STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 41F with some passing high clouds this Thanksgiving Day morning on the coast. Dry skies for the next week as our dry spell continues. Have a safe & grateful holiday !
A WEAKENING cold front is expected to bring a chance for light rain primarily to Del Norte and northern Humboldt counties on Thanksgiving Day. A cooling trend follows for the weekend with dry conditions and a chance for freezing temperatures during the morning hours. Additionally, a long period swell is expected to bring hazardous beach conditions late Sunday into early next week. (NWS)
LOCAL FAMILY NEEDS HELP
Two year old Nina is battling Leukemia. She is the grandaughter of Antonia Perez who was the popular and well-liked custodian at Anderson Valley High School for many years. Nina's mother Itzel Perez grew up in Anderson Valley. Lily Perez has joined with Itzel and Philip Muir to create a Gofundme page for little Nina. You can find much more information at https://gofund.me/5254575a1 where you can also make a donation to help this family. Nina needs all the help she can get.
(Terry Sites)
ALEXA, CAN I DRINK AND DRIVE?
On Saturday morning, November 22nd, 2025, at approximately 8:20 AM, Ukiah Police Department officers were dispatched to what was reported as an injury traffic collision with a vehicle having been driven into a school gymnasium.
On arrival, officers observed a white Mini Cooper vehicle that was resting against the corner of the school cafeteria building, adjacent to the street. Standing next to the open door of the vehicle was the suspect in this case, identified as Alexa Harz.
Through the open door of the vehicle, officers observed numerous cans of beer on the passenger floorboard. Harz appeared intoxicated; however, she was uninjured during the collision. Due to it being a Saturday morning, no children were present at the school at the time and no one else was injured.
Based on obtained statements and school security camera footage, it was determined Harz had been driving westbound on Gobbi St. at an estimated 40 MPH, failed to stop at a stop sign at the intersection with S. Dora St., and continued directly into the side of the school building.
The school sustained significant damage to an exterior wall. Ukiah Unified School District representatives were called to the scene to assess damages and begin arrangements for the upcoming weeks. Additionally, the suspect vehicle had struck a guy wire supporting a City of Ukiah electric utility pole, dislodging the wire from the ground. This necessitated the response of the City of Ukiah Electric Department and Ukiah Valley Fire Authority to ensure the safety of those in the area.
Officers conducted a DUI investigation of Harz and she was placed under arrest for the listed charges. Harz was later transported to the Mendocino County jail where she was booked.
UKIAH DRUG CONSPIRATORS ARRESTED
On Tuesday, November 18, 2025 Ukiah Police Department Detectives launched an investigation into fentanyl and methamphetamine sales in the Ukiah area. UPD Detectives had obtained credible information that narcotics sales were occurring at three separate locations in Ukiah and obtained search warrants for the locations.
During the service of the first court order Detectives contacted Rolando Ruiz, a 37-year-old male that did not reside at the residence. Ruiz was found in possession of fentanyl, and it was determined that he had multiple prior convictions for drug possession. Ruiz was placed under arrest, and a much larger portion of fentanyl was found hidden on his person, along with plastic baggies consistent with packaging fentanyl for sales and a significant amount of cash in small denominations. Several other subjects were cited and released for drug possession at the location.
The next search warrant service occurred at a residence in downtown Ukiah. UPD Detectives provided “knock and notice” on the residence’s front door and received no answer. After several minutes of waiting and continuing to announce their presence, the detectives suspected that the suspect was actively destroying evidence. Detectives forced their way inside and encountered 39-year-old Michael Lamun, a previously convicted sex offender required to register with the State of California pursuant to Penal Code 290. Upon entry and contact with Lamun the Detectives immediately noticed substantial evidence of narcotics sales, as well as clear evidence that Lamun had been actively flushing fentanyl down the toilet as the Detectives knocked on the door. Inside the residence the Detectives located a substantial amount of fentanyl, methamphetamine, Xanax pills, a large amount of cash, and numerous other evidentiary items of drug sales.
Later in the night UPD Detectives began surveillance on a hotel room in which two people were suspected to be selling drugs from. A male, later identified as Joseph Jensen of Ukiah, left the hotel room in a vehicle and a traffic stop was conducted. Simultaneously UPD Detectives contacted Alannah Biancardi as she exited the hotel room. Biancardi was detained and a search of the hotel room yielded fentanyl, substantial evidence of drug sales, and two firearms. During a search of Jensen’s vehicle additional fentanyl was located that was packaged in a manner consistent for the purpose of sales. Both Biancardi and Jensen were arrested.
At the conclusion of the operation Ruiz was booked into the Mendocino County Jail for charges of Possession of a Narcotic for the Purpose of Sales, Drug Possession with Two or More Prior Drug Possession Convictions, and additional misdemeanor charges. Lamun was booked into the Mendocino County Jail for charges Possession of a Narcotic for the Purpose of Sales, Possession of a Controlled Substance for the Purpose of Sales, Possession of a Designated Controlled Substance for the Purpose of Sales, and Possession of Drugs by a Convicted Sex Offender, and additional misdemeanor charges. Biancardi and Jensen were booked into the Mendocino County Jail for charges of Possession of a Narcotic for the Purpose of Sales and Conspiracy to Commit a Crime. Jensen was also booked for the crime of Transportation of a Narcotic for the Purpose of Sales.
FORT BRAGG COUNCIL VOTES TO BOOST PAY to $950 a Month
Residents express support, appreciation for councilmembers' service
by Elise Cox
The Fort Bragg City Council voted Monday to raise councilmember pay from $510 to $950 per month after the 2026 general election, adopting the maximum allowed under state law and drawing broad support from residents who said higher compensation would help attract working parents and other prospective candidates.
City Clerk Diana Paoli said the increase will take effect when the new term begins in December 2026. The council last reviewed its compensation structure in 2024, when a scheduled 5% cost-of-living increase was not implemented due to an administrative error.
California Government Code §36516 — updated by a 2023 Senate bill — sets the allowable salary cap for a city of Fort Bragg’s size at $950 per month or $11,400 a year. Paoli said councilmembers had the option to leave salaries unchanged, apply a smaller 5% increase, or adopt the full amount. In addition to the monthly stipend, councilmembers receive health care and retirement benefits ranging from zero to more than $38,000 depending on individual circumstances.
Public comment strongly favored the raise. Several speakers argued that the modest stipend deters younger people, caregivers, or those without financial flexibility from seeking office.
Jacob Patterson told the council that without the ability to extend dependent-care reimbursements to all city employees — which the city cannot afford — increasing council salaries was the only feasible way to offset caregiving costs for potential candidates. Other residents noted the time demands of committee work, meetings outside Fort Bragg, and long closed sessions.
Councilmember Lindy Peters, who has served more than two decades, delivered the most pointed defense of the increase, pointing to persistent misconceptions about what council service requires.
Peters said he routinely puts in at least 20 hours a week, often more, and receives “about $5.35 an hour” once his current stipend is divided across the workload. He emphasized that councilmembers receive no pay for committee meetings, including regional boards that require unpaid travel.
“People don’t realize that closed session often goes three or four hours before a public meeting that goes another four,” Peters said. And then there uncounted hours of informal service. “If I started a timer every time someone stopped me in Safeway or at the farmers market to talk about city business, I’d be putting in a lot more than 20 hours a week.”
He added that online criticism from residents unfamiliar with the workload overlooks the challenges of balancing public service with family and employment responsibilities. Peters cited former Vice Mayor Jessica Morsell-Hay, who did not run for reelection because she could not manage council duties while raising two young children and operating a family business.
“To get some good quality candidates, this is also a little carrot on a stick,” Peters said. “Maybe younger candidates with young children, or people caring for a parent, will feel they can give it a shot.”
Other councilmembers echoed his concerns. Councilmember Albin-Smith noted she serves on about ten committees, some of which require extensive preparation or travel. Vice Mayor Marsha Rafanan said $950 a month could open the door for residents who otherwise could not afford to participate.
“Anybody that complains about this raise, which really isn’t all that much, obviously doesn’t know the work that goes into a meeting behind the scenes,” Judy Valadao said.
Gabriel Quinn Maroney urged the councilmembers “not to mess around” with smaller amounts. “Your constituents want you guys to be availabe,” he noted. “Although its not a lot of money, this helpls you to be more available and to do your job better.”
(mendolocal.news)
POTTER VALLEY WATER STORAGE OPTIONS DISCUSSED
by Justine Frederiksen
What will life be like for farmers in the Russian River Watershed after the Potter Valley Project is decommissioned and its dams removed?
“An absolute disaster,” said one attendee of a forum held in Ukiah Monday to update the public on the process of dismantling the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s hydroelectric plant in Mendocino County, a longtime Potter Valley resident who predicted that eliminating the cheap and plentiful source of water provided for decades as a by-product of electricity will “wipe out every bit of farming from here to the Bay Area,” since what now costs about $20 an acre-foot will become at least ten times as expensive.
“What we’ve laid out today is the vision of … how we survive as a county with the reality of what PG&E has left us in,” said Third District Mendocino County Supervisor John Haschak, thanking the Inland Water and Power Commission for not only hosting the Nov. 24 workshop, but for its years of work attempting to mitigate the impacts of losing both Scott and Cape Horn dams by finding a way to possibly continue the diversions of water from the Eel River into the Russian
River that were initiated for a hydroelectric plant that PG&E not longer wants to operate.
“We respect the work of the IWPC, and we see that as the path forward,” said Haschak. “We know that there are issues with the plan (to build a New Eel-Russian Facility to seasonally divert water), and we’re also asking PG&E to really study the economic harm that’s going to be done to the communities.”
As for why there were no PG&E representatives at the workshop Monday, Scott Shapiro, legal counsel for the IWPC, said that “PG&E is quite willing to come be part of these meetings, and we elected not to ask them to come to this one, but we will include them in future meetings, perhaps the next one.”
As for the possibility of stopping the decommissioning of the project, Shapiro said the IWPC tried twice to take over operations of the PVP, but now “there are no forks in the road, just a straight road that leads to the end,” which almost certainly includes both dams being removed.
“So you might not like how we got here, but we did, and this is an attempt to make the best lemonade we could out of lemons, after not being able to buy the whole thing ourselves, and not being able to acquire the license (to operate it) ourselves,” Shapiro continued, pointing later to several options that the IWPC is currently exploring for increasing water storage capacity in Potter Valley and Lake Mendocino, which include: increasing the amount of water that can be stored in the lake, pumping more water from the lake, creating a new dam, and expanding the current network of storage ponds.
As for which storage options might be pursued, Shapiro said that was not something the IWPC was prepared to address at this point, as the first step was “making sure the water continues to flow, the second part is figuring out how to maximize water storage.”
“There is no silver bullet, all of these (storage) concepts have some strengths and some weaknesses,” said consultant Tom Johnson, explaining that several options were being looked at because “we’re trying to replace Lake Pillsbury storage; we need to have storage that was in Lake Pillsbury, somewhere in the Russian River. So when we have seasonal diversions (with the NERF), we can then store the water to be used in the summer.”
But no matter which storage options are ultimately realized, Johnson said, all will be “expensive and difficult, and some sort of water conservation will be needed because the water will get a lot more expensive,” and there will be less of it available.
At the end of the three-hour workshop, IWPC Chair Janet Pauli thanked the panel and promised, “we’re going to do this again.”
The presentation, including all informational slides regarding the storage options and their expected costs, can be watched on the Mendocino County YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UClLBmYYFOA
(ukiahdailyjournal.com)
SUPERVISOR WILLIAMS' long response ostensibly to Chris Skyhawk was A-I generated.
“…Maintaining trust with the diverse partners who negotiated this compromise is essential. Breaking those ties now, after years of delicate consensus-building, would not strengthen Mendocino County’s position. It would leave us isolated. The coalition exists because no single jurisdiction can solve this alone.
Thank you again for your engagement and for your interest in water security for Mendocino County.
Sincerely, Ted Williams”
Bob Abeles:
The above message scores 100% AI generated. According to the gptzero tool, “We are highly confident this text was AI generated.”
ANDERSON VALLEY BREWING COMPANY
Happy Thanksgiving!
Plenty to be thankful for here at the Brewery in this year of transitions. It is an honor to be able to continue the traditions of AVBC into the future and we don't take the responsibility lightly. We are thankful for this beautiful valley, the amazing community and your continued support.
THANKSGIVING DAY: We will be open all day so if you need a break from the family (we won’t tell), come on by. Jason will be dishing up some tasty bites and Minal will be pouring your favorite beers!
BLACK FRIDAY SALE: What's Black Friday without a sale? 20% off EPIC packs all day on Friday.
MUSHROOM TALK WITH LOCAL EXPERT ALISON GARDNER THIS SUNDAY AT WHITESBORO GRANGE
by Wendy Meyer
Northern California is a mushroom hunting paradise and home to many diverse species. Learn all about mushrooms on Sunday, November 30 at 1pm as Whitesboro Grange (32510 Navarro Ridge Rd., Albion) hosts a special Mushroom Talk featuring longtime local mushroom enthusiast and educator, Alison Gardner.
Alison has over 55 years of mushrooming experience, receiving her early training from Norm Shandel, Sr., along with years of assisting in classroom/field courses with the well-known mushroom class at C/R. Alison brings a lifetime of practical knowledge to the subject.
The presentation will explore the fascinating world of mushrooms, focusing not only on mushrooming itself but also on the vital role fungi play in the environment. She will discuss their nutritional and medicinal value, the importance of proper identification, and the various risks that make careful knowledge essential.
Attendees are encouraged to bring in mushrooms they have found and are curious about. Alison will bring specimens as well, creating an opportunity for hands-on learning before or after the main presentation.
Drawing from decades of personal experience — including being able to recognize her first edible mushrooms at age 11 and navigating both allergies and an accidental encounter with a toxic species — Alison offers an engaging, grounded perspective on the rewards and responsibilities of mushrooming. The program will conclude with a question-and-answer session.
Copies of The Wild Mushroom Cookbook, a book she co-authored with Merry Winslow, will be available for purchase.
A modest participation fee of $18/person for general admission and $15 for Grange members is suggested to help support the event.
The community is warmly invited to attend. Doors will open at 12:30 PM at the Whitesboro Grange. For additional information, please email: [email protected]
JUST 10 DAYS TO THE ELK CRAFT FAIR!
Happy Thanksgiving from all of the makers and artists that will be selling their wares a week from Saturday December the 6th from 11am to 4pm at the Greenwood Community Center in downtown Elk. This is your opportunity to find unique gifts and support your local community! Along with the fabulous arts and crafts there will be a delicious lunch available as a fundraiser for the Greenwood preschool. So don’t spend it all on Black Friday stuff or better yet don’t spend any and come on down to Elk a week from Saturday and have a hometown holiday this year.
UKIAH HAS BECOME RURAL MENDOCINO COUNTY’S PLAYGROUND
by Jackie Kretnzman
Dave Dick drives 40 minutes to Ukiah at least three times a week — but not for work. He is commuting for fun. Dick, like many in rural Mendocino County, travels to Ukiah because it is the only place in the county with large-scale recreational facilities and programming.
“I play in a men’s softball league, my wife and I play in the volleyball league, and my son plays youth soccer,” says Dick. “The facilities here are fantastic, and we don’t mind the drive. Once we’re in town, we use that as an opportunity to shop at Costco and eat at In-N-Out Burger.”
Most of the communities in the county are small and unincorporated, so they don’t have the resources to provide park and recreation services. Recreation Supervisor Jake Burgess estimates that half of the people who use Ukiah’s recreation services live outside the city. They come from Comptche, Boonville, Willits, and even Elk — a two-hour drive away. He thinks that the city’s population of 16,000 at least doubles during the day, as people come from all over the county to work and play.
That’s in part because Mendocino County, like so many rural California counties, is financially strapped. “Right now — especially with the recent rollback of federal funding — as well as the expiration of some COVID-era funding, you’re seeing this huge gap in the demand for services in these areas and the ability of these counties to provide those services,” says Community Development Director Craig Schlatter.
Ukiah has long been the recreation hub of Mendocino County. But beginning with the pandemic, demand soared as people sought out more outdoor recreation and social activities. According to Burgess, youth basketball participation has swelled from 700 to 800 pre-pandemic to over 1,100 last year, with most of those new registrants coming from outside city limits. The number of swimming lessons provided grew from 900 to 1,400 over the same period.
“We are especially proud of the swim lessons,” says Burgess. “We have an extensively trained staff. There’re a lot of creeks and rivers in our county for kids to learn how to swim. We actually lose money operating the pool, but we feel it’s a vital service.”
Ukiah is also the county’s entertainment hub. Each Sunday in the Park concert attracts more than 4,000 people. Ukiah’s annual Pumpkinfest draws more than 15,000 visitors. The newest program, Dive-In Movies at the municipal pool, has been a big hit, averaging more than 500 people per show. (First screening: Jaws.) People can watch the movie from the pool deck or while floating in an inner tube and buy food from local vendors.
All these activities serve a dual purpose — fun and community-building.
“The free concerts are basically like giant mixers,” Burgess says. “It’s where people see their friends, or they see people they haven’t seen in a while. It’s a giant kind of outdoor cocktail party.”
Ukiah has managed to finance these services without dipping into the General Fund or assessing new taxes. Local companies sponsor the larger events, the city receives a percentage of vendor sales, and program participants pay registration fees. (Non-Ukiah residents don’t have to pay a higher rate.) The city also has a facility-sharing agreement with the school district and receives grants and private donations.
In its quest to maximize recreation opportunities, Ukiah last year annexed nearly 800 acres of open space on its western flank to build trails, preserve open space, and protect the Ukiah Valley watershed. Ukiah and the nonprofit Ukiah Valley Trail Group will soon begin constructing hiking trails in the Lookout Peak Trail Complex. The goal is to complete 20 miles of trails for hikers and mountain bikers, which will have the added benefit of bringing tourism dollars into the city. Seventy acres are set aside for up to 20 units of above moderate-income housing.
“We were seeing right outside the city limits a lot of sprawl and haphazard growth, with no real concern for the environment,” says Schlatter. “We wanted to be able to develop the land more intentionally.”
The annexation was no sure thing. It required the approval of the Mendocino County Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo), which had, for almost four decades, turned down the city’s annexation requests out of concerns over traffic, farmland conversion, and resource impacts. This time was different, says Mendocino LAFCo Executive Officer Uma Hinman.
“The city put in a lot of effort, thoughtfully worked the annexation into its General Plan, collaborated with a number of agencies, sought community alignment, and demonstrated that it recognized the importance of carefully managing this area for responsible growth,” she says.
Schlatter says that the successful annexation is the culmination of 50 years of planning. “The city wanted to honor the original vision of the 1970s council that saw the Ukiah Valley and the city of Ukiah as one community,” he says. “The way we look at it, if people in the county are doing well, that means people in the city of Ukiah are probably doing well too.”
(Jackie Krentzman is a Bay Area-based writer and editor.)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, November 26, 2025
ARMANDO ALVAREZ, 35, Ukiah. Suspended license for DUI, failure to appear, probation revocation.
RICKIE CURTIS, 52, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, contempt of court.
FOREST GASTELLUM, 52, Fort Bragg. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, vehicle obtained by theft, extortion: purchase or receipt of same.
MICHAEL MATTHIAS, 21, Redwood Valley. Assault with deadly weapon with force-possible great bodily injury.
JOSE REYES, 36, Ukiah. Controlled substance, contempt of court.
VINCENT SIMMONS JR., 32, Ukiah. Narcotics for sale, marijuana for sale, contempt of court.
REALIA SPECIALE, 43, Willits. Battery.
HEY, ESMERALDA, MOVE INTO CLOVERDALE
Editor:
Wouldn’t it be simpler, and certainly better for Cloverdale, if the Esmeralda folks move into Cloverdale, rather than build a satellite town? Cloverdale already has houses for rent and sale; and shops, restaurants and other businesses that could really use a boost. Plus, there is a ton of vacant retail space. How could businesses that are already struggling afford to operate satellites in Esmeralda? Why not live in Cloverdale, among its residents, rather than on a hill above them?
CD Grant and Eric Neel
Cloverdale
THE HEALDSBURG NUTCRACKER BAKERY
If you are looking for a destination that will lift your holiday spirits make your way to Costeaux French Bakery in Healdsburg at 417 Healdsburg Avenue.
Beautiful baked goods, delicious brunch items and beverages of your choice await. The clincher is what is on display through the New Year. Fifteen years ago the bakery owners bought a few nutcrackers (like the one in the ballet) to display in their bakery. Another person in the shop at the time had a collection of nutcrackers that were made available to the bakery and they were off and running. Every year customers add to the collection with gift nutcrackers.
Unbelievably they now have close to a thousand. Displayed in the bakery are many, many tiny, medium, large and huge. You will never see so many together in one place. Artfully displayed, they are truly a wonder to behold. Make a date to meet a friend and eat something sweet. Open seven days a week. This has already become a happy holiday tradition for many North Coast residents.
(Terry Sites)
PROFIT OVER PEOPLE
Editor,
Regarding Verizon confirms more than 13,000 job cuts," Verizon’s job cuts illustrate the real reason most companies will be embracing artificial intelligence — to make more money for their investors.
The CEO’s quote, “Our current cost structure limits our ability to invest significantly in our customer value proposition” is classic corporate subterfuge. The main goal is to increase profits by cutting payroll costs.
Just wondering: Who will be buying Verizon’s products and services when everyone has been replaced by AI?
Robert Leeds
Oakland
YOU GOT IT COMING, LADY
Editor,
Although the letter writer did not intend it, her frustration at being called a cult member, brainwashed, a Nazi and “other vile comments” simply for voting for Donald Trump coincidentally appeared on day as an Open Forum detailing Trump’s threats to sidestep the judicial system and assassinate of his political rivals.
Although we are all entitled to vote for our choice, those who still support Trump at this time should at least be honest with themselves and admit that they support fascism.
Look up the definition. It fits what’s happening.
Stefan Gruenwedel
San Francisco
TRUMP THE TERRIBLE'S FACE ON NATIONAL PARK PASSES
Trump's face on new national park passes outrages conservationists
by Amanda Heidt
The Department of the Interior announced a series of changes Tuesday for "America the Beautiful" passes, which cover entry and amenity fees at over 2,000 federally managed areas, including the country’s national parks. Among the differences visitors can expect beginning in 2026 are new digital passes, with original artwork featuring President Donald Trump's facial glare, and “America-first” prices that will see international visitors paying steeper fees.
In a DOI news release, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said that the new policies will “ensure that U.S. taxpayers, who already support the National Park System, continue to enjoy affordable access, while international visitors contribute their fair share to maintaining and improving our parks for future generations.”
Beginning in the new year, the cost of the pass — which covers entry for a year — will hold steady at $80 for U.S. residents but jump to $250 for international visitors, while nonresidents without an annual pass will pay an additional fee of $100 per person at 11 of the most visited parks, alongside the regular entrance fee. (The DOI has not specified which national parks will be included.) There will also be at least eight new fee-free days for U.S. residents, such as Constitution Day, Independence Day weekend and Trump’s birthday.…
TREATMENT IS A GOOD START
Editor,
Data from the Opiate Treatment Outpatient Program at San Francisco General Hospital show that for patients admitted in 2024, 46% were still in treatment six months later. In 2017, when heroin was the dominant illicit opioid, 44% stayed that long.
The rates remained stable even as the number of people admitted to treatment doubled during the last few years. As a result, more people stay in treatment for an extended period. The number of patients who’ve been in treatment more than a year (584) is now larger than the historic average number of patients in the whole clinic (575).
Would it be better if everyone who entered treatment stuck around longer? Absolutely. The outpatient program is exploring how to help patients stay in treatment longer and enter recovery.
Until then, just getting more people to start treatment will lead to more people “sticking with it.”
Dr. Scott Steiger, deputy medical director, Opiate Treatment Outpatient Program
San Francisco
WOWIE ZOWIE
Wowie Zowie
Your love's a treat
Wowie Zowie
You can't be beat
Wowie Zowie, baby
You're so neat
I don't even care
If you shave your legs
Wowie Zowie, baby
You're so fine
Wowie Zowie, baby
Please be mine
Wowie Zowie
Up and down my spine
I don't even care
If you brush your teeth
Dream of you each mornin'
I dream of you each night
Just the other day I got so shook up
I dreamed of you in the afternoon
I dream of you each mornin'
I dream of you each night
Just the other day I got so shook up
I had a flash in the afternoon
Wowie Zowie, baby
Love me do
Wowie Zowie
and I'll love you too
Wowie Zowie, baby
I'll be true
I don't even care
If your dad's the heat
(Wowie Zowie...)
— Frank Zappa (1966)
‘THE ROAD FROM OLOMPALI TO HOPLAND’ — A Short Story (a two minute read.)
She was still just a girl when the world broke open.
Her name was Maxima, daughter of Camillo Ynitia, last recognized chief of the Coast Miwoks of Marin County. In those years, she wore her hair in long braids, sometimes tied with string, sometimes flying loose behind her when she ran along the edge of the bay. She loved the wind most of all — the way it spoke in the tule reeds, the way it called the osprey home.
But that was before the soldiers came.
It somehow came to be, Camillo was killed with an arrow, when she was about 16. She inherited what was left of Olompali, but was forced, along with her sister, to sell it and move up north where Hopland was founded, but basically a melting pot for many neighboring tribes. So Native families from Marin, Petaluma, Novato, Corte Madera, Sausalito, etc., — were to be marched north. A forced removal to sell the land that was left of the ancestorial land. A trail of tears through dust and wind and a rough treacherous journey, away from the land the people had been a part of, through family and all relations, for thousands of years, in the Villages of Marin in the Redwoods!
Maxima remembered the morning they were taken. The sky was gray, like ash. She walked beside her sister, who was very sad to be leaving, so Maxima had to be the strong and protective sister. She kept Maria close at all times. She had no trust of anyone. They took their homeland and forced them out. Three long days it took… From Olompali to Hopland, with all their worldly possessions on a horse.
WORD JUGGLER
Inventing words, that's my vice.
I confess outright
that I relish stretching them long,
crushing them small, veering them off the worn trail.
I twist, curve, mold them like play-dough,
pushing them so harshly they go on strike,
letters crossed like stakes, sentences walled up,
even verbs flat-out refusing to bend.
A full-blown language uprising!
They populate and swarm.
They boycott my word stock.
My tongue forks into impossible knots.
Thoughts snag, weave into wild tangles.
Pin them to the page? Pure torment.
Vowels snap free, scatter like mad pinballs.
Consonants grind down, flare out,
drained from chasing my word frenzy.
So I stand there, just staring,
unable to tame them, to wield them as I would like,
praying a single word, naked and authentic,
might grace me with its presence.
And when finally it peeks out, letter by letter,
wary, quivering,
I welcome it like a rare bird lost in the void.
I stroke it, hear its quiet pulse.
I chew it over bit by bit.
I savor it piece by piece,
then set it loose on the blank sheet,
free to give meaning and taste to a creation
unbound by orthodoxy.
— Asma Al Taleb (translated from the French by the author and Ted Dace)
Asma Al Taleb blogs at https://passionsetcritures.wordpress.com/
THE POKE BONNET HAT
So many sad things -- the Panic of 1837 resulting from over speculation in cotton and slaves and made worse by President Jackson’s Specie Circular.
We tried corn and cowpeas. We planted them in between the cotton rows.
The practice was to plant and thin so that wide spaces were left between the cotton and livestock was allowed to forage in the field on the corn leaves and pea vines.
During the depression years that began in 1837, fruits and vegetables were grown for personal and local consumption but were not commercial crops -- we ate or canned in jars everything we grew.
We fermented sauerkraut and pickles in barrels.
We had pigs, too. Early pigs were similar to “Arkansas Razorbacks” and did not cost much at all to keep since they foraged in field and forest.
I want to stop writing but there's more.
The Natchez tornado was awfully destructive both to human life and property -- at least 300 missing and 263 found dead by drowning or by the falling of houses and timber.
The tornado's direction was southwest to northeast, which would put the tornado passing well west of Covington County, and close enough to do damage to our farm.
At first, the tornado was an unknown black thing on the horizon. It seemed like something major and permanent, like all bad things, and I remember thinking this will go on forever.
I remember thinking hardship is endless, ongoing, and all of this is the Devil's conjuring.
I remember thinking there is no refuge that can save the hireling or the slave, and this is the damn truth about every damn place in Petit Gulf Cotton Country.
I remember thinking even many of my girlfriends have died so young with trees planted over their graves -- Delliah, Opal, Rose, Birdie, Adeliade and Grace.
We met in first grade in our one-room schoolhouse.
I remember thinking my poke bonnet hat makes me look like a pretty creature and earnest, even during the worst of times, even during panics, depression years and tornadoes.
[Daphne wrote from New Orleans to request I write these thoughts.]
Footnote:
According to the doctors of the time, Daphne died of complications from "acute inflammatory fluor albus".
Egbert Guernsey’s Homoeopathic Domestic Practice, published in 1857, stated the condition was caused by "the suppression of menstruation, the free use of tea and coffee, excessive sexual indulgence, or frequent childbearing."
Upper-class women deemed particularly susceptible to fluor albus were "excited by the luxuries and stimulants of the table, the excitements of the ballroom or theatre, or the glowing and sometimes impure pages of a certain class of fiction."
Treatment included injecting cold water up the vagina with nitrate of silver.
In truth, Daphne died of an ectopic pregnancy. It is still the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths in adult women, but not much was known about ectopic pregnancy in 1857.
(John Sakowicz)
TEARS FLOWED IN S.F. COURTROOM AS IMMIGRATION JUDGE WAS FIRED MID-HEARING
by Ko Lyn Cheang
Shuting Chen was conducting an asylum hearing for a family of three Venezuelan siblings, listening to testimony about how they had fled persecution in their home country, when an email popped up on one of her computer screens. The subject line read “Notice of Termination.”
She felt like all the air had been sucked out of her lungs, she told the Chronicle.
For months, she had been mentally preparing for this moment as she helped one colleague after another who had been fired by the Trump administration pack up their offices. She took on hundreds of additional motions from the dockets of her terminated colleagues, working weekends and nights to shoulder the exponentially growing workload.
But nothing could have emotionally prepared her to see the email come in.
The floodgates opened. She broke down in tears. She told the attorneys, the interpreter and the asylum-seekers that she had been fired and could not finish the case. The asylum-seekers’ attorney, Julie Reddy Wiltshire, started crying. Chen apologized, then left.
“I felt it was really disgraceful what happened to her,” Wiltshire, who’s practiced immigration law since 1999, told the Chronicle. “I, as an American, was embarrassed. It made me question the rule of law in this country.”
Her clients, who had waited years for a chance to plead for asylum and who Wiltshire said had a strong case, may have to wait years more in legal limbo.
Chen is one of 12 San Francisco immigration court judges who have been fired by the Department of Justice this year, leaving a skeleton staff of just nine judges to handle the workload of 21. None have been replaced, but the Trump administration has advertised open positions, including in San Francisco, as “deportation judges.”
The terminations are part of an unprecedented axing of immigration judges nationwide, who are employees of the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, responsible for hearing asylum claims and other appeals for immigration benefits from people in deportation proceedings.
At least 90 immigration judges have been fired this year, a previously unheard-of number, even as the backlog of immigration cases in court continues to grow to a record 3.4 million cases. Asylum-seekers in San Francisco were already waiting an average of 4½ years for an asylum hearing, a Chronicle analysis previously found, a number that’s only expected to grow in the face of judicial shortages.
Chen said she was not given a reason for her firing.
“My concern is that they’re trying to systematically dismantle the San Francisco immigration court, one judge at a time,” Chen said.
She was appointed in 2022 by the Biden administration. Of the four other San Francisco immigration judges who were fired on Friday alongside her, two were Trump appointees from his first presidential term.
Immigration advocates have said they believe the firings are intended to pressure remaining judges to speed up deportations or replace judges with military attorneys who the administration believes might be more willing to issue deportation orders, some of whom do not have immigration law experience.
A San Francisco Chronicle analysis from September found that the judges who had been fired at the time had granted asylum at the highest rates, but some other fired judges nationwide had low asylum grant rates.
Judges who have been fired said they have made asylum decisions based on the law and not ideology. A wide variety of circumstantial factors can influence asylum grant rates, including whether an asylum-seeker is represented by an attorney and the demographic composition of a judge’s docket, which varies widely from judge to judge.
A Department of Justice spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre declined to comment on the reason for the firings but claimed the Biden administration had been “forcing immigration courts to implement a de facto amnesty for hundreds of thousands of aliens.” There is no evidence that the Biden administration forced immigration judges to issue particular decisions.
Wiltshire, who’s appeared before at least three of the fired San Francisco immigration judges, said she does not know why they were fired.
“They seemed to be fair judges and do things according to the book,” she said. “If I had to speculate, I might say it was perhaps because San Francisco is thought to be one of those ‘liberal’ locales and any judge holding court in such a place might have a liberal leaning, but I’m not quite sure.”
This year, Wiltshire said, she felt the ground shifting beneath her feet as she watched the government try to dismiss asylum-seekers’ cases and deport them to countries they had never been to.
“Quite frankly, what’s happening is illegal,” Wiltshire said.
Chen said the firing of her and four other judges will mean their approximately 25,000 cases will be reassigned to the remaining nine judges. When she left, immigration hearings were being set for 2029 because there was no earlier availability, she said. That means those 25,000 cases likely won’t be heard for four years at the earliest.
She said that the amount of work her remaining colleagues must handle is “frankly inhumane.” But she said she had full confidence that they would do their best to ensure due process for every person who passes through immigration court.
“Being an immigration judge was a trauma-filled and pressure-filled job,” Chen said. “It’s not normal for people to be working such a traumatic job at the pace we’re asked to do.”
Chen immigrated to the United States with her family when she was 8 years old in the 1990s, just decades after the U.S ended its policy of barring Chinese immigration. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2009 before running her own immigration practice for six years, providing, among other services, removal defense and asylum assistance. Before being appointed to immigration court, she served as a staff attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
“I’m an immigrant myself, and I never took my role as a judge for granted,” she said. “I worked every day to make sure the very laws that gave me an opportunity to be here were fairly applied. For these reasons, I don’t just mourn the loss of a job, but also the disintegration of a system.”
(SF Chronicle)
THE STATE FOUND RED FLAGS IN NURSING HOMES BUT LICENSED THEM ANYWAY
by Jocelyn Wiener
The chain of California nursing homes owned by Shlomo Rechnitz and his companies has faced state scrutiny for years. Now, a series of recent lawsuits is bringing renewed attention to his companies.
Elder care advocates say Rechnitz’ companies are Exhibit A in how regulators at the Department of Public Health are failing some of California’s most vulnerable citizens.
In 2021, a CalMatters investigation documented that the state Department of Public Health allowed Rechnitz and his companies to operate 18 nursing homes while delaying a decision on granting licenses to them. The state had kept the license applications in a “pending” status for seven years after he acquired them. Rechnitz and his companies were allowed to continue operating five additional homes even after the state denied licenses to them.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law meant to address the issue, but state regulators in 2023 granted Rechnitz’ companies the licenses to operate the homes just before the measure took effect.
Here are key takeaways from CalMatters’ most recent coverage:
Newly licensed homes now subjects of patient lawsuits
Several homes that received licenses in 2023 are now being sued by patients and their family members.
In February 2024, a Los Angeles County jury awarded $2.34 million to an 84-year-old nursing home resident named Betsy Jentz, finding that Country Villa Wilshire had violated her rights on 132 occasions, at times leading to serious injuries.
This coming February, a jury in Shasta County is scheduled to hear a case against Windsor Redding, which is accused of negligence in the 2020 COVID-19 deaths of 24 patients.
Another upcoming case involves 78-year-old Barbara Pendley, who allegedly died after suffering severe dehydration at North Point Healthcare & Wellness Centre in Fresno.
And trial is scheduled to begin next spring in the case of a 79-year-old dementia patient, referred to as Cheryl Doe, who was allegedly raped twice at Windsor Healthcare Center of Oakland; a second case against the same facility alleges that excessive sedation of 64-year-old Alando Williams led to his death.
Rechnitz and his companies have denied allegations in all of these cases.
“It is accurate that nursing homes are the target of abusive lawsuits that accomplish nothing but depleting resources for patient care,” said Mark Johnson, an attorney for the facilities and their holding company, Brius.
On average, more citations at Rechnitz homes
A CalMatters analysis of data from both the state health department and the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found 78 California facilities in which Shlomo Rechnitz or his wife, Tamar, were listed among the owners. On average the facilities fared poorly on several key quality metrics compared to the state overall.
- In the past three years, these 78 nursing homes received an average of 12.4 citations for facility-reported incidents, compared with 6.1 for all nursing homes statewide.
- A higher proportion of the facilities has received a federal fine in the last three years than the state’s overall rate. Two-thirds of these facilities received at least one federal fine in the last three years, compared to half of all facilities across the state.
- The facilities have been fined an average of $47,897 during the last three years, compared to an average of $29,573 for all California facilities.
Johnson, the attorney for Rechnitz’ facilities, said in his email that a large percentage of these facilities are located in Los Angeles County, which issues deficiencies at a higher rate than any county in California, many of which are overturned on appeal.
He also said that “Mr. Rechnitz’s facilities self-report at a significantly higher rate than other comparable facilities,” which, in turn, could lead them to have a higher number of deficiencies.
Rechnitz is wealthy
In August 2024, an Alameda County jury found that Alameda Healthcare & Wellness had violated the rights of 71-year-old James Doherty, Sr. more than 1,400 times. That included seven instances in which staff failed to transport him, causing him to miss chemotherapy treatments, court documents said. Doherty died following the development of a large pressure sore. His family was awarded $7.6 million.
Another key revelation from that case: Rechnitz and his wife disclosed their net worth. According to financial documents filed in court, it comes to $786 million.
Tony Chicotel, a senior staff attorney for California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, said that dollar figure hasn’t been divulged publicly before.
“At least in some of these chains, the money that was meant to go for patient care is being stripped away and sent up top to the ownership,” he said.
Advocates say the state is not doing its job
Elder care advocates say the state Department of Public Health could push for greater accountability, including withholding licenses from owners they deem to be bad actors.
Wendy York, a Sacramento attorney specializing in nursing home abuse, said that watching elderly and disabled residents repeatedly suffer the same types of injuries in these facilities “feels like a broken record. It feels like Groundhog Day.”
There are “government agencies who are responsible for their oversight,” York said, but “at the end of the day, it feels like we’re the ones who are doing the enforcement.”
Department of Public Health spokesman Mark Smith said in an emailed statement that the department “remains committed to transparency and accountability for all providers, and to the health and safety of all nursing home residents in California.”
(calmatters.org)
FAKE IT ’TIL YOU MAKE IT
by Erin L. Thompson
Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, who died last month, had a business card in the early 1990s that described him as “Jonty ‘Brown Trews’ Tokeley: Smuggler and Fabricator of Egyptian Antiquities.” “Jonty” was a nickname from the Territorial Army. Born Jonathan Foreman, he renamed himself “Tokeley-Parry” while at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he got a degree in moral philosophy in 1974.
While he was working on a PhD, his girlfriend introduced him to some antiquities collectors. He dropped the philosophy and taught himself to restore ancient artefacts. The problem was, though, that after he brought a battered piece back to life in his workshop, he had to return it to its owner. A restorer was merely a “servant at the tables of the rich.” Tokeley-Parry wanted to be a master.
In 1988, a client invited him along on a buying trip to Egypt. All newly discovered antiquities were property of the state and their sale or export was banned. But farmers or construction workers whose shovels turned up treasure would sometimes sell it on the black market. Tokeley-Parry met an Egyptian middleman who offered to supply him. All he had to do was get his loot out of the country.
By his own estimate, Tokeley-Parry smuggled 3,000 antiquities out of Egypt in 65 trips over six years. His success was attributed to his skill as a “fabricator.” He made genuine antiquities appear fake by covering them in layers of conservation plastic, plaster, gaudy paint and gilt. His goal was to make a piece “look as much as possible like a kitsch bazaar thing, the sort that idiots buy in hotel shops.”
As long as he could convince the antiquities police guard at the airport X-ray machine that his suitcase contained a plaster souvenir instead of a stone artefact weighing ten times as much, Tokeley-Parry was in the clear. Given that he risked a long sentence with hard labor, his trips through the airport were so nerve-wracking that Tokeley-Parry described them as “a brown trouser job.”
The phrase caused some confusion when he was asked about his card in a federal court in Manhattan in 2002. He had been called as a witness in the trial of Frederick Schultz, a New York dealer who sold some of the smuggled artefacts after Tokeley-Parry had dunked them in acetone to dissolve the plastic coating and float off the plaster and paint. Tokeley-Parry and Schultz had worked together on another form of fabrication: creating a false provenance for the pieces to make it seem they had left Egypt long before the country banned their sale or export.
Tokeley-Parry proposed that they pretend the artefacts were an inheritance from his great-uncle, Thomas Alcock, a civil engineer who often passed through the Suez Canal in 1920. Schultz agreed. “He kept on asking me did I really have a relative who was Alcock,” Tokeley-Parry said in court. “He found it very amusing.”
Schultz suggested that Tokeley-Parry make paper labels like the ones used by turn-of-the-century collectors. Tokeley-Parry whited out the text on a Victorian pharmaceutical label and glued on letters photocopied from other labels to spell out “Thomas Alcock Collection.” He ran off copies, dabbed them with a wet tea bag and dried them in an oven to simulate the stains and brittleness of age, then glued them onto his artefacts.
Now that collectors could believe the looted pieces had been in England long enough for Egypt to have no claim to them, the money began coming in. Tokeley-Parry bought 40 handmade suits and a British racing green TVR sports car, which he nicknamed “the Beast” and soon crashed. “It was a very charming transition,” Tokeley-Parry later told an interviewer about his new-found wealth. “I must say I enjoyed it.”
Schultz put up the money to buy more pieces and Tokeley-Parry sent him a stream of faxes to keep him up to date on negotiations. The faxes sometimes addressed Schutlz as “004½” and were signed “006½” — a little short of 007. “Read this and then eat,” Tokeley-Parry scribbled in the margins of one. He didn’t follow his own advice, though. To keep track of what he had told his partner, he pasted copies of the faxes into his journals, where he recorded the details of each purchase.
Tokeley-Parry’s downfall came when he tried to expand his operations. Looking for couriers to smuggle antiquities out for him, Tokeley-Parry made an arrangement with the farmer in Devon who was renting him a converted barn to use as a workshop. The farmer would help with the transport in return for an apprenticeship in smuggling, but he soon began buying for himself from Tokeley-Parry’s supplier. Not knowing whether a set of papyrus fragments were valuable or even genuine, the farmer dropped off a sample at the British Museum for an evaluation in 1994.
The expert who examined the papyri could identify them precisely because he had dug them up himself in Saqqara. The artefacts should have been in an Egyptian governmental storeroom, not on his desk in London. Feigning innocence, the curators asked the farmer if he had any other examples of these interesting documents. He brought them several dozen more, which he left along with his real name and address. The Egyptologists then called Scotland Yard.
Dick Ellis, the lead investigator of “Operation Bulrush” (the biblical name for the plant that papyrus is made from), recognized that sending such easily identifiable stolen artefacts to a museum was “such a dumb thing to have done” that the farmer couldn’t possibly be the brains behind a smuggling network. Ellis called the Devon police to ask if there were other Egyptophiles in the area: Tokeley-Parry had recently reported the theft of an Egyptian stone head from his workshop.
A raid found that Tokeley-Parry had kept thousands of photographs documenting every stage of the smuggling process. In one shot, the yellow wires of Tokeley-Parry’s Walkman disappear into the popped collar of his pink polo shirt as he leans over a fragmentary statuette. In another, the smuggler gives a slight smirk as he rests his hand on the gilded hair of a disguised ancient head.
Despite claiming that his journals were notes for a novel in progress about a would-be smuggler, Tokeley-Parry was sentenced in absentia in Egypt to fifteen years’ hard labor and was also put on trial in England. He tried to persuade the court that convicting him would be “doing the dirty work for a corrupt third world regime” incapable of protecting its own treasures. It was morally permissible, he suggested, to steal antiquities from Egypt and bring them to collectors who had the wealth to restore and preserve them.
It’s an argument that many collectors would like to believe, but the court declined to see Tokeley-Parry as a savior. He didn’t only buy pieces churned up by plows or excavators, but artefacts stolen from storerooms or chainsawed off the walls of tombs that had survived intact for 4.000 years only to fall victim to the art market.
Tokeley-Parry was the first person to serve a prison sentence in the UK for dealing in stolen antiquities. When he was released after three years, he agreed to testify in Schultz’s trial, thinking he could persuade the American authorities of his argument. Again, he failed, and Schultz was sentenced to 33 months in prison.
Tokeley-Parry and Schultz remain, as far as I know, the only people to have been jailed for such acts in either the US or UK. (A handful of other criminal charges have resulted in probation or home confinement.) The seizure and repatriation of smuggled antiquities is much more common. Unlike a criminal conviction, this doesn’t require them to prove that the handler knew the pieces were illegally trafficked. Few other people have been as unwise as Tokeley-Parry to keep such vivid proof of their own state of mind.
His ploy of reassuring buyers by pretending the artefacts came from an old European collection is still widely used, though. In 2023, for example, an antiquities dealer in Switzerland, one of Tokeley-Parry’s old competitors, was found guilty of arranging for accomplices to produce false receipts and affidavits saying they had long owned artefacts that the dealer had in fact recently bought from smugglers. Despite his conviction, the dealer’s gallery continues to sell antiquities. The many artefacts he sold to museums around the world remain on display.
(London Review of Books)
WILL TRUMP SEIZE HIS HOUR AND PUSH FOR HIS ADMIRED UNIVERSAL HEALTH INSURANCE?
by Ralph Nader
When asked what they like most about Trump, fervent supporters often say, “He says what he thinks.” Well, not always. Donald Trump has long supported government-run universal healthcare – well before he had to deal with a crazed Congressional GOP in his first term. The controlling Republicans repealed Obamacare dozens of times in the House of Representatives (repeal was blocked in the Senate) – without offering any alternative.
President Trump also denounced Obamacare in vitriolic expletives, but he offers no alternatives.
However, let’s look back at a time when Trump, before his first term, was not tongue-tied about Medicare for All.
In a little-noticed Washington Post article (May 5, 2017), headlined “Trump’s forbidden love: Single-payer health care,” Aaron Blake reports that “in his heart of hearts, [Trump] wants single-payer health care. Indeed, it seems to be his forbidden fruit.”
Blake goes back to 2000 when “he [Trump] advocated for it as both a potential Reform Party presidential candidate and in his book, “The America We Deserve,” to wit:
“We must have universal health care. Just imagine the improved quality of life for our society as a whole,” he wrote, adding: “The Canadian-style, single-payer system in which all payments for medical care are made to a single agency (as opposed to the large number of HMOs and insurance companies with their diverse rules, claim forms, and deductibles)…helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans…Just before the 2016 campaign, Trump appeared on David Letterman’s show and held up Scotland’s socialist system as the ideal.”
Then, in April 2017, a law professor argued in the New York Post that Trump should just go for it. Universal Healthcare would be great for the Republican Party, as it would challenge the Democrats’ claim that it is the compassionate party. Moreover, Trump’s supporters would actually like better, less costly healthcare.
“A friend of mine was in Scotland recently. He got very, very sick. They took him by ambulance and he was there for four days. He was really in trouble, and they released him and he said, ‘Where do I pay?’ And they said, ‘There’s no charge,’” Trump said. “Not only that, he said it was like great doctors, great care. I mean, we could have a great system in this country.”
Then, early in the 2016 campaign, he again praised the single-payer systems in Scotland and Canada — while also arguing that the United States needed to have a private system.
Asked on “Morning Joe” whether he supported single-payer, he said: “No, but it’s certainly something that in certain countries works. It actually works incredibly well in Scotland. Some people think it really works in Canada. But not here, I don’t think it would work as well here.”
He said two days later at a GOP debate: “As far as single-payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you’re talking about here.”
Later on, Trump would repeatedly push for universal health care without specifically subscribing to the words “single-payer.”
“Everybody’s got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say,” Trump said in a September 2015 “60 Minutes” interview. “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”
He added when asked who is going to pay for it: “The government’s gonna pay for it.”
[…]
Law professor F.H. Buckley argued in the New York Post last month that, in the face of defeat for the Republican health-care bill, Trump should just go for it. He argued that it would be a great thing for the Republican Party because it would eliminate Democrats’ claim to being the party of compassion and that Trump’s supporters would actually like it.
“Leave behind all the people who hated you, who curse when you succeed,” Buckley wrote. “Reach out to the people who voted for you. Challenge the Democrats by offering them what they’ve always said they wanted.”
Fast forward, and Buckley’s words are even more timely. In a few weeks, the Republicans have promised a vote on extending the Obamacare subsidies to 22 million Americans. The Grand Old Plutocrats are in a bind. If they reject these subsidies, they give the Democrats a huge and decisive winning campaign issue for the 2026 elections. If they accede and keep the prices from skyrocketing, they hand a victory to the Democrats in defiance of their past rejections of universal healthcare and look weak.
My sister Claire Nader suggests that this is a great opportunity for Trump’s sense of grandiosity. Knowing the Congressional Republicans’ bind and disarray, he can announce his single-payer universal health care – everybody in, nobody out – and cite how much more efficient such a system is in Scotland, Canada, Australia, and other countries.
Then Trump could tout the political advantages – sweeping aside all the media coverage coming about the loss of Medicaid coverage by tens of millions of Americans, including Trump voters. Gone would be the huge inflationary price increases, continued inscrutable bills, with their overcharges and fraud. Getting healthcare would be far less aggravating than today. Imagine no more giant health insurance companies with their denials of benefits, rip-offs, suffocating fine print, and prior authorization requirements that enrage physicians. All people would need to show is their Medicare card.
Trump could pluck H.R. 676 out of its obscurity (about 140 House Democrats signed on in 2019). He would get support for this bill from all the Democrats plus a hefty slice of GOP lawmakers, especially those running for re-election in 2026.
Trump is running out of distractions, and running out of the gas that kept his opponents in shock and awe. His polls are dropping. A recession is on the horizon. Inflation is here. His campaign promises are paper-mache. Government health insurance for all, with private (and some public, as with the VA) delivery of health care, comes close to the Canadian healthcare system that has worked for some 50 years, with better health outcomes.
As Claire wryly reminded me, Trump could become the Tommy Douglas of the U.S. Douglas started Canadian Medicare in Saskatchewan in 1962 and is a hero in Canada.
Any Democrats holding back support for “Medicare for All” for fear of making Trump look good should think of the tens of millions of Americans who would feel good in so many ways, shorn of the anxiety, dread, and fear produced by our current broken, gouging healthcare system.
Trump’s past, present, and future will still give the Dems plenty of fodder for their loathing of the president’s policies and actions.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
I live in a well-ordered Red City without rampant crime and with a mayor and police chief who care about the residents here and don't want them tortured by murderous gangs and thugs or their neighborhoods burned to the ground! BTW I live in the Free State of Florida. Need I say more?
LEAD STORIES, THURSDAY'S NYT
2 National Guard Members Are in Critical Condition After D.C. Shooting
Suspect Came to U.S. in 2021 Under Refugee Program, Homeland Security Chief Says
Trump Vows Crackdown on Immigration and Orders More Troops to D.C.
Death Toll From Hong Kong Apartment Fire Rises to 55
‘No Alarm Went Off’: Survivor Recounts Harrowing Escape
Police Arrest 3 With Ties to Construction Company, Citing ‘Gross Negligence’
U.S. to Press Europe and Other Allies on ‘Mass Migration,’ Document Says
“I'M NOT INTERESTED in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment? Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.”
― Norman Mailer, On God: An Uncommon Conversation
TUESDAY’S DC SHOOTER
The man who shot and seriously wounded two West Virginia National Guard members near the White House on Wednesday afternoon has been identified as Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, according to the FBI.
Lakanwal emigrated to the United States during President Joe Biden's chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, the New York Post reported.
He arrived through a program called Operation Allies Welcome, per The New York Times. The Biden-era initiative provided safe haven to Afghans looking to flee Taliban rule in their country.
Lakanwal, 29, was taken into custody after allegedly launching the assault at around 2:10pm at Farragut West metro station, which is in the center of Washington, DC.
The attack, which is now being investigated as an act of terrorism, quickly turned into a shootout after the suspect reportedly got three shots off before officials returned fire.
The perpetrator came around a corner, raised his gun and fired at the guard members, according to Jeffery Carroll, the Executive Assistant Chief of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department.
Carroll added that the suspect was subdued by other guardsmen after 'some back and forth'. When he was taken into custody, he did not have an ID on him and was reportedly not cooperating with investigators.
Both National Guard members were shot in the head, and CNN obtained a cell phone video showing authorities performing CPR on one of the guardsmen.
Both guard members are in critical condition and Lakanwal, who was also shot, has non-life-threatening injuries, according to federal law enforcement officials.
(AP)
THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE UKRAINE-RUSSIA WAR
by Niall Ferguson
Trump’s latest peacemaking initiative has a better chance of success than the skeptics realize. Both Ukraine and Russia now need a respite from war.
And so the familiar rituals of peacemaking resume. The president of the United States seeks to broker a ceasefire between two warring countries. A document, intended to be used as a starting point, is partially leaked by one side, then wholly leaked by the other side. There is controversy in the press about its provenance and significance.
The negotiators gather in a neutral location. Although there are only two combatant countries, there turn out to be many others with skin in the game. While the diplomacy continues, so does the war, each side seeking to gain leverage from military pressure.
And on it goes. And on. President Donald Trump originally set a Thanksgiving deadline (tomorrow) for Ukraine to accept a new 28-point plan for peace with Russia. A high-level U.S. delegation met with Ukrainian representatives in Geneva over the weekend to delete some of the 28 points and revise some of the others, before meeting with Russian spokesmen early this week in Abu Dhabi. However, as Trump admitted last week, the Thanksgiving deadline was never a hard one: “I’ve had a lot of deadlines, but if things are working well, you tend to extend the deadlines.” You also tend to extend them when things are not working well.
(TheFreePress.com)
TOSSING A BIRD THAT DOES NOT FLY OUT OF A PLANE
A Thanksgiving story about the limits of human empathy
by Annie Lowrey
YELLVILLE, Ark. — It is October in the Ozarks. The grass has dried out and the trees have bronzed and browned. Deer lie glaze-eyed in the back of camouflaged pickup trucks. High-school football helmets crack every Friday night. And seven days a week, workers in processing plants are helping to kill, gut, pluck, and truss turkeys for Thanksgiving tables around the country.
Here in Yellville this cold and rainy weekend, there are turkeys everywhere—turkey shirts and turkey costumes and turkey paraphernalia. There is a raffle giving away birds for Thanksgiving dinner. There’s a brisk trade in turkey legs, too, pulled out of a barrel smoker. At the bandstand, a judge announces the winner of the “Miss Drumsticks” contest, who gleams and sparkles in her pageant finery. “It’s Miss Drumsticks because they’re judging who has the best thighs,” an older woman explained to me, matter-of-fact.
But—and this is unusual, and much to the dismay and consternation of many locals—there are no live turkeys. None in a cage towed behind a pickup. None thrown from the courthouse roof. None pitched off the bandstand and picked up by screaming teenagers. And none dropped out of an airplane. That is what the Yellville Turkey Trot festival is famous and infamous for, you see: living, breathing, squawking birds getting lobbed out of a low-flying aircraft.
Turkeys, it seems worth mentioning, do not fly. Although the wild, dark-feathered ones you see in flocks on exurban roads are capable of fluttering up into and in between trees, the factory-farm-bred, white-feathered ones you eat on Thanksgiving are closer to the penguin side of the avian flying-ability spectrum. The birds can slow their descent by flapping wildly and catch the wind and glide, should they find themselves free-falling from 500 feet. But some die on impact, fleshy anvils with useless wings.
Once a year for the past seven decades, with just a few breaks, Yellville has had a dozen or so fowl demonstrate this gravitational reality. The Turkey Trot is a much-anticipated event for people with a lot of Ozark pride but without a lot of money, organizers and attendees explained—a transgressive event that locals love to love, love to hate, love to go to, and really love to talk about. “There’s a festival that goes on in Fayetteville that’s huge. They have booths there where you walk up and you just stop in your tracks and go, ‘Holy cow, that’s neat!’” Bob King, the owner of a local retreat property, told me. “We’re a small-town festival. It is important to people.”
Yet the tradition might be as dead as the turkeys whose legs were getting smoked and sold in the street. Years of negative and mocking media attention, criticism from animal-welfare groups and their supporters, and the involvement of a variety of regulatory and legal authorities have led to the live-turkey part of the weekend getting shut down, perhaps for good.
As the lip-synch contest echoed and the quilting guild showed off its wares, some worried that the everything-else portion of the weekend would wither away, too. Local-business owners fretted that a vital source of income was gone—with some hoping that a plane foisting the birds would show up, cops and politicians and op-ed writers and vegan busybodies be damned. “We will have to see how the numbers end up,” said Keith Edmonds of the chamber of commerce, a note of resignation in his voice. Every time an aircraft passed overhead, little kids checked to see if a bird would come out.
Was it worth it, ending a town’s beloved annual event to save a few birds from a few moments of confused terror? Was it meaningful, given how many billions of birds raised for meat face a far more gruesome life and death? Would it stick, given the steeliness of the residents of this corner of the Ozarks and the devotion of Americans to their meat-eating and cold-weather traditions?
I was not sure before going to the festival, and I was even less sure after it. But I knew this: This was not a Thanksgiving story about throwing a bird that does not fly out of an airplane. This was a Thanksgiving story about the human will to throw a bird that does not fly out of an airplane.…
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/yellville-turkey-trot/576184
“The six o’clock news is all about space, all about emptiness: some bald men plays with little toys to show the docking and undocking maneuvers, and then a panel talks about the significance of this for the next five hundred years. They keep mentioning Columbus but as far as Rabbit can see it’s the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly where they’re aiming and it’s a big round nothing.”
― John Updike, ‘Rabbit Redux’
PEOPLE GETTING DIVORCED
People getting divorced
riding around with their clothes in the car
and wondering what happened
to everyone and everything
including their other
pair of shoes
And if you spy one
then who knows what happened
to the other
with tongue alack
and years later not even knowing
if the other ever
found a mate
without splitting the seams
or remained intact
unlaced
and the sole
ah the soul
a curious conception
hanging on somehow
to walk again
in the free air
once the heel
has been replaced
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti
IT WAS GOOD TO BE OLD, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity. The more rivers you crossed, the more you knew about rivers—that is, if you survived the white water and the hidden rocks.
~ Charles Bukowski, ‘Women’
TIME TO LET MY BROTHER KEVIN DO THE CARVING
by Maureen Dowd
My researcher, Andrew Trunsky, suggested gummies as a Thanksgiving side dish. He knows the annual toast to President Trump at my family’s Thanksgiving dinner sets my teeth on edge. Maybe edibles would lead to a lighter vibe. But I’m still recovering from my wild ride 11 years ago when pot was legalized in Denver and I flew out to write a column and had a night of extreme paranoia after nibbling off the end of a THC-infused candy bar. So this year, I’m swallowing the toast as I usually do, with a gulp of the Trump champagne my brother serves.
Speaking of Kevin, here is his annual letter from the right — but not always correct — side:
Red lights are blinking for both parties.
New York voters chose Zohran Mamdani, a socialist Elmer Gantry with little experience, to be mayor of the world’s most important city. President Trump held a chummy Oval Office meeting with him that made it look as if the president was ready to trade jobs.
Mamdani’s election was propelled by younger voters enthralled by his promises of free things. From a rent freeze to free buses to government-run grocery stores to a $30-an-hour minimum wage, he made the case for a socialist society.
On Friday, a resolution was brought to the House floor condemning socialism. Ninety-eight Democrats voted against it.
Cracks are showing in the president’s ironclad hold on the Republican Party. Congress all but forced him to agree to release the Epstein files. But after he castigated his most slavish supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, as a “traitor” for pushing the release, Greene announced she would resign her U.S. House seat, later denouncing “the wicked snow globe of Washington DC.”
This is a loss. Greene was a loyalist. She gazed at Trump with a Nancy Reagan level of adoration. Trump is transactional, and he’s always open to bringing you back for another deal. But he is oblivious to the fact that when you threaten someone to the point that she considers herself a “battered wife,” sometimes it can’t be fixed.
Trump’s telling a Bloomberg News reporter “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy,” and calling a Times reporter “ugly inside and out,” was beneath contempt. Our mother always told us, “There is never an excuse for bad manners.”
Six congressional Democrats released a shameful video without giving any context encouraging service members to disobey illegal orders, thereby threatening the foundation of our military: the chain of command. But instead of shaming them, Trump posted on Truth Social that it was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” causing the oily Senator Chris Murphy to warn that the life of every Democratic congressperson was in jeopardy.
Democrats won governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia, but the Virginia race was muddied by unearthed 2022 texts sent by their candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, musing about killing the then-speaker of the Virginia House and watching the man’s two young children die in their mother’s arms. Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat who was elected governor, refused to ask Jones to drop out of the race. Jones was elected anyway, showing how Virginia feels about decency.
It had been a bad year for Democrats. After regaining office, Trump proceeded at breakneck speed to undo much of the damage the Biden administration had wrought, immediately closing the border and deporting criminals. The Democrats resisted, but their leaders kept getting trapped on the wrong side of the argument. Boys in girls’ sports (and locker rooms), L.G.B.T.Q. teaching in lower grades with no opt-out, and no parental input on gender identification.
Chuck Schumer, one of the least popular Democrats, especially with progressives, shut down the government to mollify his party. In exchange, he got nothing. Nancy Pelosi announced her retirement (perhaps to day trade).
One of the most disgusting spectacles playing out right now is the resistance to and demonization of ICE agents by elected officials in major cities. They have put law enforcement officers in harm’s way. As the son of a police officer, I am repulsed to hear political lightweights like Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California paint ICE agents as, in Pritzker’s words, “jackbooted thugs” and encourage interference with officers.
If Trump gets overconfident in the face of such idiocy, here’s some advice: Remind ICE that we are trying to deport criminals with violent police records, not landscapers. Do not let Stephen Miller convince you that the deportations must rise, and do a better job of communicating what you are doing.
And do not underestimate the power of grocery receipts. Voters see them three times a week. Trump looks out of touch when he tells voters their 401(k)s will show how great the economy is: Many don’t have a 401(k). Lower tariffs on food items. Do not lose voters over a bag of potato chips.
Surveys have shown the country might like a third political party. It could be the democratic socialists, a slow-growing cancer for Democrats. (If Republicans can’t address affordability better, democratic socialists will poach Republican voters, too.)
Socialism has never worked anywhere in the world. Our country is built on capitalism, and that has served us well for almost 250 years. Democrats can only hope that Zohran Mamdani is a huge flop on Broadway.
Happy Thanksgiving!
(nytimes.com)
LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO FIGHT WITH YOUR FAMILY
by Karl Pillemer & Mel Robbins
We’re in the middle of a family relationship crisis. At least one in four American adults is estranged from a close relative. Two-thirds of Americans say families aren’t spending enough time together. And these rifts occur equally across all age groups, education levels, races and religions, according to the largest ever study of family estrangement, which one of us, Dr. Pillemer, conducted a few years ago.
Yes, there are important reasons to cut ties with certain people intentionally. But we’re not just cutting people off — we’re letting our closest relationships disintegrate through neglect, busyness and an unwillingness to move past the things that bother us.
You may think it’s better for your mental health to slowly distance yourself from someone you have difficulties with, but, in the long run, it will likely have a devastating impact on your happiness and well-being. As a professor studying family estrangement and an author and podcast host, we’ve learned from very different vantage points that most of us wait excruciatingly long to absorb this message.
Research on end-of-life regrets reveals a consistent pattern. People don’t regret missing out on a promotion or failing to buy a bigger house. They regret not asking for forgiveness. They regret not expressing their love more often. They regret holding a grudge. And they regret letting relationships with their families and friends fall apart.
Fortunately, the same research that highlights these life regrets also points toward solutions. Despite an increased burden of disease, and the toll taken by the death of loved ones, research has shown that people over the age of 65 report, on average, being happier than younger adults. They report more satisfaction with their social networks and higher levels of positive emotions.
They do so not because circumstances align perfectly, but because they look for what’s working in life rather than what’s not.
This shift is natural. Older people, our research suggests, understand the importance of distinguishing between what they can control and what they can’t — and ruthlessly focusing their energy on the former. Your husband’s side of the family has politics that bother you? Or your college-age kids don’t call as much as you’d like? Accept it and move on. You can’t control their behavior, but you can choose how much to dwell on it or whether to hold it over their head.
Much of the research coming out of the Cornell Legacy Project, which has collected the life wisdom of over 1,500 older Americans, reflects these lessons in participants’ own words. One woman, who couldn’t leave her bed and had just a few months to live, expressed remarkable optimism in an interview for the Legacy Project: “I’ve had my bath, lunch was good, and I’m getting ready to watch my programs.” She’d grown up in terrible poverty and was thankful that she had three meals a day, a place to live and people to take care of her. “You will learn, I hope, that happiness is what you make it, where you are. Why in the world would I be unhappy?” she said. “It’s my responsibility to be as happy as I can, right here, today.”
And therein lies the secret: learning how to accept people as they are, sometimes in spite of who they are.
Thanksgiving can create the perfect opportunity to exert control in exactly the wrong ways. As family members come together, it can be difficult not to bring up your well-thought-out advice that you’re convinced will change their lives for the better. But decades of research shows that receiving unsolicited advice for a problem you’re having is stressful, especially when if comes from those who haven’t dealt with the same issue.
However well intentioned you are, you shouldn’t spend Thanksgiving trying to convince your parents that it’s time for them to sell the house and move into assisted living. Let them make their own mistakes, even if you might have to deal with the consequences. Your parents are adults. Give them the dignity of their own experience.
The same approach holds for children. You may have lots of great ideas about what your kids should do, but unless someone is in danger, it’s usually counterproductive to intervene. If your son seems to be wasting his life in a dead-end job instead of going to graduate school, that’s not your battle to fight. In fact, the less judged he feels, the more likely he will be to come to you for advice when he’s ready.
A key to making intergenerational relationships work is not harping on differences in values and life experiences. The best family relationships often operate more like friendships. Many people who’ve overcame estrangements didn’t do it by having huge, emotional conversations about the past. They started with an outing to a bingo parlor or a weaving workshop together.
One piece of advice older people share over and over again in interviews is simply to lighten up. Everything doesn’t have to be so darkly serious — and relationships don’t have to be a battle of wills. It’s almost impossible to convince someone to adopt your perspective. It’s easier to get them to sit on the couch with you, watching “Jeopardy.”
Or try this thought experiment: Imagine if you had a year left to live. Would you want to spend your last Thanksgiving resenting your father’s politics? Or avoiding your sister for something she said last Christmas? Or would you rather find the grace to focus on the positives? Perhaps your father, for all his social-media-fueled hot takes, has mastered the art of carving a turkey. Your sister might be judgmental but you love her holiday-themed nails. Accepting what you can’t change doesn’t mean you’re endorsing their beliefs — it simply means doing everything you can, right now, to embrace the positives and look past the negatives.
We’re fortunate that some of the biggest regrets of older people — not expressing love, not seeking forgiveness, not telling those who matter how they feel — are regrets that we can avoid. Giving unsolicited advice might be your way of saying, “I love you,” but it’s better to just say it in a straightforward way. You can’t assume people already understand how much you love them, how much you care about them, how proud you are of them. The only time it’s too late to apologize or ask for forgiveness is when somebody is no longer here.
This Thanksgiving, let your family members live how they’d like to live. They’ll be grateful for it — and, years from now, you may be too.
(Karl Pillemer is a professor of human development at Cornell and the director of the Cornell Legacy Project. Mel Robbins is the author of “The Let Them Theory” and host of “The Mel Robbins Podcast.”)
COOKING UP SOMETHING GOOD
Mommy′s in the kitchen
Cooking up something good
And daddy's on the sofa
Pride of the neighborhood
My brother′s in the ballet
It seems he's got it set
And I'll be up at midnight
With my cigarette
Oh, when life moves this slowly
Oh, just try and let it go
Oh, when life moves this slowly
Oh, just try and let it go
Daddy′s in the basement
Cooking up something fine
While Rick′s out on the pavement
Flipping it for dimes
If there's anything redeeming
I haven′t seen it yet
And I'm still up at midnight
Chewing Nicorette
Oh, when life moves this slowly
Oh, just try and let it go
Oh, when life moves this slowly
Oh, just try and let it go
— Samuel Macbriare Demarco (2013)
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