ERIC HART, Willits, has announced he will run for the Mendocino County District 3 supervisor seat.
ARTHUR JUHL (Gualala):
I ran for Supervisor but I was not a Democrat. If you are you have a chance. The problem is that no one understands the budget. I memorized it but could not discuss it as no one knew what I was talking about. The CEO at the time prepared everything for the Board rather than the Board told the CEO what to do. I don’t know what is happening now but it looks like the same!
So good luck!
LEW CHICHESTER (Covelo):
A perspective from one who has lived out in the remote areas of what is the Mendocino County Third District: we occasionally get a supervisor who pays attention to what goes on in Legget, Laytonville and Covelo, but just as often get a representative of this district from Willits who doesn’t have a clue and seems to not even be interested in us out here.
John Haschak is a outlier in that analysis, has genuinely adopted the concerns of Round Valley/Covelo as his own and gets out here a lot, really a lot. John Pinches was fabulous, a really smart person with a ranching background who knew that the budget, where the money comes from and where it goes, is job #1 for the county supervisors. Most of the other supervisors supposedly representing us over the previous decades were worthless. Never seemed to have a clue, hardly ever got out here, didn’t know any of us.
Years ago it was Barney ‘B.J.’ Rowland, from Dos Rios, who penned a regular column with the sign off “pay attention.” Whomever wants the Third District Supervisor endorsement better do the same.
ED NOTES
THE FOLLOWING BIT of crucial information originated with Bob ‘Oyster Bob’ Sites, a Yorkville man who keeps us abreast of the latest in food and drink. This info, of course, may not be news to most of you, but it surprised us. Ready? Pabst Blue Ribbon beer has never advertised and it's produced by union labor. And we're drinking it, exclusively, from now on. PBR was also family-owned for many years until, probably, the heirs sold out to the big boys and took off for Monaco. But still, no advertising and union-brewed? Name another beer with those bona fides.
MICHAEL SLAUGHTER POUNCED: “PBR not advertised? Nonsense! Recall the jingle (with two chords, a I and a V)… What’ll you have? PBR. What’ll you have? PBR. What’ll you have? Pabst Blue Ribbon, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer.”
AND, SLAUGHTER ADDS, “There was Fehr's. It’s always Fehr weather when good fellows get together. And Champagne Velvet on early TV: … Champagne Velvet, the champagne of bottled beer. But, you know, I never heard of Griesedieck making a commercial…” And, “Land of Sky Blue Waters beer–that was Hamm’s. The summer of 1961 I spent as a camp counselor at a boys’ camp outside Ely, Minn. Another counselor and I would buy Hamm’s in town and, back at camp, stash the beer in the lake. Then as the sun got low in the sky and the Purkinje Effect would start to take hold, we would paddle a canoe to our now-chilled stash and enjoy the sunset, hove to in the Boundary Waters.”
ON THE SUBJECT of food and drink, one morning I was at the Whole Foods market at Haight and Stanyan in San Francisco where I helped restrain a street guy who went off on a clerk at the checkout stand. I should probably explain my presence: Whole Foods was not too far from my wholly subsidized Frisco apartment at the time, and it was the only nearby source of bulk granola and unradiated almonds.
NOT TO SOUND too much like a food crank, but a nun who sold organic foods, including almonds, at the Alemaney Farmer's Market, informed me that the bulk almonds you get at places like Costco are nuked before they're packaged. Hers weren't, and I loaded up on them whenever I got out to Alemany. (As a free association aside here, it always annoys me to see adult males dressed as nuns during The City's frantic dress-up days like Halloween and the annual Gay Parade. Nuns do huge good in the world, and always have, as do many other religiously affiliated people. I've never seen the joke in making fun of nuns, and I doubt we'll see gay guys bouncing around as gay priests any time soon.)
SO, IT'S ONLY 9AM and I'm one cashier over from the tall, elegantly clad young black woman who's the next door clerk. Whole Foods, to promote it's trendo-groove-o image, and Frisco being the very cynosure of trendo-groove-o, permits its workers to wear their own clothes, their civvies. No smocks for Whole Foods! Anyway, a scruffy little guy strides up to the elegantly clad clerk's register and plunks down, with an authoritative plunk, his two purchases — a carton of deli food and a fancy bottle of water.
THE YOUNG WOMAN rings him up, he grabs his stuff and takes a couple of steps towards the door. “You've got to pay,” the young woman says. “No, I don't,” Little Scruff says, adding a martyred, “Why are you doing this to me, bitch?” At which I joined a chorus of, “Whoa! Over the line, dude!” By which time the elegant clerk was barraging Little Scruff with her own indignant counter-insults. A little guy in a security cop uniform comes hustling over and takes Scruff by the elbow. Security Man is even smaller than Scruff and Scruff shakes him off and takes another step towards freedom and instantly Little Scruff and Littler Security Guy are in a floor-grapple.
A POSSE of clerks, one of them a hefty woman who gives Scruff a nice chop to the gut, helps Security Guy subdue Little Scruff, who has gone silent except for a final insult aimed at me, Mr. Civic Involvement. I'd joined the scrum by holding one of Scruff's feet. “You think this is funny, Gramps?” Well, it has some of the key elements…. Scruff was group-walked out the door, and I paid for my granola and nuke-free almonds and biked it righteously outtathere.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK from Sunday's Chron: “Donations might have swayed votes in Legislature.”
MIKE GENIELLA'S NEW SUBSTACK
Mike Geniella, the reporter who's been doing an AMAZING job of reporting on this whole incredibly complex Eyster/Cubbison/Antle disaster, has started a Substack. You can subscribe at mikegeniella.substack.com.
One of my very early jobs was making journalism contest entries for the SF Chronicle, and I have to say that his coverage bests anything that passed across my desk. It's been amazing to get his takes, and without his hard work, who knows whether we ever would have known about this mess. We're incredibly fortunate to have someone of his caliber writing about local issues.
I don't know him, but if you value his contribution to our local free press, I encourage you to support him.
Biggest fan, Mike!
Jean Arnold
Fort Bragg
Rixanne Wehren:
I second that. So glad that Mike Geniella took on reporting on Mendo County government even when his work was unfunded. A true journalist and committed commentator.
’25 THINGS
by Fred Gardner
The frightened eyes of Kash Patel
Elon Musk's chainsaw
The Rubble in Gaza
The Gulf of America
The masked ICE agents
The fires in Los Angeles
The prison in the Everglades
The red MAGA cap
Tyler Robinson's rifle
Jeffrey Epstein’s client list
Lady Ghislaine's transfer
Mark Zuckerberg's bunker
The No Kings marches
]immy Carter's coffin
The tariffs on
The New York City mayor
The Potomac mid-air crash
Venezuelan petroleum
Iranian plutonium
Ukranian rare earth
The Russian draftees
Vanishing newspapers
The National Guard deployment
The Big Beautiful Bill
The greatness of Ohtani
The first American pope
For-profit medicine
Señora Machado'a Nobel peace prize!
The deported immigrants
The gilded Oval Office
The laid-off workers
The OKC Thunder
"Diddy" Combs's sentence
Cannabis rescheduling
The impact of fentanyl
The trial of Mangione
GLP-1 diet drugs
The WNBA
The Department of War
The East Wing demolition
The net worth of Melania
The government shutdown
The death of Rob Reiner
The crypto currencies
The melting glaciers
Starvation in Somalia
The Emirates Cup
Marjorie Taylor Green
The ominous armada
The latest mass shooting
The Christmas Season
MENDO JURY SELECTION:
Saffron Fraser (Philo): Whew. I think our jury selection process could be due for an overhaul.
Yoli Rose: It was very slow, time consuming, and crowded. I was willing to do my civic duty, but was delighted to be rejected. Good to see you there. … it was actually pretty awful. People sitting for hours on the floor. Yuck. I'm glad, too, that they sent me home "early.".I was clearly not a good unbiased juror.
EVA CRYSANTHE:
On Christmas Eve day, one of my heroes, Fred Gardner, unceremoniously emailed what seems to me a treasure trove of notes and memories (even a song he recently recorded, which is excellent.)
Of the total package he sent, I think I can share this piece, since it is public information. I received it just as I was picking up my mail to find a card from Dr. Howard Levy, another great antiwar hero of mine.
Check out who took this photograph. The legendary photographer Jeff Blankfort, that's who!
So I got three unforgettable Christmas gifts, and they're all from Jewish men. I couldn't be happier or more grateful (unless I won the lottery.)
Please never be afraid to reach out and try to contact people you admire. These three men are such an important part of American history, and people need to know more of their stories in 2026.
MENDOCINO VOICE:
The Ukiah Valley Water Authority is proposing water rate increases for multiple districts in the region, with hikes ranging from 6% to 30% starting in 2026. A public hearing on the proposals will be held Feb. 9 at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center. Residents may submit written protests under Proposition 218 before rates are approved.
JON KENNEDY (Potter Valley):
The sudden Trump/USDA interest in Potter Valley feels less about dams and more about Congressman Doug LaMalfa’s newly reshaped district. It’s a hot local issue, he’s likely vulnerable, and this is an easy way to look like he’s “fighting for the people.” That said, members of Congress weigh in on national and neighboring issues all the time, so it’s fair to ask why this only became urgent after lines were redrawn.
If FERC denies PG&E’s surrender, the costs don’t vanish, they land on a relatively small group of California ratepayers. So I agree with the recemt Press Democrat editorial: if the feds want to override a locally negotiated deal for political reasons, they should fund it and own the liability.
Also worth noting: funding these dams forever still doesn’t solve the fish habitat issue. It just freezes the conflict.
And let’s be honest, MAGA isn’t winning California. Even they’ll do the math and move on once the political return dries up.
HOW DO PEOPLE COPE with idleness, boredom, pointlessness? What happens when they do not have to work and plot their lives around this activity? Freedom, time, utility, chance — such concepts coagulate around the game player. Why do some players become addicted to the game of their inclination? Why does the long-distance runner torment himself with endless miles consumed each day; the race-car driver confront death on such unfavorable odds; the gambler return to lose more; the chess player exhaust so many hours at his game?
There is a remarkable amount of resistance to the analysis of motives and compulsions operating on sportsmen and game players, in so far as examination of their unconscious motives might be involved. Yet with ardent sportsmen we are dealing with addiction, and we should be inspecting its cause.
Humanism has watered the pastures of leisure and of games with much uplifting speculation. But in the world of games lie areas of darkness, of taboos, of cruel instincts and vile desires. For starters, let us narrow the focus to the chess player face to face, as in so many medieval woodcuts, with Death.
— Alexander Cockburn, ‘Idle Passion’ (1978)
SOME TIME BEFORE he became involved in the Dreyfus Affair, Emile Zola wrote an article called ‘The Toad.” It purported to be his advice to a young writer who could not stomach the aggressive mendacity of a press which in 1890 was determined to plunge the citizens of the French Republic into disaster.
Zola explained to the young man his own method of inuring himself against newspaper columns. Each morning, over a period of time, he bought a toad in the market place, and devoured it alive and whole. The toads cost only three sous each, and after such a steady matutinal diet one could face almost any newspaper with a tranquil stomach, recognize and swallow the toad contained therein, and actually relish that which to healthy men not similarly immunized would be a lethal poison.
All nations in the course of their histories have passed through periods which, to extend Zola’s figure of speech, might be called the Time of the Toad: an epoch long or short as the temper of the people may permit, fatal or merely debilitating as the vitality of the people may determine, in which the nation turns upon itself in a kind of compulsive madness to deny all in its tradition that is clean, to exalt all that is vile, and to destroy any heretical minority which asserts toad-meat not to be the delicacy which governmental edict declares it to be. Triple heralds of the Time of the Toad are the loyalty oath, the compulsory revelation of faith, and the secret police.
The most striking example in recent history of a nation passing through the Time is offered by Germany. In its beginnings in that unfortunate country the Toad was announced by the shrill voice of a mediocre man ranting against Communists and Jews, just as we in America have heard the voice of such a one as Representative John E. Rankin of Mississippi.
By the spring of 1933, the man Hitler having been in power for two months, substance was given his words by a decree calling for the discharge from civil service of all “who because of their previous political activity do not offer security that they will exert themselves for the national state without reservation,” as well as those “who have participated in communist activities, even if they no longer belong to the Communist Party or its auxiliary or collateral organizations,” and those who have ‘opposed the national movement by speech, writing or any other hateful conduct” or have “insulted its leaders.”
Thereafter, in a welter of oaths, tests, inquisitions and inquests, the German nation surrendered its mind. Those were the days in Germany when respectable citizens did not count it a disgrace to rush like enraptured lemmings before the People's Courts and declare under oath that they were not Communists, they were not Jews, they were not trade unionists, they were not in any degree anything which the government disliked — perfectly aware that such acts of confession assisted the inquisitors in separating sheep from goats and rendered all who would not or could not pass the test liable to the blacklist, the political prison or the crematorium.
Volumes have since been written telling of the panicked stampede of German intellectuals for Nazi absolution: of doctors and scientists, philosophers and educators, musicians and writers, artists of the theater and cinema, who abased themselves in an orgy of confession, purged their organizations of all the proscribed, gradually accepted the mythos of the dominant minority, and thereafter clung without shame to positions without dignity. Of such stamp are the creatures in all countries who attempt to survive the Time of the Toad rather than to fight it.
If the first street speeches of Adolf Hitler may be said to have become the Time in Germany, then June 7, 1938, signaled the approach of the Toad into American life, for on that day the House of Representatives, under a resolution offered by Mr. Martin Dies of Texas, established by a vote of 181 to 41 the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
— Dalton Trumbo, The Time of the Toad: A Study of Inquisition in America (1949)
THE SAN FRANCISCAN, I submit, is anything but a snob. He is clannish, yes, but only about his city — every facet of it that delights him. In the old days, he was equally at home in the free-lunch counters of Market St., in Eddie Graney's billiard palace, at the Old Poodle Dog, and in Mrs. Spreckels' big house. He knew Jim Corbett and John L. Sullivan and Oofty-Goofty and Will Tevis, and greeted them all as equals in the egalitarian city. In a later manifestation he could hang out at the Black Cat or Izzy's and feel at ease in Anita Zabala Howard's drawing room.
Today he wears a sweater to Enrico's, a proper suit and vest to the Palace's Happy Valley, black tie to the Museum and tails to the Opera —and knows the best place in Chinatown to get jook, too. He realizes San Francisco has grown larger and stranger and away from itself, dividing into groups that are afraid to stray into the city's unbeaten paths, and for them he can feel only sorrow.
They are missing the far ranging excitement of being a San Franciscan who'd rather look at the Ghirardelli tower than the Jack Tar.
The other midnight, in a Chinatown bar, I met a real San Franciscan. He was a middle-aged longshoreman from the Mission, and he wore a zipper jacket and open shirt. While he quietly sipped a Scotch, he talked of Harry Bridges, Bill Saroyan and Shanty Malone. He was curious about Leontyne Price and Herbert Gold. He wondered if the Duke of Bedford's paintings were any good, he missed Brubeck, and he discussed Willie Mays down to his last spike. He seemed to know everybody in town, by first names— and it was only after he'd left that we discovered he'd bought a round of drinks for the house. For want of a better phrase, he had that touch of class — the touch of a San Franciscan.
Herb Caen, March 12, 1961
COVER UP/THE SEYMOUR HERSH STORY
A movie that just came out on Netflix.
A must watch for those boomers who grew up during Vietnam and Watergate all the way thru Iraq.
Especially relevant today of course.
Heroes are often hidden.
— David Lipkind
ED NOTE: Excellent doc about a great journalist.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] The Israeli Defense Force does assassinations, murders children for sport, spies on America, tortures prisoners, bombs residential neighborhoods, schools, and hospitals, starves people to death, poisons water supplies, murders journalists, engages in terrorism. Like cell phones that blow up, etc etc. And then they dance and sing to celebrate their atrocities. While those with a conscience end up committing suicide. Rates are very high.
[2] One of the often overlooked attractions of anti-Semitism is the self-assured, self-righteous clarity it gives its most ardent adherents. I mean, if you lack the normal gag-reflex decent people feel about racist ideologies, anti-semitic ferver does provide morons a nice, clear, black-and-white view of the world to embrace. I’m sure that is refreshing for people with low-powered brains in a world where nuance and complexity require constant data processing, analysis and adjustments to one’s stances.
Every dilemma can be approached by the simple question, “Are there Jews involved?” If yes, then their side of the debate is “Evil” and the other side is “Good” and nothing else matters.
If you don’t actually care about being correct or joining one of the most loathsome groups in both modern and ancient human history: Jew haters and anti-semitics.
[3] I'm a cat man myself, but the thing that strikes me is the outright unfriendly vibe that they emanate. I sometimes feel sad for the pooch, most often beautiful purebred, who sits waiting in a tiny apartment all day, only to be grimly marched by mom, her nose in her device and roughly yanked to and fro to avoid contact with humans and other dogs.
[4] One reason I predicted Trump would win in 2016 was the comparative lack of Hillary signs around San Francisco. You were more likely to see old Obama bumper stickers. Not that the city didn’t vote for her, but the lack of enthusiasm was visible.
[5] I am not a Bible reader. I know a few quotes but, as my senior class in high school back in 1962 was asked the question "Is man inherently good or bad?" I was the only one to say inherently bad…my rationale was that we would not need rules if man were inherently good. I have an automatic negative reaction to people who presume that those who belong to an organized Christian religion are automatically good. I am suspect of anyone who quotes the Bible chapter and verse….paraphrase without the chapter and verse, no problem.
[6] Gerrymandering on its face seems undemocratic. Manipulating districts for the sole purpose of political gain doesn't fit easily into a democratic electoral process. Both parties are guilty. The fact that the Supreme Court court, other than prohibiting gerrymandering on racial lines, has never taken a principled stand on gerrymandering by either side, except to say its not judicially feasible to create a judicial standard which, IMO, is an abdication of its authority, not to mention spineless. It would seem that every election becomes more about winning and less about participating in a democratic process where citizens have the real freedom to choose.
[7] I’m in my 70s. After watching my parents both pass slowly, as well as one of my sisters, and the effect that had on the rest of the family, I am bound and determined to punch my own ticket when the time comes. I’d much rather be able to take a black capsule and pass quietly, but since our law makers have chosen to not make that an option, odds are good that when the time comes I’ll eat a bullet. All sane adults should have the option to terminate their lives once it is no longer worth living.
[8] Corruption in America permeates every nook and cranny of our society. From our charitable organizations to our churches, from our cities to our states, everything. It's all about money. Money, money, money. Insatiable greed. The unending desire to "get rich."
Money destroys everything and results in a ruined people, bent by greed and lust for stuff they do not need and can not possibly ever fully utilize. Greed is the greatest flaw of the human species. Until we find a way to overcome this, we as a species will never grow beyond the limits of MONEY.
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