to show baskets.
Tradition dictated that a weaver’s baskets be buried with her or a relative whenever she died. When Elsie’s grandmother passed, Elsie lost many examples of weaving and relied on her mother to continue learning. Annie was worried about the art of weaving and baskets being lost or forgotten, so she requested Elsie break this tradition and keep her baskets when she passed. Elsie granted this wish, even as some Pomo people and relatives told her she shouldn’t.
At 50, Elsie began weaving full-time and teaching the art to others. Between 1969 and 1971, she finished 54 baskets, some of which took years to make. In addition to teaching her family, Elsie taught at the Mendocino Art Center from 1966 to 1975. The course included several weekends in the spring that taught students to gather and cure materials. In the fall, students were taught to weave. Elsie’s classes were open to Pomo and non-Pomo students alike.
In 1972, Elsie published "Pomo Basketmaking: A Supreme Art for the Weaver," which details weaving methods for different styles of baskets, how to gather materials, and more. Through this book, her teachings, and her many baskets on display in museums, Elsie’s work ensures that the art of Pomo basket weaving is never lost or forgotten.
In addition to weaving, Elsie was an outspoken representative for her community. She was a member of both the Pomo and Hintil Women’s Clubs. These groups promoted education, Indigenous rights, and cultural preservation. From 1979 to 1981, Elsie worked with the Native American Advisory Council, where she participated in a study to record the history of the Makahmno and Mahilakawna Pomo.
This council also partnered with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the construction of the Warm Springs Dam and Lake Sonoma. This construction had the potential to destroy indigenous plants in the area, and Elsie contributed to a study of plants used by Native peoples for medicinal, economic, ceremonial, and artistic purposes. Her input was instrumental in relocating endangered plants before they were destroyed.
Elsie passed in December 1990 at age 91. In her lifetime, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity Degree and given the title of Pomo Sage. In 1995, Elsie Allen High School opened in Santa Rosa, California, and her baskets remain on display at countless museums. Elsie’s work in preserving the history and art of Pomo basket weaving is unmatched, and her legacy continues today.
A Woman’s Place Was Everywhere: How Working Women Shaped Mendocino is on display until March 29, 2026. The Kelley House Musum is open Thursday-Monday, 11am-3pm. Visit the Kelley House event Calendar for a walking tour schedule.
(kelleyhousemuseum.org)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, November 12-13, 2025
BRENT ANDERSON, 39, Westport. Disorderly conduct-under influence.
NATASHA BABATUNDE, 38, Ukiah. Parole violation.
OSCAR BERNAL, 36, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury.
KENNETH BUTTREY, 67, Willits. Controlled substance, probation revocation.
JEFFREY CARVER, 42, Willits. Controlled substance with two more priors, probation revocation.
JOEL COWAN, 37, Willits. Failure to appear.
DEREK JOHNSON, 57, Willits. Probation revocation.
SARA KLEIN, 52, Redway//Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia, unlawful display of evidence of registration.
DANIEL KOWALSKY, 55, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.
JEANNETTE LONG, 33, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation violation.
SCOTT MATHER, 39, Ukiah. Controlled substance, evasion, failure to appear, probation revocation.
MICHAEL MCCLELLAN, 52, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, county parole violation.
JEREMY MILLER, 44, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
TYLER NELSON, 37, Point Arena. Failure to appear.
DANIEL PEREZ, 40, Manchester. Probation revocation.
JASON PICKETT, 48, Willits. DUI-any drug, paraphernalia, toluene or similar.
NATALIE RODRIGUEZ, 34, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, vandalism, parole violation.
LEE RUPERT, 50, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.
KELLI SCHAFER, 34, Santa Rosa/Leggett. Controlled substance without prescription, evasion.
BRIAN WILLIAMS, 54, Ukiah. Parole violation.
TRISTIN WILEY, 30, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, concealed dirk-dagger, entering a noncommercial building during an incident, contempt of court, probation revocation.
ALL THE ESSENCE WE’LL EVER NEED
The meaning of it,
The substance and core of it,
The saying of it.
The feeling of it,
The compelling power of it,
Because it was said.
The writing of it,
The setting in stone of it,
So it could live on.
The music of it,
The deep truth of it that sings,
So we’d remember.
— Jim Luther
TRIPPING THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
Warmest spiritual greetings,
Dancing on Light Beams
Sitting in front of a public computer at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in Washington, D.C. listening to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OvM4ycNVL8
I await new membership cards related to health, wealth, and food, which will be incoming in a week or so. Beyond this, the way is all blissful. There is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.
I am ready to roll out of the homeless shelter, going where necessary and doing what is crucial.
Talk to me.
Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]
‘ARE YOU TRYING TO PULL A FAST ONE?’: Rumors of tech-backed ‘autonomy’ stir backlash to Cloverdale Esmeralda megaproject
by Amie Windsor
Is the Network State — an online movement that uses cryptocurrency to fund self-governing micro-communities — coming to Cloverdale?
That speculation, fueled by a Nov. 12 Substack post by the account The Nerd Reich, became a flashpoint Wednesday night during a joint meeting of the Cloverdale City Council and Planning Commission. The groups gathered for a presentation from the Esmeralda Land Co. about its proposal to redevelop the long-stalled Alexander Valley Resort site.
Esmeralda, a Bay Area-based developer founded by Devon Zuegel, wants to transform the 266-acre property on Cloverdale’s south end into a new mixed-use neighborhood with homes, public parkland, restaurants, retail space, multiple hotels, and a conference and event center. Zuegel said the plan scales back what has been approved on the site for the past two decades and adds a public park that would be gifted to the city.
Housing and hotels: a scaled-down vision
The development would offer 166 detached single-family homes, from one-bedroom starter homes to four-bedroom models with accessory dwelling units. The average single-family home would be about 1,582 square feet.
Plans also call for 239 attached “village flats” — studios to three-bedroom apartments — and 200 “active living senior” units, from studios to two-bedroom apartments. Home prices would range from $600,000 to $4 million, according to Esmeralda documents, which note that pricing would shift with the housing market.
The resort component would include three separate lodging concepts: a 120-room resort hotel with two restaurants, a 64-room boutique hotel and a 16-unit apartment-style resort building.
A spa, fitness center, racquetball club, Japanese-style hot spring and more than 21,000 square feet of retail space round out the concept.
The development’s components would be linked by what Zuegel called “the necklace” — a bikeable, walkable trail designed to encourage movement throughout the community.
“The goal is not just to make it walkable and bikeable, but to make it welcome to the entire Cloverdale community,” Zuegel said. “That’s one of the things we really care about. We want this neighborhood to be part of Cloverdale.”
Skepticism boils over
But many Cloverdale residents — and some council members — said the project feels anything but inclusive.
Several speakers pointed to Zuegel’s past participation in Network State-related conferences and her appearance on a 2024 podcast with Jan Sramek, the founder of California Forever — a Silicon Valley-backed initiative to build a new city in Solano County — as reasons for concern. Others, including Council member Marjorie Morgenstern, said they were troubled by the lack of information about who is funding the development.
That unease was clearest during public comment.
“The way I see your project, I see it as a facade,” resident Angela Cordova told Zuegel. “Are you putting up a smoke screen … in our community? Are you trying to pull a fast one?”
Zuegel acknowledged she joined a Network State event via Zoom in 2024 but said she wasn’t “deeply aware of the movement.” She described a network state as “trying to get autonomy” — a goal she said has nothing to do with Esmeralda’s proposal.
Both she and Esmeralda partner and Director of Development Michael Yarne said the project has no plans for political autonomy and instead aims to fold itself into the fabric of Cloverdale.
“There’s no effort to secede that I’m aware of,” Yarne added.
To demonstrate that, the developers outlined features they say would connect the project to the rest of Cloverdale: extending trails into downtown, expanding the city’s free bus line to reach the site and adding a sculpture walk that ties into existing public art in town.
“I love the sculpture walk in Cloverdale and would love to extend it and have it be a link that connects this project into the rest of the town,” Zuegel said.
They also addressed the investor-transparency issue directly. Zuegel denied circulating rumors that the project was backed by prominent tech figures associated with efforts to build autonomous or privately governed communities — among them Palantir Technologies co-founder Peter Thiel, “Network State” author Balaji Srinivasan and Pronomos Capital, a venture firm that funds charter-city projects overseas.
Esmeralda, she said, has 19 investors — most of them Bay Area residents who “want to see a different pattern of development happen. Some of them intend to live there once it’s built.”
Environment, water and ‘the Twinkie’
The developers said they intend to partner with local nonprofits and agencies to restore portions of the property damaged decades ago when the site housed a lumber mill. One part of that effort involves removing a large mound of mill waste — what the developers call “the Twinkie” — which contains roughly one million cubic feet of soil mixed with wood waste and stretches about a half-mile long, a tenth of a mile wide and roughly 18 feet tall.
“Our intention is to remove and/or resculpt parts of the Twinkie in order to allow the Russian River to flood into the property,” Zuegel said.
Once the mill waste is removed, the land will be able to function as a natural floodplain, creating habitat for birds, fish and other wildlife.
Developers also outlined water-management plans, including stormwater capture and aquifer recharge, anticipating future reductions in water availability if the Potter Valley Project is decommissioned.
“There are going to be some really innovative approaches on the east side park,” Yarne said.
Don Seymour, an engineer with Sonoma Water, said aquifer recharge could be “very beneficial,” but noted that designing and demonstrating the benefits would require “significant field investigations and hydrologic/hydrogeologic modeling.”
Fiscal impacts: a major revenue stream for the city
According to a draft fiscal and economic study commissioned by the developer, the project could generate nearly $80 million for the city over the next decade through impact fees and sales-tax revenue.
Project construction, according to the study, could generate $2.5 million in one-time sales-tax revenue and $77.5 million in impact fees. Once the hotels open, the study estimates they would bring in $2.2 million a year in transient-occupancy taxes, which go directly into the city’s general fund.
The development is also projected to create about 480 jobs, including retail and service positions, and could carry an assessed value of roughly $945 million upon completion.
“Today, the entire site only generates $80,000 in property tax,” Yarne said.
Under county allocation formulas, the city would collect 22 cents on every new property-tax dollar while the remaining 78 cents would be distributed to county agencies.
Esmeralda does not yet own the property and remains in its due-diligence phase with Diablo Commercial Properties, the agent for owner Spight Properties II LLC.
The developer plans to return to the Planning Commission on Jan. 13 to submit its entitlements package — the set of planning requests needed before a sale can be finalized and building permits can be pursued.
If the project stays on schedule, the City Council would take up the proposal Feb. 11, with a second hearing and possible final approval Feb. 25. All dates are tentative.
(pressdemocrat.com)
THE ILLUSION OF GUN SAFETY
Editor:
A Nov. 9 Press Democrat article describes much-needed programs to increase gun safety in homes with schoolchildren, but it fails to address one of the key drivers of so-called firearms accidents. One of the usual explanations why people want to have firearms in the home is for personal protection. That requires that the weapon be immediately available and fully functional so it can be used on short notice.
This directly conflicts with standard gun safety practices, which say that safe storage in a home requires that the weapon and its ammunition be stored in separate places and that the weapon either be locked up or rendered unusable by removing an essential part. These safety requirements render the weapon unavailable for immediate protection.
This illusion that firearms in a home can be both safe and protective is part of the common justification for opposition to many proposed gun control laws. What we need is to ignore spurious arguments like this and enact effective gun control everywhere.
Richard Peterson-Jones
Santa Rosa
ASK THE VET: BOVINE VIRAL DIARRHEA VIRUS
by Kendall Wilson DVM MRCVS (Ukiah)
Bovine Viral Diarrhea (BVDV) is a highly contagious disease that affects cattle of all ages. It is worldwide virus, with many herds at risk for infection leading to significant economic impacts and production losses.
There are many different clinical signs associated with BVDV, which is why it can be difficult to get the correct diagnosis without veterinary intervention. The incubation period is 3 to 5 days after exposure. Most animals will experience a very high fever, lethargy, bloody diarrhea, a decrease in milk production and inappetence. Some may experience ulceration in their mouths and often times pneumonia. If the strain of virus contracted by the animal is highly virulent, then this often leads to death within days of the first clinical signs appearing. In the rare case, the animal may die before other clinical signs are apparent. Pregnant cattle that contract the virus will likely abort 2 to 4 weeks post exposure to the virus. If abortion occurs, the cow will often suffer from fertility issues with difficulty conceiving in later breedings. If the pregnant cow is able to recover and does not abort, her calf will be a persistently infected (PI) animal. Persistently infected animals can be difficult to detect as they often appear completely normal, however, they will shed heavy loads of virus their entire lives. This leads to significant impact for the rancher and the ability to manage it in their herd with major economic losses.
The most common way BVDV gets introduced into a herd is by purchasing new animals at an auction with unknown vaccination status. Animals that go through auction or market become stressed and are likely exposed to animals that are shedding BVDV. This directly impacts their immune status and therefore become ill a few days after reaching their new location. If animals are purchased at an auction, it is highly recommended that there is a 2-week quarantine period to help reduce risk to the current healthy herd. It is essential to have a strong vaccination program to help reduce risk to the herd that new animals are being introduced to. Vaccination does not stop disease from spreading through herds however, it does reduce clinical signs and overall production and economical losses. It is recommended that you and your veterinarian create a herd vaccination program and follow strict biosecurity to help reduce risk to your herd and hopefully prevent unnecessary loss.
WHISTLES ARE SAN FRANCISCO'S LATEST BULWARK AGAINST ICE
In other cities like Chicago, locals have used whistles to alert their neighbors to ICE raids
by Timothy Karoff
A few days before Halloween, while other businesses in San Francisco were putting out bowls of candy for patrons, Jonathan Ojinaga presented a different offering. Instead of M&M’s and Kit Kats, he filled the ceramic skull by the entrance of his restaurant, Azúcar Lounge, with a few dozen metal whistles. Each day, patrons take a few whistles from the bowls.
“It’s a slow trickle,” Ojinaga said. “We get a couple every day.”
Those whistles serve a practical purpose. Azúcar Lounge is one of several “whistle stops,” local establishments handing out whistles to patrons to help them alert their neighbors to activity from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. By following the same whistle code, locals can communicate from afar: Three short whistles signal that ICE is nearby, and one long whistle means that somebody is being detained.
Frameline, the nonprofit behind San Francisco’s annual LGBTQ+ film festival, has stocked whistle stops in the city, with more than 200 whistles in recent weeks. Those stops include Azúcar Lounge in SoMa, Queer Arts Featured in the Castro, and the Roxie Theater and Mother bar in the Mission.
In an email to SFGATE, Gabriella Siaton, the Roxie’s theater manager, said the theater ran out of its first batch of whistles within a day of receiving them.
“Prior to this, I had not heard about the whistle code,” Siaton wrote. “I knew there were different sharings on social media regarding ICE agents being spotted in the Mission, but I appreciate how the whistle allows for a more instant and in-the-moment response.”
In recent months, whistles have become a popular tool of activists in Chicago, where an aggressive series of immigration crackdowns has targeted day cares and flea markets. In Chicago, whistles signal the presence of ICE or Customs and Border Protection agents, and some groups host meetups to assemble whistles. The sound of a whistle tells immigrants and other vulnerable community members to run away while also urging fellow neighbors to gather in a crowd and run toward the scene to film arrests.
That trend has rippled out to San Francisco. Although the arrests by ICE agents at San Francisco’s immigration courts are distinct from the expansive, militaristic crackdown in Chicago, Chicago’s whistle code offers a replicable model. Frameline started handing out whistles in late October, shortly after President Donald Trump called off a “surge” of federal agents to San Francisco.
But in the City, the history of self-defense whistles traces back further in time. In the 1970s, self-defense groups like the Butterfly Brigade and the Lavender Panthers distributed whistles to the city’s LGBTQ+ communities. If anyone was at risk of a hate crime, they could blow a whistle to call for help.
“We were inspired by the bold legacy of queer resistance — from San Francisco’s Butterfly Brigade blowing whistles in the Castro to defend each other from violence to the community organizing coming out of Chicago now,” Allegra Madsen, Frameline’s executive director, wrote in an email to SFGATE.
Asked whether he had heard the whistles blown in public, Ojinaga said he hadn’t.
“I have not,” he said. “And I guess that’s a good thing.”
(SFGate.com)
BIG OIL ON TRACK TO REACH ITS SECOND-HIGHEST INFLUENCE SPENDING YEAR IN CALIFORNIA
by Dan Bacher
Sacramento, CA. — Despite the claims of California politicians that the state is the nation’s “green” and “progressive” leader, the lobbying spending spree by Big Oil in the first 9 months of 2025 enabled the passage of legislation to expand oil drilling in California and stopped the Make Polluters Pay Superfund Act and other critical climate legislation from moving forward.
New lobbying disclosures reveal the fossil fuel industry spent $7.1 million in the third quarter of 2025, from July 1 through September 30 – putting the industry on track to reach its second-highest influence spending year, just behind 2024’s $38 million spend, according to a press statement from the Last Chance Alliance (LCA).
The total lobbying and influence spending for Q1-Q3 in 2025 is over $25 million for the fossil fuel industry, the LCA wrote.
“While Californians continued to struggle with sky-high utility, grocery, housing costs and fears of spiking prices at the pump, gas and oil corporations poured millions opposing California’s transition to affordable clean energy and propping up oily lawmakers,” the LCA stated. “Lobbying disclosures make it clear that Big Oil is spending this money to keep Californians dependent on fossil fuels instead of saving on clean, abundant, and cost efficient energy resources like solar and wind.”…
THERE ARE TOO MANY WINERIES IN CALIFORNIA
by Esther Mobley
California has too many wineries.
The state is home to 4,864 of them as of Jan. 2025, according to data from WineBusiness Analytics. That’s a nearly 47% increase since 2010, when there were 3,319. For most of that period, demand for wine was growing steadily, and thousands of entrepreneurs — whether driven by passion or seeking to capitalize on what was then an obvious market opportunity — cashed in.
As the wine industry crisis has mounted over the last two years, a lot of attention has focused on California’s grape glut. Farmers can’t sell their crops, and many have heeded the repeated warnings from industry leaders that they should rip out many of their vines altogether: More than 38,000 vineyard acres were removed over the last year or so.
But there’s been far less consideration of the other side of the wine-producing equation — the wineries who buy growers’ fruit, ferment it and sell it. Unlike behind-the-scenes farmers, the wineries represent the industry’s consumer-facing side, funneling bottles into tasting rooms, restaurants, supermarkets and wine shops.
If these changing dynamics of supply and demand require a mass grapevine removal in order to return the grape market to equilibrium, California’s winery count is also due for a correction.
In March, I predicted that 2025 would be the year of California winery closures. There had been a flurry of activity in the previous few months — most notably the permanent closure of Newton Vineyards, a Napa Valley landmark owned by the powerful Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. For the first time in a long time, the number of California wineries fell rather than grew between 2024 and 2025, according to WineBusiness Analytics, declining by a total of 21.
That almost certainly won’t be enough. Since that column, a few players both big (the private equity-owned Duckhorn Portfolio) and small (one of San Francisco’s last remaining urban wineries) have announced closures, but there are still 1,545 more wineries in California today than there were 15 years ago — and with demand plummeting, the market simply can’t sustain them all.
The winery count alone doesn’t tell the full story of wine production in California. A winery can be gargantuan or miniscule: WineBusiness Analytics data show that 50% of U.S. wineries produce under 1,000 cases. Many are getting even tinier. Dozens of wineries told me this year that they planned to decrease their production volume, and the ubiquitous sight of grapes still languishing on the vine in November — even in the heart of Napa Valley, America’s most sought-after wine land — bears that out. Last year’s crush was already the smallest in 20 years, but some experts predict that this year’s, due to all the unpicked grapes, will turn out to be even lighter.
If everyone makes less wine in 2025, and if the growers continue removing vines, maybe that will inch the industry closer to a place of balance while demand remains low. Still, I contend, there will be too many wineries. It’s not just a numbers game — it’s also an identity problem. To many consumers, California wineries have become a homogenous blur, a sea of brands that aren’t meaningfully distinct from each other; not enough have a memorable story or a singular product.
Saying that businesses will close sounds harsh. These are often multi-generational businesses, especially in countries with longer wine-producing histories than ours, and they don’t shutter with the same frequency as, say, restaurants.
A correction to the number of wineries in California is simply an inevitability amid this tumult. What I fear is that the smaller wineries — which in many cases are the more interesting ones, treating the land more responsibly and pushing quality higher than their larger, more corporate counterparts — will disproportionately be the ones who falter. Demand for wine will rise again eventually, I believe, but not everyone will be able to hang on long enough to see it happen.
(SF Chronicle)
FRANCIS TAYLOR:
The wannabe aristocrats paragraph really got me. I worked at one of the top global accounting firms and the WORST people were the wannabes. They were chasing the high life. They’d have no problem throwing you under the bus to get ahead at the firm.
Back in the 2010s it was all about being a foodie. Going to French Laundry and trying the expensive food. I asked an accounting friend what he thought of the food. He said he couldn’t describe it, just that it was good. But he thought that anything expensive was “good.” He was one of those wannabes.
The actual wealthy people that I met at the firm never flaunted their wealth. It was only in talking to them that you realized how wealthy they were.
One of the coolest people at the firm was a senior manager from an extremely wealthy Indian family. She told me that she had a nanny growing up and that actually her two other siblings had their own live-in nannies. I was totally shocked. I had never heard of such wealth. Each child having their own nanny? I asked her why she was working (she clearly didn’t need it) and she said she loved learning about companies and loved being around all the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley business. She was in it for the fun.
She’s still one of the nicest, funniest, and most charming person I had ever met up in Northern California. NorCal people are different type of breed of Californians but that’s a whole different story haha. She was definitely special especially compared to the rest of the NorCal people lol.
It totally changed the way I thought about the wealthy. I realized it was the wannabes that were the ones destroying society. They thought that flaunting wealth made them wealthy but that’s not true wealth. Old money vs new money.
I come from poverty so I have the opposite mindset. Flaunting wealth means you’ll get jacked. So don’t flaunt it unnecessarily.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
The one sure way I know of to tell a person's net worth is to check the watch. Most times (no pun intended) if it's a vintage well known brand they probably have money. Might be wearing old worn out jeans, Chuck Taylors and decades old flannel shirt, but the watch is a dead giveaway. In my (affluent) area, someone recently had a watch stolen. The crime victim stated the value as somewhere between 50 and 90 thousand dollars. A friend of mine said, “Yeah whatever, it could go forty thousand dollars either way.”
BILLIONAIRE MATH
Editor,
Smart NYC billionaires are definitely moving out.
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani says he will tax 5% of the net worth of his city’s billionaires. He does not believe they will move away. Personally, I think billionaires are probably the easiest people in the world to move.
After all, if you are an entry level billionaire, 5% tax equals $50 million. Let’s say you keep your billion in the bank at 3% interest, that’s $30 million in taxable income, which at NYC’s 14% tax rate, that’s another cool $4 million in taxes for the city.
Considering all that, I suspect the least wealthy billionaire in NYC could drop $54 million on a new home in Florida and still come out better than staying in New York. Of course, he’d miss out on the free bus fare and government groceries Mamdani has promised for residents.
Craig A. Nelson
San Rafael
NEWSOM PLAYS CLIMATE WARRIOR, COMPROMISER AND COY CANDIDATE
by Dan Walters
Gov. Gavin Newsom still insists he hasn’t decided to run for president in 2028. But after persuading California’s voters to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts to grab more Democratic seats, he embarked on a flurry of appearances that had the distinct aroma of a political campaign.
He did an interview on CNN, jetted off to Texas to crow about California’s passage of the Proposition 50 gerrymander at a rally of Democrats — some chanted about a 2028 candidacy — and then headed to Brazil as the self-appointed U.S. delegate to a climate change conference boycotted by President Donald Trump. Oh yes, and Penguin Random House announced that in February, it will release Newsom’s memoir of growing up in San Francisco, founding a business and segueing into politics, titled “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.” It will cost just $30.
No presidential campaign is complete without an autobiography describing how the candidate overcame barriers of birth and circumstance to become a dedicated public servant. As Newsom surfaced in Brazil on Monday, Politico journalist Camille von Kaenel filed this analysis of the governor’s purpose:
“The California governor’s task at United Nations climate talks in Belém, Brazil, this week isn’t to negotiate sweeping policy changes or break into closed-door talks reserved for nations. It’s to put on a show: proving his state is still cutting emissions despite President Donald Trump’s rollbacks, nudging governments and businesses to do the same, and reminding the world that the U.S. might one day pick the climate agenda back up — perhaps under a President Newsom.”
There is, however, a subtext to Newsom’s claim to be a climate change warrior. In recent months, he’s tiptoed away from the aggressive decarbonization programs he had championed earlier, clearly trying to minimize impacts — particularly costs — on consumers. Living costs loomed large in last year’s presidential campaign.
One example is Newsom’s effort to stop the planned decommission of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and several gas-fired generators in Southern California, when it became evident that taking them off-line could lead to shortages in electrical power and potential blackouts.
Another is this year’s 180-degree flip on the petroleum industry. Newsom had spent months demonizing refiners for price-gouging, but when two refineries announced plans to shut down, raising the possibility of sharp gasoline price hikes, Newsom shifted to maintaining fuel supplies and encouraging oil production to stave off imports.
“We are all the beneficiaries of oil and gas. No one’s naive about that,” Newsom said. “So it’s always been about finding a just transition, a pragmatism in terms of that process.”
Still another example is what happened just a few days ago in Southern California. After years of squabbling over carbon emissions from ships and equipment at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the logistics industry and the regional air quality board appointed by Newsom reached a compromise.
The ports are a major source of emissions in the smog-sensitive region and the South Coast Air Quality Management District had been pressing them to shift from gasoline- and diesel-powered equipment to electricity. Cargo handlers complained that expensive retrofits could make the ports uncompetitive in global trade, potentially threatening thousands of jobs. The agreement requires a three-phase, multi-year transition to zero-emission machinery, which disturbs environmental advocates and even some board members. Opponents who wanted immediate action chanted their displeasure and were removed from the meeting before the vote.
“The give-and-take of ideas and compromises in this process — it mirrors exactly what a real-world transition to zero emissions looks like,” said William Bartelson, an executive at the Pacific Maritime Association. “It’s practical, it’s inclusive and it’s grounded in shared goals.”
(CalMatters.org)
THEY RELY ON LANDLINES FOR EMERGENCIES. AT&T’S POLITICAL MOVES IN CALIFORNIA COULD TAKE THOSE AWAY
by Yue Stella Yu & Malena Carollo
Upon hearing her husband’s call for help, Cynthia Halliday came flying upstairs. He was rushing toward the outdoor deck, gasping for air. He was having a heart attack.
Halliday held him and dialed 911 with her cellphone. The dispatcher answered, but within seconds, she said, the call disconnected due to poor reception. Halliday screamed for help, loud enough for her next-door neighbor Larry Williams to hear and dial from his copper landline. This time, it got through.
Halliday’s husband did not survive. But on that day in 2018, Halliday became convinced that copper landlines were her best shot at getting help during emergencies, especially where she lives in Hacienda, a tight-knit community deep in the rural forests of Northern California.
Those landlines, however, are what AT&T — the largest copper landline provider in California — is pushing to retire nationwide.
As California’s largest “carrier of last resort,” AT&T is required by law to provide basic phone service, typically copper landlines, to any Californian who asks for it, with lower-income customers qualifying for a discount. It provides 75% of the state’s last-resort phone service, accounting for about 500,000 Californians and 5% of all its California customers.
Subsidies to support copper landlines have declined sharply. Critics say AT&T wants to shed them to avoid their billion-dollar annual cost and boost profits with lucrative services like fiber.
For the past two years, AT&T has tried unsuccessfully to bow out of that obligation in many areas of the state, spending heavily to influence state regulations and laws. This year, it spent at least $4.5 million on lobbying as it tried and failed to pass a bill that would have allowed AT&T to cut copper services in certain areas in exchange for agreeing to expand its fiber services. Its industry ally, USTelecom, assembled a “grassroots” coalition to support the legislation, with more than 80% of coalition members having ties to AT&T, CalMatters found.
The company’s efforts to shed copper landlines show no signs of stopping. An ongoing process by the utilities regulators seeks to determine key components of the carrier of last resort requirements. And Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, an Inglewood Democrat, told CalMatters she intends to revive the bill that died this year.
It’s unclear just how many Californians would be impacted if AT&T gets its way. A map AT&T submitted to California utilities regulators as part of a failed 2023 effort marked 1,133 towns across 53 of California’s counties, including rural communities such as Hacienda, as territories the company sought to withdraw from.
AT&T said it only wants to pull out of communities with multiple alternatives, such as wireless and fixed broadband. It argued it’s not cost-effective to maintain expensive copper lines for many of its customers, the number of which has dwindled over the years. Doing away with the obligation would free up money to invest in more advanced technologies, such as fiber optics, it said.
“No Californian will be left without reliable phone service in their homes, including 911 services,” said Terri Baca, vice president of legislative affairs at AT&T, at an April legislative hearing.
But critics say the reliability of those alternatives isn’t guaranteed, and that AT&T’s push would pad shareholders’ pockets at the expense of a lifeline for those communities, especially during power outages and natural disasters. Statewide, more than one million 911 calls are made each year over landlines, according to the state’s Office of Emergency Services.
If AT&T’s goal is to upgrade services, it should build them out before retiring copper, opponents argue.
“If they wanted to replace copper with fiber right now, there’s nothing stopping them,” said Phil Grosse, a Hacienda resident and the North Coast regional chair of the California Democratic Party’s rural caucus.
The debate has intensified in California in recent years, partly because it is a significant holdout in AT&T’s plan to abandon copper networks across the country.
Spokespeople for USTelecom, its coalition Californians for a Connected Future, and AT&T did not specify how they recruited coalition members or why most members had ties to AT&T. Instead, they sent general statements calling the state’s carrier of last resort obligation archaic.
“Our goal is to deliver the best possible experience to our customers, now and into the future,” said Megan Ketterer of AT&T.
Cara Duckworth, a spokesperson for USTelecom, told CalMatters “even if we answered all the questions I’m not sure we’d get a fair shake.”
“Many of our providers would love to no longer have to spend money maintaining old copper equipment and would much rather invest that money in next (generation) networks that better serve consumers,” she said.
Some rural Californians say they fear AT&T will eventually wear state lawmakers down to that goal.
“Rural communities don’t have the big money to compete with AT&T. That’s why we hire legislators to look out for us,” Grosse said in a June letter to state lawmakers.
‘Predictably Unpredictable’
Kathy Yerger, 67, lives among redwoods so dense that wireless Internet providers have refused to service her Hacienda home.
“It would be like trying to find a golf ball in the sky,” she remembered one provider telling her. Another, upon learning her address, chuckled and told her “no, you are not on the list,” she said.
Although she has a cellphone, Yerger has learned not to rely on it.
“If I put the phone in the window and hope the stars line up and the trees don’t blow, yes I can (try to connect),” she said. “It’s predictably unpredictable.”
Like many of her neighbors, Yerger’s best — if not only — bet at communicating with the outside world is her copper landline. Even that line fails sometimes when water corrodes the old copper wires. But it’s still the most reliable option she has, especially during emergencies and natural disasters.
In Hacienda, frequent mudslides and floods during rainy winters have washed away homes, sparked power outages, and sometimes claimed lives. The 2020 Walbridge fire, which scorched more than 55,000 acres of Sonoma County, got within a quarter mile of Yerger’s house. The only notification was word of mouth from the local fire department deputies and a neighbor calling her landline, she said.
Few reliable alternatives remain during those disasters. Cellphone services, which many Californians rely on to receive emergency alerts, can quickly fail. Fiber optic lines, while more resilient, require backup power along the network and are expensive to install. Voice-over-Internet-Protocol phones, a landline alternative, depend on the internet and home electricity and thus fail during power outages.
The alternatives are so unreliable during emergencies that Hacienda residents created walking evacuation routes along the area’s ragged switchbacks. They set up their own walkie-talkie network, drilling weekly. They even discussed using bullhorns and sirens to alert each other if a wildfire comes through, Grosse said. The hope is to reach enough people for someone with a copper landline to call for help.
“There’s no copper fetish here,” Grosse said. “When a reliable alternative appears, I’d really be happy to give (it) up.”
A Technology Upgrade Or A Profit Grab?
Underlying AT&T’s push to retire copper is money. Telecom companies previously received subsidies from state and federal governments for last-resort services, but those payments have been reduced or eliminated in recent decades. California, for example, reduced its subsidy fund from $400 million in 1996 to about $20 million currently, according to a USTelecom regulatory filing.
This leaves companies providing landlines with a larger share of the bill for maintaining such networks. For AT&T, that’s about $1 billion each year in California alone.
Despite this, AT&T remains profitable. An October filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed a $9.7 billion profit so far this year. And fiber is one of its profit drivers, bringing in $2.2 billion, up nearly 17% from the same time last year.
“They’re looking for a way to boost profits,” said Ernesto Falcon, communications and broadband program manager for the California Public Advocates Office.“They can’t legally do that unless you get rid of (the carrier of last resort requirements).”
AT&T representatives have repeatedly insisted that the company’s efforts to pull out as a carrier of last resort are to modernize telecommunication. In public hearings, they promised that AT&T’s request would not threaten copper landlines in areas without other viable options.
So far, state regulators and lawmakers aren’t convinced.
The California Public Utilities Commission rejected a March 2023 petition by AT&T that would have allowed it to pull out copper lines only in service areas where customers have telephone service alternatives. The application claimed 99.7% of its customers had access to at least three alternatives, with 99.9% having access to at least two.
After the rejection, the company turned to the state Legislature, sponsoring bills to relinquish its obligation.
Last year, an AT&T-backed bill would have granted the company relief if it notified the commission of certain census blocks with no customers or with multiple phone service alternatives. The bill, authored by McKinnor, died without a hearing.
McKinnor reintroduced the measure as Assembly Bill 470 this spring. In its final form, the bill would have allowed AT&T to pull copper lines out of open spaces and “well served” areas — those with at least three other service providers — if it promised, among other requirements, to expand advanced fiber optics in six years to three times as many households as it is currently required to serve and to help its customers transition to other services.
The bill would have required the public utilities commission to map out well-served areas using the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Map and the federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program — both tools to measure internet, not telephone, connectivity. The map was criticized by opponents of the bill, including the California Public Advocate’s Office, as not being an accurate representation of coverage.
“This bill does not leave any customer behind. This isn’t about taking something away, it’s about ensuring that we have a plan to migrate Californians to superior services,” Baca said in a July hearing.
McKinnor told CalMatters the measure was her “out of the box, progressive” way to get AT&T to pay for infrastructure upgrades instead of spending taxpayer dollars.
But critics say some areas, such as Hacienda, could count as well served while still lacking quality access. There’s no guarantee that other providers would offer reliable alternatives, and the legislation would not have required the fiber buildout to be in the same communities where AT&T seeks to pull out, they said. Many Hacienda households are listed on the federal broadband map as having four internet providers available — none of which are reliable, they said.
“I agree we need to have technology, but only to a point where you are not dropping service for people that are dependent on it,” said Kelli Mathia, immediate past president of the Odd Fellows Recreation Club in Guerneville, down the Russian River from Hacienda.
If AT&T is really trying to upgrade services, why must they pull out copper lines first? Halliday wondered.
But McKinnor said allowing AT&T to preemptively pull the lines is only fair.
“I believe in free enterprise,” she told CalMatters. “I can’t mandate a business to spend billions of dollars doing infrastructure and say, ‘Oh, maybe we will give you (the relief) at the end.’”
AT&T’s real goal is to boost its bottom line, said Regina Costa, a Hacienda resident and telecom policy director for The Utility Reform Network, which led opposition to the bill.
“What they really want is to get rid of customers that they do not think are profitable,” she said.
In a shareholder meeting last year, AT&T CEO John Stankey said getting customers off of copper lines allowed the company to “turn down” that service in “low utilization” and “low profitable” territories. “I can turn out the lights, walk away, take cost out of business,” he said.
AT&T’s Web Of Connections
AT&T is already a political juggernaut in Sacramento.
Between 2015 and 2024, AT&T made nearly $3 million in campaign contributions to state lawmakers, according to an analysis of CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database. This year, it contributed nearly $300,000 to lawmakers’ campaign accounts as they considered its sponsored legislation, data from the California secretary of state’s office shows.
AT&T also reported giving five California lawmakers and two of their staffers $300 tickets to Mexican singer Ana Gabriel’s Sacramento concert on the day the bill died in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The five, all Democrats, were Sen. Susan Rubio of West Covina and Assemblymembers Mark Gonzalez, of Los Angeles; José Solache, of Lakewood; Juan Carrillo, of Palmdale; and Blanca Rubio, of West Covina. All voted for AB 470 this year, with Assemblymember Rubio voting for early iterations of the bill but not casting a floor vote.
Spokespeople for all five lawmakers told CalMatters that AT&T’s gifts did not sway their decision and that they supported the bill on merit.
The company spent another $4 million lobbying state lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration about the bill this year, including $2 million spent between April and June, making it the company’s most expensive lobbying quarter in California in 20 years. It spent an additional $354,000 lobbying the utilities commission to influence the state’s carrier of last resort rules and policies around telephone companies’ service quality standards.
AT&T is so powerful in Sacramento, Grosse said, that some legislative aides told him in the past he would not win in a fight against the company.
“The (party’s) rural caucus can go ahead and they can talk to legislators, but AT&T is spending so much money on elections you are not going to prevail,” he recalled being told.
On its face, AB 470 had widespread support this year from Californians for a Connected Future, a recently formed coalition of more than 150 disability advocates, chambers of commerce, tribes, community service organizations, local officials and small businesses, including a construction company and a tennis shop. For months, dozens of those groups testified in public hearings and signed identical letters urging lawmakers to pass the bill, arguing it would incentivize modern technologies and ensure more reliable coverage.
The coalition, which describes itself as “grassroots,” also states it is a “project of USTelecom.” Rhonda Johnson, AT&T’s executive vice president of federal regulatory relations, sits on the trade group’s board. USTelecom received $250,000 from AT&T to lobby on its behalf this year, and also spent between $85,200 and $106,000 running ads on Facebook supporting the bill in the coalition’s name, according to a CalMatters tally.
It’s a prevalent practice commonly known as “astroturfing,” when corporations or trade groups enlist seemingly unaffiliated organizations for the appearance of grassroots support, said Jack Pitney, politics professor at Claremont McKenna College.
“If you don’t read the fine print, you’ll assume that … there are a lot of organizations that sincerely support this legislation.”
While the coalition often bragged about the scale and diversity of its membership, more than 80% of member organizations have ties to AT&T, CalMatters found.
Some of those groups have AT&T’s top leaders serving on their board of directors. That includes AT&T president Susan Santana, who sits on the board of the California Chamber of Commerce. Ben Golombek, the chamber’s chief of staff for policy, most recently served as the west region vice president for public affairs for AT&T. Other AT&T executives, mostly directors of external affairs, double as board members of various local chambers, business groups, foundations and voting rights groups.
AT&T also pays to be a member of many local chambers of commerce, many of whom support the bill. Of the 28 chambers in support, AT&T is listed as a corporate member of 26 of them.
Dozens of coalition members list AT&T as a key funder. The California Asian Pacific Chamber of Commerce calls AT&T an “invaluable” partner. Groups such as the Concerned Black Men of Los Angeles, which provides mentorship to Black local residents, list the company as a sponsor.
Others, including tribes, youth service groups and senior advocates, have partnered with the company in its $5 billion effort to “bridge the digital divide” nationwide, distributing free laptops donated by AT&T, hosting “connected learning centers” the company set up across the state to offer free digital access or receiving grants from AT&T to address digital inequity.
The telecom giant has also sponsored events for some coalition members, from golf tournaments for the San Gabriel Valley Conservation Corps to the 70th anniversary gala of Society for the Blind.
The financial support can make it hard not to align with AT&T, Pitney said.
“If AT&T has supported you in a material way, you want to make sure that support continues,” he said. “You are likely to look favorably on requests from that organization.”
CalMatters reached out to all organizations and people named in this story for comment. Most did not respond. California Chamber of Commerce spokesperson John Myers said it supported the bill because it made “economic sense.” Lauren Oto, a spokesperson for the California Asian Pacific Chamber of Commerce, said the group supported the AT&T-backed bill because “it represents a key opportunity for our members to see that technology is being used to improve public safety and expand access to communication.”
Norma Quiñones, executive director of the San Gabriel Valley nonprofit, told CalMatters AT&T’s sponsorship had nothing to do with the group’s support for the legislation. But the nonprofit offers job training to youths, she said, and AT&T is a prospective employer. While acknowledging not knowing much about the bill, she said it would help close the digital divide and expand high-speed internet access to underserved communities like the ones she serves.
“I wanted to build the relationship with AT&T and support their efforts,” she said. “It ultimately ties into our workforce development and our digital equity goals for our young people.”
The sway AT&T has worries residents like Grosse.
“One of the largest corporations in the world spent (millions of) dollars lobbying on this thing,” he said. “Do you really think it’s in the public’s interest?”
Regulatory Change On The Horizon?
If potential legislation doesn’t beat them to it, California utility regulators are expected to decide the future of California’s carrier of last resort obligations over the coming months.
The California Public Utilities Commission is currently undertaking a rulemaking process that seeks to answer questions including who should be providing last resort service, what would count as sufficient coverage and under what circumstances companies could stop doing so.
USTelecom and AT&T have advocated for changing the requirement so AT&T can stop providing this service in all but “populated areas,” and eventually leave those as well.
“Customers will gain, not lose,” AT&T said in a September 2024 filing.
(CalMatters.org)
THE UNHAPPINESS MANIFESTO
Reviewing "Life Is a Lazy Susan of Sh*t Sandwiches," by "I've Had It" podcast hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, prophets of the new misery gospel
by Matt Taibbi
“Standing backstage at the Variety Playhouse, I almost shat myself,” reads the first line of Life Is a Lazy Susan of Shit Sandwiches, the autobiographical mission statement of I’ve Had It podcast hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan. This is the Bible of “immiseration,” a phenomenon professor Chuck Pezeshki describes as an explosion of voices whose function “is to make other people miserable.” With woke out of fashion, endlessly complaining about the prison yard that is modern society has become the new elite signaling mechanism. If you’re willing to admit to finding happiness in this vale of patriarchal tears, Shit Sandwiches isn’t meant for you, but the book is more than a road map to a pose.
Welch and Sullivan are ubiquitous social media stars for the BlueSky/MSNOW set, dubbed the “two red state moms” who hit it “big” by Rolling Stone. Welch in particular has expertly deployed Trumpian PR tech on the road to fame, grabbing gazillions of eyeballs as the Skeletor-faced Mamdani supporter who calls MAGA supporters “psychopaths” and “religious addicts” and rips swimmer Riley Gaines as an “insufferable twat.” Sullivan is the ex-megachurcher who throws in barbs while mostly gushing and laughing at Welch’s viral antics. The schtick is polished and it’s not hard to see how they conquered the podcast landscape, but their relationship is a lot more twisted than either seems to realize, a political folie à deux story for the ages.
As a result, Welch and Sullivan have written an unintentionally fascinating book. Nearly the whole riddle of modern American political dysfunction is on display in these pages. It’s the Rosetta Stone of misery culture:
Told in alternating first-person chapters, Life is a Lazy Susan of Shit Sandwiches is the tale of two Oklahoma moms united by car-wreck marriages to dissolute lawyers — one an alcoholic, the other a sex addict — who came together in a friendship of opposites. Fierce, narrow-eyed Jen, who looks like the victim of a mad plastic surgeon who uses a Guy Fawkes mask as a model, is the Alpha, a self-described “dyed-in-the-wool Democrat in a red state” who grew up surrounded by “fucking crazy” Bible-thumpers. She’s the pithy secular Oliver Hardy to the more kindly Stan Laurel of Angie “Pumps” Sullivan, who was “raised to believe Jesus was my best friend.”
The Laurel-and-Hardy comparison isn’t flippant. Welch and Sullivan really are a classic American comedy duo. Sullivan, a former cheerleader and Homecoming Queen whose faith was undone by a calamitous marriage to the apparent Guinness record holder for stripper-bonking, plays the Middle American straight man to Welch’s progressive zingers. Welch made her own catastrophic choice in husband Josh. She fell “deeply in love” with the fellow atheist brimming with “supposedly ‘gay’ (metrosexual) attributes” like “statement eyewear,” and obsessed in conversation with “religion (bad), Republicans (worse), and the death penalty (don’t get him fucking started, sister).” She had less patience for his having “spent his whole life drunk” until 2002 and his “messy” money habits, sadly only discovered post-marriage.
The unlucky brides went for despair drives in Angie’s Suburban, which Jennifer nicknamed the “Petri dish” because it was always full of “rogue McNuggets” and other artifacts of that societal burden, parenthood. Angie describes the “Let’s burn” rides, which will be in the inevitable Shit Sandwiches Netflix series:
“I would call Jennifer, and she’d answer on the first ring like she’d sensed my need in the ether. I’d say, “Let’s burn,” which was our code for ‘Let’s smoke cigarettes on our respective porches and talk about all the shenanigans our husbands have got themselves up to’.”
This story is told well. I expected lazily dictated rants transcribed and broken into chapters by a poor unnamed editor, but Shit Sandwiches has the feel of being written throughout. Angie on her libertine husband: “Kirk gave me my three wonderful kids, and I will always be grateful for that, even as I prayed for a colony of fire ants to crawl up his dickhole.” Philosophy from Jen: “I think there’s only this life, and that life’s temporariness lends it beauty and pathos.” If this was just a story about two wronged women getting together and “kvetching about every little thing under the sun,” as they put it, it might have been classic American comedy, like Car Talk for wives to inadequate douchebags.
What makes the book crazy is the subplot about Angie’s evolution from religious/right-wing wrongthink to Jennifer’s left-atheistic politics and outlook. Both describe this process in great detail. Neither sniffs the obvious irony of Jennifer evangelizing and converting Angie from one form of exacting “purity culture” to another.
Angie describes her upbringing:
“My family attended an Evangelical megachurch, the kind where they sing Christian hymns, and the preacher delivers hellfire-and-damnation sermons about Jesus. These sermons were designed to terrify us into being good Christians and to control our behavior when we weren’t in church. I grew up in purity culture, which promulgates the idea of sexual abstinence. It meant girls didn’t wear skimpy clothes or stay out late, doing things like teenage drinking or anything that might threaten their precious virginity…”
As her life travails accumulate, Angie becomes disenchanted. Her primary complaint seems to be God allowing the existence of her philandering husband (“Wasn’t Jesus supposed to protect me from this crap?”), but she has other, odder thoughts:
“Yes, I grew up believing in a certain skinny thirty-three-year-old carpenter who died for my sins, and, yes, sometimes I questioned some of His decisions, like why were there so many wars in God’s name? Why did kids get cancer? Why did I have to pay for Wi-Fi on flights when I’d already paid for an overpriced ticket? Why did Trump exist?”
I can see complaining that some megachurches spend too much time preaching what Jennifer describes as the “prosperity gospel,” and too little teaching the actual gospels, but emerging from a life of religious immersion to complain about WiFi surcharges and the existence of Donald Trump (in that order) is beyond bizarre. Not to Jennifer, who breathlessly details how she helped pull Angie out of her childlike religious state. In one section, “Pumps” says to Jen, “Did you know human beings used to be nine hundred years old?” Jennifer replies:
“Angie,” I said slowly, like I was talking to a toddler. “Girl. That never happened.”
“Yes, it did,” she said, a slight adolescent lilt to her voice. “I learned it in Bible study.”
“This is objectively and verifiably false,” I continued. “Modern man lives longer than ever before because of two things—filtered water and access to modern medications.”
“But there was no disease in the Garden of Eden!” she chirped, a competent attorney who was nevertheless taking these age-old tales at face value.
We’re re-living Inherit the Wind, bursting the ancient misinformation bubbles of True Believers. A few paragraphs later, after explaining how difficult it is for her to “coexist amongst people with views that seem diametrically opposed to my own,” Jennifer exults that Angie “could evolve,” like an Australopithecus Oklahomus:
“And yet … I know people can change. Angie did. I always knew there was more to Angie than her terrible politics. And I also believed that she could evolve. I saw her heart and her kindness. The purity culture of her youth had brainwashed her into seeing the world one way. When I say ‘world,’ I mean the heteronormative, Christian megachurch in Oklahoma. I still struggle to balance my compassion and empathy with the more pressing need for allyship and speaking up.”
Jennifer complains about “evangelicals” who get “biblical panties in a twist trying to save you,” but zero irony alarms ring as she pushes Angie from “heteronormative” purity culture to the equally inflexible liturgy of “allyship.” She even speaks in the language of Christian evangelists, who’ll insist they’re not converting anyone, merely awakening you to the presence of God’s love already within. Jennifer’s version: “Inside [Angie] was a whole other person, like a Matryoshka doll, one who knew the lack of universal healthcare in this country was a tremendous problem…” In another section, Jennifer exclaims, “Her metamorphosis took place over many conversations.” It’s My Fair Lady with two Oklahoma moms, with Jen as impatient Henry Higgins and Angie the desperate-to-please Eliza.
Once you become conscious of the creepy reverse-evangelism plot, it blots out the rest of the story. Apart from the shared marriage disasters, the friendship works because Jennifer is a born proselytizer-of-banalities and Angie is a natural reciter-of-same. Angie stresses in her opening chapter what an obedient Christian child she was, someone who believed Christians just “did what they were supposed to do,” which in her case meant going upstairs every night and doing her homework to “the familiar sounds of my parents watching TBN or GOD TV.” But after meeting Jennifer, she stopped believing in the afterlife. “I can’t say what I believe in anymore, except Rachel Maddow,” Angie says.
Jennifer both does and does not notice that Angie has merely switched televangelists. “Of the two of us, believe it or not, she is the big political junkie,” she says, “monitoring twenty-four-hour news cycles on MSNBC like her life depends on it.” Jennifer spends much of the book detailing devotion to a catechism of postmodern whateverisms, talking about how she “felt a moral calling to support marginalized groups” and denouncing “half-assed” devotion:
“Nothing sticks in my craw more than half-assed, cherry-picked allyship. For instance, if I go to a party thrown by a close friend — who happens to be gay — and everyone in the neighborhood shows up to get their IG snap. Meanwhile, I know for a fact that some of those same ass-lickers vote straight red down the ticket, even though that vote means the potential elimination of gay marriage or other discrimination protections. I’ve always found this hypocrisy breathtaking.”
When I joined an apocalyptic megachurch in San Antonio in the 2000s for the book that became The Great Derangement, I remember being awed by the cynicism of using the pulpit to push Republican policy aims. What I’ve Had It gets up to is even weirder, since the whole faith is really based around hating Trump and “the ones who elected Trump.” As Jen says, “We can bond over the things we can’t stand, like… MAGA Republicans.”
It’s abundantly clear throughout the book that both authors, but especially Welch, are blessed with excellent business sense (that language is ironic, as we’ll see in a moment). “Don’t get me wrong. I’m as vapid and shallow as the next person,” writes Jennifer, referring to her home design business. “I sell overpriced furniture and pick out statement chandeliers for the one percent. It doesn’t get shallower than that, but having money gave me emotional freedom.”
Some would read that and wonder at the absurdity of Welch also showing up at Zohran Mamdani’s victory party and bleating about the hopelessness of life in America, a country “closing the door on fixing the planet.” I don’t see it that way. Welch is an excellent salesperson, and what she’s selling is Everything Sucks Derp Trump! religion wrapped in a thin skin of intersectional gibberish. That this requires pretending I’ve Had It! isn’t a classic Horatio Alger success story shouldn’t be held against her. It’s part of the schtick, and the schtick works.
The idea behind immiseration is that all wealthy societies go through cyclical periods in which the educated and upscale have too many kids for too few mansions and sinecures. This forces wannnabe aristocrats to “invent other high-status virtue-signaling modalities” to mark them as different from the plebes. Once it was Romans eating civet and peacock brains, now it’s “luxury beliefs” like the end of “biological sex,” America deserving 9/11, and the new progressive answer to purity culture, the metaphysics of which are that everything and everybody sucks, and nothing (not even Van Gogh or Stonehenge) has any value but My Political Needs.
Welch preaches hard: “Even if you won the lottery and paid off all your student loans, your car, and your mortgage, then went on an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Maldives, you might only be happy for a nanosecond,” she says, claiming it’s just “human nature.” Sullivan says she traded the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for the “trinity of my three kids,” but Welch stomps on the eternal truth that parental love all by itself can make life worth living. She goes into detail about the “hard-hitting” and “thankless” misery of having to mother a “crying whelp” twenty-four hours a day. Having kids “only exacerbates your existing problems,” she writes, in a chapter called “Having Kids Won’t Solve Your Problems.”
Welch is so caught up in the faith that she had to check herself in the middle of praising the Obergefell Supreme Court case legalizing gay marriage to issue a statement reminding the reader that marriage is historically repressive. “Not that the institution of marriage is historically so great for straight women,” she wrote. “For most of recorded history, women were the property of their fathers and then their husbands, no better than a pair of goats or a featherbed…”
We conclude with the matter of these two authors being “blessed” with business acumen. They wouldn’t appreciate the compliment.
In recent years it’s become fashionable to think that wokeness-or-whatever-we-called-that peaked in 2020, in the summer of Floyd. In those years it became common to cancel or castigate people for microaggressions, the term invented to capture the strange idea of bigotry without unkindness. I get that Welch and Sullivan are joking above, but I’d bet they’re not kidding about wishing for a world free of people trying to be nice in the wrong way, like that poor sap of a UPS driver. Misery culture never went away, it’s just rebranded, this time as an evangelical religion whose first conversion manual is now on sale — God help us.
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WHOSE BBC?
by Des Freedman
From the revelations about Jimmy Savile in 2012 to the gender pay gap debacle in 2017, the BBC was for many years its own worst enemy. Now, confronted with a rampaging US president and increasingly confident domestic opponents, some of whom sit on the corporation’s board, the BBC is embroiled in a crisis that has so far seen the resignations of two senior executives and the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit from Donald Trump.
The immediate trigger was a dossier of allegations of liberal bias that was leaked to the Daily Telegraph. Most prominent among them was Panorama’s editing of Trump’s speech on 6 January 2021 to make it look as if the defeated president was directly calling for violence at the US Capitol. The program certainly messed with his words but it’s far from clear that it misrepresented the overall impact of Trump’s behavior on that day.
Dodgy splicing – or ‘Frankenstein editing’, as one BBC staff member described the Panorama case to me – isn’t usually sufficient to bring down the leadership. When the BBC changed the order of events in its coverage of the Battle of Orgreave during the 1984-85 miners’ strike to make it look as if the miners, rather than the police, had instigated the violence, the then assistant director general admitted that its report ‘might not have been wholly impartial’. But no heads rolled and no one’s career suffered. When a 2019 edition of Panorama re-edited interviews to make it look as if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was riddled with anti-Semites, the program was nominated for a BAFTA.
This time it seems that the director general, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, were the victims of a sustained campaign by right-wing newspapers, backed by an assortment of Tory and Reform MPs, to destabilize the corporation. Unusually, these voices have a presence on the BBC board: Robbie Gibb, a former director of communications for Theresa May and self-declared Thatcherite, also sits on the editorial guidelines and standards committee that is supposed to ensure impartiality. It was his friend Michael Prescott, a former independent adviser to that committee, who delivered the ‘dossier’ to the BBC board that sparked the current crisis.
By going out of its way to appease its critics on the right – by, for example, providing disproportionate coverage of Reform and amplifying right-wing talking points from social media – the BBC has only fueled the forces that are set on undermining it. In a detailed account of its newsroom culture, Lewis Goodall, a former Newsnight policy editor, highlights ‘the BBC’s tendency to move, unthinkingly, to wherever received wisdom is at any given moment – something it will be doing again, but in a rightward direction, right now, given the ideological winds have shifted.’
For many people, this is one of the more baffling aspects of the whole episode. Why would an insurgent right want to remove a director general who was the former deputy chair of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservatives and a head of news who had done so much to tilt BBC output towards a Reform agenda? Why would they want to undermine a leadership that had presided over Gaza coverage that, according to the Centre for Media Monitoring, systematically amplified Israeli narratives and minimized Palestinian suffering? Why would they want to weaken a director general who refused to transmit a documentary on the targeting by Israeli forces of medical staff in Gaza – subsequently shown by Channel 4 – whose removal from the BBC caused significant disquiet, including among BBC staff?
The short answer is that the BBC could never do enough to satisfy its enemies on the right, who are as exercised by what the BBC represents – a ‘public service’ model in an increasingly commercial media landscape – as they are by what it says or does.
The insurgent right is far more comfortable with outlets owned by billionaire media moguls and tech oligarchs than with organizations that are formally accountable to and owned by the public. Given that our key communication platforms are controlled by US tech giants and, should Comcast complete its proposed takeover of ITV, the news outputs of ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky will effectively be in US hands, these attacks on public service – accentuated by Trump’s threat of legal action – should be fiercely resisted.
None of this means ignoring the BBC’s substantial flaws. If the corporation has a problem relating to ‘ordinary’ people, it isn’t because it’s packed with social justice warriors but because it’s disproportionately staffed, especially at an executive level, by privately educated university graduates, 26 per cent of whom went to Oxbridge. Concentrated in London, it is unwilling to hand meaningful power and resources to the devolved nations and regions. Its bureaucratic and hierarchical rigidity is borne out by its incapacity to react to the Telegraph dossier for a week while the board was locked in disagreement. When BBC staff must be desperately anxious about their future, the corporation’s chair, Samir Shah, used a ‘town hall’ event following the resignations to argue that it was ‘disrespectful’ to attack board members, a comment that enraged staff found ‘tone deaf’.
Forty-eight hours after the resignations, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told the House of Commons that ‘the BBC is not just a broadcaster; it is a national institution that belongs to us all.’ It is formally ‘our BBC’, as the corporation’s branding insists, but it doesn’t always feel that way. An opportunistic and dangerous attack on the principle of non-commercial media shouldn’t obscure the underlying structural problems with the corporation, its lack of meaningful independence from government, and the need for radical change.
There’s plenty to be getting on with: to demand that Gibb return to a career in PR, that the BBC refuse to pay Trump’s ransom and that the government be removed entirely from the corporation’s governance and funding decisions. But there also needs to be a thoroughgoing transformation of the BBC, perhaps by handing it over to the public in the way imagined by the Media Reform Coalition.
Next May will be the hundredth anniversary of the 1926 general strike, which presented the newly created BBC with its first test. Would it stand up to government and remain independent or would it acquiesce to power? As Lord Reith remarked in his diary, there was no need for the government to ‘commandeer’ the BBC because ‘they know that they can trust us not to be really impartial.’
FAMILY OF MAN KILLED IN US MILITARY STRIKE SAYS IT WANTS JUSTICE
by Simon Romero
One day in mid-September, Alejandro Carranza, a Colombian fisherman who, his family said, had long plied the Caribbean in search of marlin and tuna, called his teenage daughter. He told her he was going fishing, she said, and would return in a few days.
He never made it back.
The day after he left, on Sept. 15, his family, fellow fishermen and Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, say Mr. Carranza was killed in a U.S. military strike on his boat. The furor about what happened to him has ignited a feud over the huge U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and the legality of the deadly attacks on 20 vessels since September.
I never thought I would lose my father in this way,” said Cheila Carranza, 14, this week, holding back tears as she gazed at a photo of him on her phone in her grandmother’s crowded home, where she lives in one room with her mother and two siblings.
As the death toll climbs from U.S. strikes on boats in waters near Latin America, tensions are increasing with Colombia, which had long been a top U.S. ally in the region. So far, 20 U.S. strikes have killed at least 80 people.
The attacks have enraged Mr. Petro, who accused the United States of murdering Mr. Carranza in one attack. President Trump responded by imposing sanctions on Mr. Petro and his family and moving to slash aid to the country. This week, Colombia suspended intelligence sharing with the United States until the Trump administration stops its strikes.
The Trump administration claims the attacks occurred on boats carrying illicit drugs that kill thousands of Americans. But many legal experts in the United States and elsewhere say the strikes violate international law because those killed, even if they had been suspected of committing any crimes, did not present an immediate threat.
Mangled bodies have begun washing up on the beaches of Trinidad and Tobago after U.S. strikes in the region. The only two known survivors of the strikes are not from Venezuela, but Colombia and Ecuador.
The Trump administration has called Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, the leader of a drug cartel and has privately said that the goal of the U.S. deployment, the largest in decades in Latin America, is to push the authoritarian leader from power.
The Trump administration has not provided evidence, aside from descriptions of intelligence assessments and declassified portions of video images, that any of the vessels it has destroyed were carrying drugs. At the same time, in Mr. Carranza’s case, there is no immediate ability to determine with certainty if he was simply a fisherman or had been involved in drug smuggling.
Mr. Petro, in a news conference last month, said Mr. Carranza was from a traditional fishing family, but “may have been involved very intermittently’’ with drugs.
Many fishermen in coastal and island communities, he said, become involved in drug transport because poverty leaves them few alternatives.
The strikes have left Mr. Carranza’s family reeling and grasping for answers, offering a rare glimpse into the strain the U.S. deployment can inflict on those left behind as the toll from the deadly attacks continues to climb. The family has hired an American lawyer, who said he was preparing a legal claim.
Katerine Hernández, the mother of three of Mr. Carranza’s children, disputed Mr. Trump’s claim that the strike that killed her former partner, along with two other people on the same boat, had targeted “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela.”
“Alejandro had nothing to do with Venezuela; he spent his entire life here in Colombia,” said Ms. Hernández, 37, in an interview in Santa Marta, a sun-drenched city on Colombia’s northern coast where she met Mr. Carranza when she was 13.
Mr. Carranza, 42, also occasionally took jobs piloting boats for others in the waters around Santa Marta, his family and other fishermen said, raising the possibility that the boat he was in was transporting something illicit with or without his knowledge.
But Ms. Hernández said that Mr. Carranza had never been involved in smuggling drugs. “If he was some kind of narcoterrorist,” she said, “then why are we living in misery instead of a mansion?”
Despite separating several years ago, Ms. Hernández said, she and Mr. Carranza remained close. Until recently, she and the children had lived with his parents. While he rarely earned more than Colombia’s monthly minimum wage, about $382, she said, he always put food on the table for her and the children.
Now, Ms. Hernández said, they were subsisting on the kindness of relatives who themselves have next to nothing. She and the three children are living in her mother’s home in Gaira, a gritty area of Santa Marta not far from the city’s glistening beaches.
Katerine Hernández, the mother of three of Mr. Carranza’s children, left, with her family at the house where she is currently living with her three children.
Dan Kovalik, an American lawyer hired by Mr. Carranza’s family, said that even if Mr. Carranza had been suspected of piloting a boat carrying illicit drugs, it would have been illegal to kill him.
“If the people on the boat were suspected of drug trafficking, they should have been arrested, not killed,” said Mr. Kovalik, who plans on filing suit in the United States and seeking damages for Mr. Carranza’s family.
The identities of the other two men aboard the boat remain unknown.
“This case is important from two points of view,” Mr. Kovalik added. “First, the family deserves compensation for the loss.”
“Second, we want this case to help stop these killings from taking place again,” Mr. Kovalik said. “This is murder, and it is destroying rule of law.”
Asked to respond to the assertions by Mr. Kovalik and Mr. Carranza’s family, the White House doubled down on its claims that the people killed in the Sept. 15 attack were “narcoterrorists.”
Since Mr. Carranza departed on the fishing trip two months ago, Ms. Hernández said, their lives have been shattered.
Before the U.S. strike, she said, she had already been unable to work after a motorcycle accident severely damaged her right leg — near the place on her ankle where she still has Mr. Carranza’s first name, tattooed.
The school fees for Zaira, their 17-year-old daughter, have gone unpaid, she said, while their son, Libiston, 11, was traumatized after another child showed him the video shared by Mr. Trump, apparently showing the father’s boat being blown to pieces.
Ms. Hernández said that some people had questioned whether Mr. Carranza had even been killed at all since his body has not been recovered. Others have tried to insinuate that he was involved in drug smuggling, she said, because of a previous brush with the law.
In a case from 2012, Mr. Carranza had taken part in a scheme to steal weapons that had been confiscated in legal proceedings, according to Colombian officials. Ms. Hernández and Adenis Manjarres, 30, Mr. Carranza’s first cousin, both said that Mr. Carranza had never been jailed in connection to the case. Colombian officials did not have more information on the disposition of the case.
Leonardo Vega, 40, a longtime friend of Mr. Carranza’s who is the leader of a fisherman’s association in Santa Marta, said he was certain that Mr. Carranza was killed in the Sept. 15 strike.
Upon seeing the attack on social media, Mr. Vega said that the type of boat in the video was precisely the kind used by fishermen from Santa Marta, in contrast to differently designed boats departing from Venezuela.
“I immediately thought, ‘He’s one of ours,’” said Mr. Vega. He added that the destroyed boat had two motors instead of the three or four used on boats typically used to smuggle drugs or other contraband.
Fishermen can be gone for a week or so, often sleeping in hammocks on deserted beaches, he said.
“But two months gone, no way,” Mr. Vega added. Looking at factors like the dates of Mr. Carranza’s departure and that of the U.S. attack, along with the boat seen in the video, he said he could come to only one conclusion: “Sadly, my friend is dead.”
Mr. Vega said Mr. Carranza had been well known for his easygoing personality among other fishermen in Santa Marta. He was known by the nickname “Coroncoro,” which refers to a small fish typically found in the area, and enjoyed drinking beer and playing pool.
Beyond what Mr. Carranza’s family is grappling with, the U.S. strikes have struck fear among Santa Marta’s fishermen, Mr. Vega said, and made them reluctant to do their work.
It is now tuna season, he said, usually one of the most lucrative times for fishermen to head out. But fear of what might await them there has virtually ground fishing to a standstill, he added.
Genevieve Glatsky and Simón Posada contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.
(NY Times)
Dreams
I had an absolutely fabulous dream: I was in a social scene, a cafe, and lounging amorously with a just-met woman, then as another woman had cuddled up to her I turned to another, sat beside her, and she started to kiss me, tho I was oddly loyal to the first woman, then I went to get this amazing dessert and the counter lady was all over me, and I was on her and it was this blissful dream of women and desserts and I awoke, hmm, maybe couldn’t handle all the joy and affection, and once awake I truly wondered why life wasn’t like this…
the next dream i had: i was in a room with all these
little bears, baby bears, and the mama bear is freaking out,
she gets up on her hind legs and smashes against the door,
once, twice and breaks it down…
then she and another bear or two turn to me fully standing
and they have guns and bandoliers and are ready for bizness,
then i wake up
I had last year’s most memorable dream at Motel Las Palmas in Matehuala, Mexico. In my dream a scorpion came flying at my face and I swatted at it, woke up, and found I had smashed the bedside lamp, which lay broken on the floor!
That first dream’s a good one, Paul. Here’s that great old Stevie Nicks song to go along with that same theme—pretty women!
DREAMS
Now here you go again
You say you want your freedom
Well, who am I to keep you down?
It’s only right that you should
Play the way you feel it
But listen carefully
To the sound of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
And what you lost
Oh, thunder only happens when it’s rainin’
Players only love you when they’re playin’
Say women, they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know
You’ll know
Now here I go again
I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It’s only me who wants to wrap around your dreams
And have you any dreams you’d like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness
Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
Ooh, what you lost
Thunder only happens when it’s rainin’
Players only love you when they’re playin’
Women, they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know
Oh, thunder only happens when it’s rainin’
Players only love you when they’re playin’
Say women, they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know
You’ll know
You will know
Oh, you’ll know
A comment regarding Richard Peterson-Jones on the illusion of gun safety: The availability of guns to young children in the home is a serious issue. But having a gun available to quickly use for self defense should not conflict with young children having access to that gun. Placing a gun out of reach, and out of sight of children is possible. A detachable magazine removed from an unloaded gun, and place in a different location that is also out of reach and out of sight works. Children should also start learning the basics of how to safely handle a gun at the earliest age possible, just like learning the safe use of fire. Teaching gun safety in school is a good idea. and should be encouraged. The use of a gun requires children behave as adults, and children unable to behave this way should never have access to guns.
I have far more fear of wealthy conservatives and their political power than I do of kids with guns. The former are a REAL danger.
Biggest gun nut I knew of in high school was a Dad who notoriously brought his gun to every school event. He had an arsenal in his basement that was apparently “secure”. Some kids who knew about it broke into the room one day and went out to an abandoned lot. One kid ended up dead.
The insecurity that some men feel is a bigger issue than the technical issue of how to lock up your guns.
Good point on the gun nut, but kids breaking into anything also need to take some responsibility, or at least their parents do.
“Esmeralda, a Bay Area-based developer founded by Devon Zuegel, wants to transform the 266-acre property on Cloverdale’s south end into a new mixed-use neighborhood with homes, public parkland, restaurants, retail space, multiple hotels, and a conference and event center. Zuegel said the plan scales back what has been approved on the site for the past two decades and adds a public park that would be gifted to the city.
The development would offer 166 detached single-family homes, from one-bedroom starter homes to four-bedroom models with accessory dwelling units. The average single-family home would be about 1,582 square feet.
Plans also call for 239 attached “village flats” — studios to three-bedroom apartments — and 200 “active living senior” units, from studios to two-bedroom apartments. Home prices would range from $600,000 to $4 million, according to Esmeralda documents, which note that pricing would shift with the housing market.
The resort component would include three separate lodging concepts: a 120-room resort hotel with two restaurants, a 64-room boutique hotel and a 16-unit apartment-style resort building.
A spa, fitness center, racquetball club, Japanese-style hot spring and more than 21,000 square feet of retail space round out the concept.”
The deep-thinkers of this huge development just south of Cloverdale need to ask themselves where is the WATER going to come from?
To say that this development would drastically change the character of Cloverdale, is a massive understatement. Everyone in Cloverdale that I’ve talked to says a resounding “NO” to this project.
Re: On line comment (unattributed, of course)
I kind of feel wealthy when I wear my Omega Seamaster wristwatch from the 1960’s whenever I leave the house.
I used my 25th birthday money from my mother to buy it from the shop on a troopship to Asia.
$65.
Taibbi is deplorable. Go to The Vanguard for Gavin and Zac’s report on his attack on Jen and Pumps–and read the comments on him!!!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOgJ0Fr4byU&t=74s