Letters 1/5/2026

• Kamala As Metaphor
• Flying The Flag
• Close The Corporate Loophole In Prop 13
• Remembering Shared Humanity In Difficult Times
• Those Xmas Storms
• The Flood Of 2006
• Reason For Hope
• Medicare For All
• Lithium-Ion Batteries Need To Be Properly Recycled
• What Would Harry Do?
• Murder At Sea
• An Embarrassment To JFK

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KAMALA AS METAPHOR

To the Editor:

Kamala Harris may run again for President of the United States. Democratic party leadership has learned nothing from their last loss. Let’s review:

1. Party leadership supported a senile old man as their candidate far too long. The senility was obvious; the White House denials were spurious.
2. President Biden earned the nickname Genocide Joe because of his unwavering support of genocide in Palestine. Many Americans and most of the world did not approve of the genocide. Biden continued his support.
3. President Biden was a firm supporter of the slaughter of Ukrainians and Russians. Many Americans did not want involvement in yet another war – this one provoked by US regime change in Ukraine in 2014. President Biden was determined to fight to the last Ukrainian.
4. Ms. Harris was a poor candidate, unpopular with groups of voters because of her gender, race, failure to curtail illegal border immigration, and embrace of President Biden’s unconscionable killing.

The above aside, the Democrats and the Republicans are funded by the rich for the rich, who sponsor legislation that enables their further enrichment and the permanence of the two parties, not the welfare of the vast majority of Americans. Over the past decades, income inequality has risen steadily, as has the national debt, and the annual budget deficit. Presidential elections are expensive shows to distract us from the true villains, oligarchs and two party funded war machine. Rank and file Democrats have realized this and are leaving the party in sigmificant numbers.

Both parties ensure that no third party emerges. Democratic leaders sabotaged Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders’ run against Hillary Clinton and refused to endorse Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, whose platform was hardly radical. Some cities in the US have free busses, rent control, programs for affordable housing, coop grocery stores, and child friendly policies. Some states are even taxing the rich!!!

Demand a new system! Tax the rich! Stop supporting ongoing foreign slaughters! No new wars!

Joan Vivaldo

Novato

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FLYING THE FLAG

Editor:

A friend lamented that so many of his neighbors fly the American flag — to him, a sure symbol of fealty to Donald Trump. I disagreed. Hours earlier, coincidentally, I’d retired the flag on my house and raised a beauty of a new one.

My buddy acknowledged an exception proving a rule while making it clear that just now he’d no more display the Stars and Stripes than the Stars and Bars or the reich and national flag. My truth is, I fly the American flag not in favor of any president or party, but in tribute to an ideal: the great and fragile experiment that is democracy.

I’m mindful, too, that this flag has draped the caskets of so many who died in uniform as boys. This flag stirs legions who came here from places of great anguish and meager opportunity. I try to show respect for a flag I’ve seen whipped to tatters on MAGA-emblazoned pickups and tied to poles wielded as lances by hoodlums bent on overturning an election.

I’m unsure how to respond to those who wear and fly and shove the American flag in your face out of allegiance to a minister of malevolence and his glass-eyed sycophants. But I know this: I will not cede it to them.

Chris Smith

Santa Rosa

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CLOSE THE CORPORATE LOOPHOLE IN PROP 13

Editor,

It’s fantastic that we’re finally having a conversation surrounding reforming Proposition 13, but focusing on reforming the homeowner side misses the forest for the trees.

It is much more important to reform the commercial side of Prop 13. Big corporations like Disney and Chevron are still paying property tax levels based on what their hugely profitable properties were worth 50 years ago.

We could restore $17 billion every year to California’s local governments by making commercial entities pay market-rate property taxes, all without harming elderly homeowners or small businesses.

agree that Prop. 13 needs to be reformed, but focusing only on homeowners will not restore nearly enough revenue to our schools and public services. In fact, commercial property does not change hands nearly as frequently as residential, if at all, which means that homeowners shoulder too large a portion of California’s tax burden.

Let’s put California on par with other states that tax commercial property by closing the corporate loophole in Prop 13.

Rhys Hedges

San Francisco

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REMEMBERING SHARED HUMANITY IN DIFFICULT TIMES

Editor:

I recently attended the wonderful production of “All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914” at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park. Through songs and spoken words the stage production brought to life the accounts of British, French and German soldiers along the Western Front during World War I. Enemy soldiers put down their guns, climbed out of their trenches and gathered in No Man’s Land during an unofficial truce to celebrate Christmas 1914. Food and drinks were shared, gifts exchanged and songs sung. Christmas services were jointly celebrated, and the fallen were removed from the battlefield.

Even during the horrors of trench warfare, the soldiers who participated in the Christmas Truce of 1914 never lost their humanity or their empathy for those they opposed. It demonstrates that even during the darkest of times people are capable of finding an inner light that rekindles their humanity. Thankfully we are not experiencing the horrors of war, but for some people these are dark and uncertain times. At such times it will be our shared humanity and compassion for others that will see us through.

Kurt Dunphy

Santa Rosa

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THOSE XMAS STORMS

Editor,

Over the holidays Mendocino County Office of Emergency Services (OES) was monitoring this weather and impacts to our communities. The storms are now slowing down. All in all Mendocino County isn’t much worse for wear and we fared much better than counties to our north and our south. We continue to have power outages along the coast which utility crews are continuing to work on.

Big thank you to Mendocino County Department of Transportation who have had crews out keeping the roads open since this storm began.

Mendocino DOT, Cal-Trans and utility companies will continue to have equipment and personnel out until we get all of the damage sorted out, so please drive carefully especially while these folks are on the road surface.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. Let’s keep the communities who are suffering from these storm impacts in our thoughts and prayers.

Thank you

Sheriff Matt Kendall.

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THE FLOOD OF 2006

Editor,

A major rainstorm caused widespread, severe flooding and mudslides across Northern California on December 31, 2005, and into early January 2006. The Russian River crested about 10 feet above flood stage in Guerneville, while the Napa River reached record levels in St. Helena.

In Upper Lake, flood levels rose in town, on Mendenhall Avenue, Main Street, and Washington Street, and quickly overflowed onto Highway 20. By 3:30 in the morning, the last delivery to downtown newsstands was dropped off by a delivery driver who said she feared for her life, trying to pull into the road — getting away breathlessly with zero control of the vehicle’s braking system and steered by the onrush of rising water, in the opposite direction of the route which ended, normally, in Upper Lake.

An hour later, the owner of the Upper Lake Grocery had no trouble plowing through onrushing floodwaters in his jeep, and the first thing he started working on was removal of woody debris from the storm drain outlets on Main Street, which allowed more runoff to bypass the street, but by that time the worst of the deluge was past and the rain had subsided to a mere pelting drench.

Over on Mendenhall, which filled up first from the agricultural ditch on the north side with over-gorged floodplains and the onslaught of Elk Mountain runoff that Middle Creek was quickly overwhelmed by. Eighteen inches pummeled Soda Creek in a matter of hours, and the orgiastic release had nowhere to go but down and out and over the agricultural levees and diversion channels and overgrown amphibious vegetation to the dainty drainage ditch that ends at the Treasure Cove (pizza, for those who do not know, best in the county by some accounts) and pushes under Highway through a 48-inch culvert pipe that just happened, that night, to be blocked partially by some bags of dry cement, the gift of some obnoxious asshole who was never known to be caught.

The cement and overgrown vegetation, obviously demonstrating lack of maintenance, at least, prevented further progress toward the convergence of Middle and Scotts Creek, back behind the contractor’s rock yard and off to the side of another agricultural levee that helped, back in the day, to “reclaim” the floodplain that once was the home to the Blue Lake Green Been, at the old canning factory near the highway intersection with 29. The impediment lasted just long enough to waken the residents on Mendenhall, who mostly hopped in their trucks and boogied elsewhere, but the Forest Service called the District Supervisor, who found the Public Works road crew already clearing downed trees and floating yard art in the muddy water standing 6 inches above the floors in Main Street stores and the Odd Fellows Hall.

Thinking of the evacuees, whose number were yet unknown, and the need for community assistance, the Supervisor called the Odd Fellows Hall to ask if it could be used to provide hot coffee and warm blankets to townfolk dislocated by the muck, but the hall itself was uninhabitable. The Upper Lake High School, it turned out, was the OES-designated “mass care and shelter facility,” but nobody showed up needing overnight accommodation, so the school was undisturbed.

The storm was so vast that it was declared a disaster by FEMA, which deployed a couple of high-tech RVs to the parking lot of the local park, but nobody availed themselves of their assistance, and after a few days they left without so much as a how-de-do.

The nearby auto wrecking yard (the infamous “Last Mile”) was inundated with several feet of Scotts Creek waters that breached the Army Corps of Engineers levee and infiltrated the undrained petroleum fluid systems of a few hundred hulks and variously dismantled parts cars. When the waters receded, there was a coat of greasy gray slime on the trunks of old remnant orchard specimens, stragglers from the former owner’s concession to economic failure.

For months, there was discussion about the merits of installing a “tail pump” at that vulnerable intersection of two major creeks, but the hydraulics of the lake obviated its effectivity — when the lake is higher than the creek, the creek has only one option, and that is to back up.

Backing up Scotts Creek westward toward the not-a-lake basin called Laurel Dell Lake (actually separate from Blue Lake, but dubbed by the Chamber of Commerce as one of the “lakes” called Blue, where the flow of Clear Lake used to be in the direction of the Ukiah Valley before an earthquake dumped a minor mountain foothill across Highway 20, almost at the county line) meant pushing maddened flood flows northward and Highway 20 traffic was quickly stalled near Bachelor Valley and the Eagle Ranch.

The Upper Lake Community Council and the District Supervisor held meetings to determine what needed to be done, including, of course, making sure those under-highway culverts and the storm drains are working properly before winter. However, the County had, three years earlier, decided to not fund the federally-mandated storm water management program, and the Public Works department was never tasked with that level of regular maintenance.

For at least two decades, residents in town and ranchers and orchardists and vintners in the valley have attempted to get the Public Works department (or anyone the Board of Supervisors decides to assign) to maintain the Clover Creek Diversion Channel north of town and lying eastward toward the downflows of Alley Creek and Clover Creek, coming from Elk Mountain and Twin Valley, respectively. As recently as December 17, the Upper Lake - Nice Municipal Advisory Council’s “Flood Prevention Committee” has implored the departments of Public Works and Water Resources to take action, which has been promised now for several years — or twelve or fifteen, depending on which local has your ear.

The staff of those departments is, of course, off for the long holiday weekend, although some of the emergency workers will have had their Christmas dinners go cold as they respond to trees down, taking old power lines with them. Eschewing Facebook for the pleasure of avoiding all the cheer, I have no revelations to share about the condition of the unrepaired floodgate that has needed fixing for way too long, but I expect the next meeting of the West Region Town Hall will be quite a spectacle!

Yours for the duration,

Betsy Cawn

Upper Lake

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REASON FOR HOPE

Editor,

President Donald Trump appointed worm-brained Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services, who is destroying our country’s worldwide supremacy in medical science and public health.

Funding for scientific research has been withdrawn. Science is supplanted by conspiracy theories, superstition, snake-oil hucksterism, and disregard for authentic scientific knowledge.

But there is reason for hope that Trump and RFK Jr. will fail. Gov. Gavin Newsom is hiring respected former leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to establish world-leading public health science for California and for a growing consortium of other states.

An emerging 15-state “Governors’ Public Health Alliance” will provide guidance from actual scientific research on vaccines, medications, testing for dangerous new diseases, and response coordination to health threats.

California became the first U.S. state to join the World Health Organization, and its health alliances will replace the MAGA-undermined CDC, and may even rescue the U.S.A. from becoming a second-rate scientific has-been.

Bruce Joffe

Piedmont

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MEDICARE FOR ALL

Editor,

A December 5 article examined the likely doubling of premiums next year with the expiration of COVID-era tax credits for Obamacare enrollees, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (“Enrollees struggle as cost of health care set to spike”). In a commentary published Dec. 3, cardiologist Kim-Lien Nguyen argues that a Republican proposal to put money directly into individuals’ health savings and flex spending accounts would allow them to direct their money to premiums for direct payment for health care (“Subsidizing insurance premiums props up dysfunction”). This “skin-in-the-game” approach would supposedly allow patients to “have the upper hand in bargaining for lower costs with providers.”

In 1963, Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel laureate in economics, argued that health care is not like ordinary commodity economics, such as buying a car or a toaster. Uncertainty, urgency of need and lack of information make it impossible to “shop” for health care like shopping for ordinary goods. Nguyen’s implication that individuals can negotiate reduced prices with doctors, hospitals and drug companies to save health care dollars better than large insurance companies, hospital organizations or medical groups is a fantasy, inappropriate for a cardiologist at UCLA to be promoting. The solution is “Medicare for All.”

Dr. Nicholas H. Anton

Santa Rosa

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LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES NEED TO BE PROPERLY RECYCLED

Editor,

Most of us don’t think twice about the batteries that power our daily lives. Phones, laptops, power tools, e-bikes and electric vehicles all rely on lithium-ion batteries, yet few people know how to recycle them when they reach end-of-life. As a result, batteries are often left in junk drawers, tossed in the trash or placed in curbside recycling. That creates fire risks and sends valuable materials to landfills.

The gap between how essential batteries are and how poorly we manage them points to a broader truth: Sustainability only works when it’s practical and scalable. The elements inside batteries can be reused nearly infinitely, making EVs and electronics among the most sustainable technologies we have — if the elements are recovered and recycled.

I am the vice president of external affairs and consumer recycling programs for Redwood Materials. It was founded by JB Straubel, the co-founder and former chief technology officer of Tesla, after recognizing this fundamental opportunity: The materials inside batteries can be reused.

I began my own career at Tesla, where I saw firsthand that sustainability requires practical, scalable infrastructure — not just ambition. That focus shapes our work at Redwood to make battery recycling scalable, economic and easy. Redwood recovers over 95% of critical minerals through our recycling operations and has quickly become the largest source of nickel, lithium and cobalt in the U.S.

Following the launch of Redwood’s “battery bins” in San Francisco — with plans to expand to other communities — Bay Area residents can now recycle mixed batteries and devices with no preparation. The bins make recycling simple and accessible, helping unlock the “urban mine” inside America’s junk drawers.

Responsible lithium-ion battery recycling keeps our community safer and strengthens America’s access to the materials needed for energy, technology and economic security. Marin has long led on environmental stewardship. By supporting modern battery-recycling infrastructure, we can turn those values into solutions that protect our communities and strengthen a sustainable energy future.

Alexis Georgeson

San Anselmo

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WHAT WOULD HARRY DO?

Editor:

The first evil year of the imperial presidency has been depressing, so many people have turned inward to read novels that feature people of morality. I am a fan of Michael Connelly, a prolific author of countless books, my favorite being the Harry Bosch detective series. A fictional Los Angeles police detective, Bosch is a complex character, driven by the ethic that all cases are important cases. His credo is: Everybody counts, or nobody counts. Yeah, it’s fiction, but doesn’t it ring true with the gold-obsessed remodeler of the White House?

Establishing the largest secret national police force under the banner of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deplorable. If Hispanic immigrants are hunted down on U.S. streets and shanghaied to another country without recognition of their U.S. constitutional rights, then nobody counts — not me, not you.

Connelly’s fellow fictional LAPD Detective Renee Ballard said: “If you lose your empathy, you lose your soul.” How can we stand by and watch this moral decline day after day? How is your soul? Rise up Americans, register to vote, hit the streets in protest, mark your 2026 calendar and get out the vote on Nov. 3. Democracy will be on the ballot.

Corey Hudson

Santa Rosa

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MURDER AT SEA

Editor:

Our president, in his first run for the most powerful office in the world famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” I thought at that time he was saying he could commit cold-blooded murder and his fans would still support him. This man is now slaughtering anonymous people in boats, in the middle of nowhere, with no warnings — boats he could stop, board and inspect for drugs and then arrest the occupants if there was evidence. But he chooses to kill them. And his fans back him without question. I guess he was right.

As a veteran who served my country in war and is proud of our service people, I feel nothing but embarrassment and shame for this pathetic man.

Chris Wilbur

Santa Rosa

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AN EMBARRASSMENT TO JFK

Editor,

Instead of trying to remove Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Performing Arts Center, let’s remove Kennedy instead. There is little more embarrassing and false than seeing Trump’s name above that of JFK. We can re-instate the proper name, as well as sanity, once this era of darkness has ended.

Trump has been determined to remake the performing arts into the capitulating arts since taking office, like the art once created for kings and gods. Now, the performing arts center is only for MAGA-nificent artists to be watched by a lot of empty seats, its TV ratings far below those of Trump’s favorite late-night TV hosts.

Perhaps, the Center should be renamed The Trump Center of the Dark Arts.

Mitchell Goldman

Richmond