Off the Record (Nov 18, 2015)

THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the murder of Susan Keegan by her husband, Dr. Peter Keegan, has come and gone. But how can you say Keegan is the killer? Because Susan Keegan's death certificate says her cause of death was homicide and the doctor was the only person in the Keegan home when the homicide occurred. And the doctor did not offer the police any explanation for his wife's death beyond she was drinking and fell and hit her head in the bathroom. Which I also don't believe because Mrs. Keegan was not the kind of person who would come at 10pm and commence drinking herself into a stupor.

DA EYSTER inherited the Keegan case. His predecessor, the feckless Meredith Lintott, did not press an investigation of the Keegan murder. Eyster went after it, and it is no exaggeration to say that everyone in his office, all his investigators, are convinced Dr. Keegan murdered his wife of thirty years.

WHY NO PROSECUTION? Because the Sheriff's Department's first responders did not treat Mrs. Keegan's death as a possible crime scene. They simply took the doctor's word for what happened and went away. The case for homicide was developed after Eyster took office, but by then the case had gone so cold it could not be plausibly revived to take to a jury, which is what the DA says. But Susan's many friends, and yours truly, think the doctor should be tried based on the known facts. Many people have been tried for murder on much flimsier evidence than exists here. (cf Tate Laiwa)

SUSAN'S stalwart friends write on the Justice For Susan website: "Five years ago today, Susan Keegan died in her home after spending the day visiting friends, attending an art class, and planning her post-divorce future. As is well-known to the many readers of this blog [and the ava], her husband had been filled with rage about her legal rights to half the family assets; gone “ballistic” in a divorce mediator’s office [Norman Rosen] the day before she died; and hired a defense attorney [Keith Faulder] one day afterwards. Susan’s death was declared a homicide in 2012 and Dr. Keegan remains the only suspect in the case.

"IN MENDOCINO COUNTY and beyond, hundreds of people who knew Susan, and thousands who did not, still don’t understand why charges have not been filed. The DA has never made a public statement about the case, except to say, year in and year out, that it remains under investigation. When a case is open, the DA is allowed to keep the evidence out of sight – no autopsy report, no photographs, no investigatory notes, no interview records, no toxicology report can be released. The search warrants in the case – at least two visits were made to the Keegan home in the years after Susan’s death – are sealed. Freedom of Information Act requests will be denied.

"WHAT EVIDENCE led law enforcement authorities to officially call Susan’s death a homicide, and why have they failed to act on what they know? Why won’t the DA’s office convene a grand jury to consider the strength of the evidence, and allow the legal system to work as intended? Why won’t the DA talk to the community he is elected to protect, and explain the inaction of the past five years?

WITHOUT ANSWERS to these most basic questions, rumors fill the gap. A healthy civil society needs institutions that work. A credible system of law enforcement functions without fear or favor to protect the innocent, give suspects their day in court, and punish guilty parties. Susan, offbeat though she was, believed in those principles. Five years on, the pain of her loss has not diminished for her family and friends. But what it has done to the community at large may be even more damaging: the passage of so much time without a prosecution has created a platform for cynics."

I KNOW a lot about the Keegan case I'm not supposed to know, and I'm here to tell you that any jury of fair minded people, and thank the goddess for the jury system because juries are fair minded (it's the g.d. lawyers and judges you gotta watch out for) would do the right thing and convict Dr. Keegan of murder. Come on, we've got a death certificate that reads 'homicide' with one suspect but no prosecution? As Susan's friends keep saying, take the facts to a grand jury. If it says there's not enough evidence for a prosecution, Dr. Keegan gets away with murder. What's to lose for DA Eyster? The doctor has already gotten away with it for five years now, and this case is not going away until it is resolved. I'm hardly the only person outraged at Susan Keegan's murder. She was a good person, and even if she were a bad person it isn't right to let her killer off the hook.

CLAUDE LEWENZ, is the New Zealand author of an influential book called How to Build a Village Town. Lewenz proposed a village town for a ranch near Hopland, quite a large village town, so large that neighbors of the proposed project immediately rose up to point out that the site is not only short of water for thousands more people no matter how gently they trod the Earth, infrastructure generally is inadequate for large-scale development of any kind, let alone one with a population influx the size of present day Hopland.

THE NEW VILLAGE was to be called MendoVito. Lewenz and his friends have not issued a formal announcement but the project is kaput. MendoVito will not proceed. Their website is down "while we seek appropriate funding." (Like, they wouldn't take money from organized crime?)

JUDGE DAVE NELSON'S "retirement" announcement last week means Judge Dave will now join Mendocino County's peripatetic posse of "retired" judges who got their black robes in Ukiah before "retiring" to a leisurely and quite lucrative pick and choose caseload throughout the state, flying hither and yon to pick up big pay as substitute judges. There must be 30 or so "retired" Mendo judges working the state judicial hustings.

WE HAVE tons of judges retired out of Mendocino County because we have wayyyyyy too many judges in relation to our population — nine of them for a population of 90,000 people.

NELSON, in my long experience with him, is a good judge. He's smart and fair. But, but, but..... aren't all judges smart and fair? No, my child, they aren't, as Judge Brennan of Ten Mile Court in Fort Bragg regularly illustrates, and as many black robes in this County have illustrated over the years, nicely keeping pace with the County's many learning disabled attorneys.

WAIT. GOTTA BACK up a little on Nelson. He's managed to jam an unneeded new County Courthouse down our collective throat that is designed for only the judges and their staffs. We've railed against this looming boondoggle for several years now, and won't bore you today, dear reader, with a rehash, but that thing will be Nelson's legacy, and all of Ukiah will curse his memory when they belatedly see how comprehensively destructive it is to central Ukiah and the conduct of County business.

(ED NOTE: This statement by Judge Nelson was made to the Board of Supervisors on March 25, 2014. After Judge Nelson departed, County CEO Carmel Angelo suggested that the county “explore” the idea of having the county consider Nelson's notion that the taxpayers should buy property next door to the new courthouse on which to relocate related court services. Then-Supervisor John Pinches, as always cutting to the core of the issue, pointed out that maybe the judges and their state sponsors should do something about the housing problem they will have created for their “judicial partners” as they say, “We'll just lift the judges out and everyone else can make do.” And everyone else includes what's left of central Ukiah, many of whose businesses depend heavily on the business generated by the existing courthouse. Supervisors Dan Gjerde and Carre Brown expressed mild concern about where the money would come from to buy property adjacent to the new courthouse. As they pointed out, given the County’s existing debt load (millions more in obligations to retirees than the County can possibly pay) and the fact that the state didn’t seem to be including the County in the discussion of where the County staff would be located after the new courthouse was built, well, gee and golly. Supervisor Hamburg, stroking the tiny service dog he apparently needs with him at all times to even function at the minimal level he functions at, predictably moved to authorize staff to explore property acquisition. (Supervisor McCowen was not in the room when the courthouse discussion took place.) And everybody said go ahead: Find out how much the judges are going to cost us and, essentially, “Let them do whatever they want.” But of course, no exploration occurred, nobody asked about it later, Judge Nelson made no more appearances in front of the Supervisors and no purchase of any land near the judges’ inevitable Taj Mahal at the foot of West Perkins is being considered. The judges have offered nothing. There’s nothing in the County’s capital equipment or facility plans. Otherwise, Judge Nelson’s description of the chaos that will ensue after their majesty's Judicial Palace is erected four blocks away from everything else is essentially accurate.)

TWO local attorneys, Patrick Pekin of Fort Bragg, and Keith Faulder of Ukiah want to succeed Nelson. We don't know much about Pekin, but have never heard a complaint about him. We do know Faulder. Like Nelson, he's smart and, we assume, fair. For an uncontested fact, he's a helluva courtroom lawyer, but until he actually functions as a judge, if he functions as a judge, we won't know how fair he is. That's the problem with judicial elections; you don't know what you're getting until you get it.

I DON'T RECALL any straight-up crooks sitting as local judges, but there has been plenty of sleazy favoritism — connected people, invariably wealthy, can always count on special treatment from our courts, and we've written about how the local judges conspired to protect a flasher colleague — Judge Lehan — sitting as Ten Mile Court judge. Odd thing about Lehan; he was appointed to replace Judge Heeb at Ten Mile when Heeb, having fallen in love with a criminal defendant, flamed out totally, letting little lover boy slide when LLB should have been put away. What we had at Ten Mile, were two consecutive judges ruled by their reproductive organs.

ONLY IN MENDO. A community-minded cannabis farmer was tooling along Highway 101 last week when, at Burke Hill Road out of Hopland, he was angered at the site of a massive plastic bag spill littering the shoulder of the otherwise uncluttered stretch of roadway. But anger soon became jubilation. "You know what it was? 300 turkey bags! Wooo! I got turkey bags until 2020! When I first saw that I said, Holy shit! There's a culvert right there which goes into a little creek which goes straight to the Russian River. I gotta do something. I drove up to Ukiah and flipped around and drove back down to the Hmong's strawberry stand, flipped around and parked on the shoulder. I had a couple of large trash bags so I picked up 300 Turkey bags off the side of Highway 101. I know it was 300 because I found the cardboard boxes that they were in. At first I thought somebody just dropped them out the back of their pickup. But then I suspected that an idiot took a big bong hit and put them on the hood of his car coming home from a hydro shop in Santa Rosa, probably the hood of a BMW because anybody who needs 300 turkey bags is doing very big business. I wonder if that was the entire purchase or just half of it? Those bags go for about $1.25 each so you can do the math. Whoever lost it must have decided they didn't want to scramble all the way down the bank because I was parked at least 18 feet off the side of the road and they were spread all the way down. I said I was not just going to pick up a couple of them, so I went to the trouble of picking them all up."

LOCAL NEWSPAPER with the highest percentage of veterans? You guessed it. The mighty AVA! In order of rank, Major Mark Scaramella, US Air Force; Bruce Patterson, US Army (combat veteran); Bruce McEwen, US Marines; Bruce Anderson, US Marines.

RANDOM THOUGHTS from a failing mind: I don't understand why there aren't effective non-lethal police weapons. Yeah, yeah, yeah there are stun guns, bean bags, various sprays, and so on, but one would think there would be something in the form of a quick-draw gun the cops could use to defend themselves in death-likely situations without killing the perp. There's been an epidemic of "incidences" in on-air interviews, both from theoretically trained interviewers and the interviewees, many of them allegedly college-educated, not that a college diploma is a guarantee its owner has achieved anything resembling educated status. (cf, the Mendocino County Office of Education) The plural of incident is incidents.

Regarding the incidences at the University of Missouri, I think the walkout by the football team was a promising start to what I hope becomes national football walkouts. These kids should be paid regular salaries instead of their present compensation in cheerleaders and freelance bimbos. College sports are full-time jobs, and football at that level is a dangerous job. See how fast the weasel-lipped college president resigned when the football team walked? Without football, most of this country's so-called institutions of higher learning would collapse. Football and basketball produce huge revenues that largely fund these places. I don't get these preposterous salaries paid college administrators. That guy in Missouri would have trouble managing a car wash. Ditto for Mendo's salaries public administrators get. Come on, $270,000 a year to "manage" the City of Ukiah, population 16,000? $50,000 to part-time manage the City of Point Arena, population 500?

I’VE COME TO REALIZE that almost all the mischief I got into as a kid was of a revolutionary, anarchistic or heretic nature. I destroyed heavy earth-moving equipment, and twenty years later the practice was named “monkey-wrenching” by Edward Abbey and taken up by serious environmentalists. I stole religious icons and defaced the front entrance to the high school with them, and tore up golf courses with cars. All these, it turns out, were either symbols or actual implements of class oppression, destruction of the earth, or brainwashing. — Jeff Costello

HOME PRICES ARE REPORTEDLY UP just a bit in Lake County although the Valley Fire has had an effect in the overall active listings. Lake County News reports the latest Lake County Association of Realtors report says the median sales price for a single family home went up from $200,000 in August to $211,500 in September, a rise of about 5.75-percent. And it’s up more than 14 percent from the same time last year when it was $185,000. The total number of sales dropped though with the Association president telling the news site that more than 20 homes that were listed before the fire were either damaged or destroyed.

A FORT BRAGG RESIDENT thinks the town's city management has screwed up everything lately, including water policy and planning. "They kept developing and permitting water guzzling projects knowing the true situation that there wasn't and isn't water to support them. The Stage 3 crisis was discussed months ahead but not announced to the public to give them time to prepare as the new brewery was given permits by the city’s planning commission. I can't believe they could have granted those if the coming water emergency had been known. At Monday's City Council meeting, they threw Public Works boss Varga under the water wagon, because, they claimed, he paid no attention to the levels, but they all knew things would be bad come summer… The Grand Jury and Fish and Game, plus two other water agencies, had warned the city for many years of their serious violations and need for a comprehensive plan. Fort Bragg’s Community Development Director Marie Jones lied like crazy with her Mitigated Negative Declaration for the mall, and in her snarky retort to Fish and Game… (She said the mall would use 200,000 gallons a year with their catchment installations, but they get only 100,000 gallons. The City's destructive ways with the Noyo River certainly helped cause the demise of the fishing industry here. Residents complied with restrictions, then rates go up."

IN HALF-HEARTED defense of Fort Bragg's water policies, no one in the County, except maybe former supervisor Johnny Pinches, could have foreseen just how drought-parched Mendocino County would be this year. Pinches argued for sensible water policies his entire tenure. Did anybody listen? Nooooooo.

BRUCE McEWEN REPORTS from the County Courthouse:

Came out in court today that Dr. William Courtney, long-established fixture of the local pot pharm community — the veritable high priest of that virtual religious cult — has quit his practice, sold his house and bought tickets for himself and his family out of the country. Dr. Courtney is moving to an undisclosed Caribbean Island (natch). There is some unsubstantiated rumor that one of attorney E.D. Lerman's clients — probably Philo's Kelly Boss — will kick down the fees and airline tickets for one final show for Courtney as a witness in the Mendocino pot courts, but other than that it looks like the good pot doc has seen the writing on the wall and decamped— for good.

ALARMING HEADLINE on Friday’s Ukiah Daily Journal: "Downtown Planning on Agenda."

BUT THE PLANNING, now routinely aggrandized as "strategic planning," Ukiah's leadership will discuss maintaining the downtown historic section as a regional center of civic and economic activity, planning valley-wide based on sound planning principles, and for the council to work with staff to create a more responsive and effective workplace. The city manager says he wants the council to agree on a strategy for the discussions before they get into it tonight. That was from the last planning session a few weeks ago. A list of topics includes "affecting positive change with the Palace Hotel and having anchor businesses that attract new business." Jezzus H! The Palace Hotel has been kicked around now for going on thirty years. Nothing has happened with it, nothing will happen with it, nothing can happen with it given the leadership givens.

ODD that Ukiah's brain trust never so much as mentions the new County Courthouse working its clandestine way to establishment completely outside the Ukiah Valley's (and the County's) planning procedures. It will destroy any hope for a viable downtown because it will be four long blocks east of the present Courthouse. Ukiah's existing downtown businesses will be greatly harmed because the Courthouse generates much daytime business.

AT LAST, a coherent counterattack against Candy Ass-ism. Here's some required reading for the neener-neener prigs and those thousands of nasty little campus fascists who seem to have appeared with the first rains: The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in a recent Atlantic Monthly. It begins, "Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American 'Where were you born?' because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might 'trigger' a recurrence of past trauma." And so on.

MY FAVE TERM from the piece is "cognitive magnification," meaning the kind of person, always some variety of liberal, who goes all to pieces at a term or opinion he or she doesn't approve of. (The main concentration of speech milk monitors can be found locally on the KZYX membership rolls.) We deal with magnified cognitions almost on a weekly basis here at America's last newspaper but, fortunately for us, the candy-assed sectors of the Mendo population confine their media input to KPFA and KZYX where they are unlikely to ever hear a disturbing word.

THERE'S LOTS of interesting on-line comment on the passing of the legendary topless pioneer, Carol Doda. I like this one: "I remember as a kid coming to SF from the San Joaquin valley where my dad was stationed at Castle AFB. We'd stay at the Marine's Memorial and walk around from there. Once while walking around Chinatown, we ended up in North Beach and passed a barker outside a club. My little brother (about 2nd grade at the time) was mesmerized by the posters outside of Carol Doda, so the barker asked him, 'Would you like to see that, little boy?' My brother replied very seriously, 'Oh, yes!' I remember my parents cracking up and moving us along back to the hotel. That memory was treasured, even though we never saw Carol Doda in person. RIP Carol."

THE SECOND COMING

by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

LOCAL MATTERS seem trivial against the terrible events last Friday in Paris, and excuse me, you sophisticates, for reprinting Yeats' prescient poem, but it continues to define the times.

TERRORISM works. It's an unending cycle of mutual murder until one side or the other wins. Since Isis's master plan is a global caliphate, we'll be fighting them for years and years.

FROM THE SUPE'S AGENDA: "Acceptance of Presentation by Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA), Family and Children’s Services (FCS) as a Follow up to the Grand Jury Report and Response by the Board of Supervisors. Summary: Family and Children’s Services will give a presentation as requested by the Board of Supervisors on August 4, 2015 during their discussion regarding the Grand Jury Report on Family and Children’s Services. The topics presented will include performance data, staffing, what is working and the development of new programs.

FUNNY, they say the presentation will include “what is working” but they didn’t finish the cliché: “…and what is not.”

THE PRESENTATION is, as usual when the discussion is mental health, impressively vague, combining meaningless overly-detailed out-of-context random charts and childish bright yellow cartoons with feel-good slogans and generalities like this:

THE COUNTY’S ORIGINAL GRAND JURY RESPONSE which Tuesday’s presentation is intended to somehow buttress was effectively deconstructed by former Mendocino County Social Worker James Marmon which, of course, the presentation doesn’t even acknowledge, much less address the Grand Jury’s original findings. His critique can be found at:

www.theava.com/archives/45903/comment-page-1#comment-986659

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THE AVA DISCUSSES the events in Paris:

Rick Weddle: re: the ongoing terror deal with ISIS…

Stated by many observers and some policy-makers is the growing conviction that we’ll be ‘fighting ISIS from now on…permanently…’ This is a damned odd version of job-security, isn’t it? Please recall that it takes a Huge Amount of effort and resources to engage in hostile actions immediately, with further untold costs waiting down the road. Also recall, please, that this ISIS outfit did not even exist until ‘we’ (American corporate warlords) provided the items in their recipe, lit the blaze under it, then started stirring it up with our famous Big Stick…ISIS is a creature of criminal American commercial interests, resulting directly from U.S. ‘policy’ directed by and for those corporations. Thank Halliburton; Bechtel; ‘Defense’ budgets; Exxon/Mobil…you know, the ones making all the cash and prizes.

Harvey Reading: Re: PARIS UNDER ATTACK!

What a surprise. Seems to me that the frogs, along with the limeys, have been delighted to be part of the “team”, led by the U.S., that has brought death and chaos to the Middle East. Those two “allies” of ours couldn’t wait until the smoke had cleared to divvy up Libya’s oil … though that hasn’t worked out so well for them has it, given that they created another failed state? And, didn’t the frogs make it illegal for women believers in Islam to wear their traditional veil? So, horrid though the acts may be in Paris, it’s hard to conclude that they were completely without justification. The old saw about what goes around comes around somehow enters my mind, all the blather issuing from the corporate media, which includes NPR/PBS, aside.

Louis Bedrock: For fuck’s sake, Harvey, over 200 hundred innocent people are dead: murdered by fanatics. Many more are injured—some seriously. Unless you believe in original sin that is passed from generation to generation, you cannot say or imply “they had it coming”. The people who died are not the persecutors of Captain Dreyfus, the traitors who formed the Vichy government and allied themselves with the Nazis, the colonizers who brutalized North Africa, or who joined the unholy alliance that has wreaked chaos in Irak, Libya, and Syria: they were people like you and me out having a good time on a Friday night. I have wonderful memories of Paris; of the friends I hung out with during my first trip to Europe—mainly students, who teased me about my horrible French, but did their best to help me speak it; of great food, wonderful museums, and a humane city where everything seemed to work well. Years later, I spent one of the best weeks of my life there with the woman I was in love with at the time after rendezvousing with her in the patio in the back of Notre Dame.

Listening to the BBC and seeing the images posted on the sites of The Guardian and El País, I recalled the wonderful times I spent in Paris, the friends I made there, the many attractions of the city. And it has saddened me and sickened me. Right now I cannot philosophize about chickens coming home to roost anymore than I could during the attacks on NYC, London, or Madrid. These are people like us. My heart is with them.

Bill Pilgrim: How about the several hundred innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen who have been incinerated or blown to bits by our Reaper drones simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? …Even wedding parties, fer cryin’ out loud! The US and its NATO vassals have sown a wind, and shall reap a whirlwind.

Reading: And how many innocent dead were left behind when the U.S. attacked the hospital in Afghanistan? Where was your howling, your concern over innocent lives being lost then? Where was it when the U.S. blew up wedding parties? When it attacked Iraq based on a total pack of lies? When it destroyed Libya? Give me a break. You seem to be of the crowd that only gets concerned when “western” lives are lost. Thank goodness I’m old and won’t have to put up with the likes of your kind for much longer.

Steve Heilig: Right on, Mr. Bedrock (re response to Harvey Reading). And so this is probably as good a time as any to say what I’ve thought for a long time – Mr. Reading comments constantly here, apparently believing he is some sort of authority on anything and everything, even though he most often has nothing much to add other than old-timer’s crankiness. Perhaps he might consider taking some extended “time out” and ponder that, among some of my fellow AVA-ers, his name just elicits rolling of the eyes. And this old saw as well: “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Bedrock: Thank you, Mr. Heilig. I’m a cranky old man myself. There have been times when I’ve read my own posts and wished I had followed the good advice you give at the end of your post. In this case, humanity trumps cynicism and grumpiness. One cannot listen to the news, or first hand accounts of witnesses, or cries of the victims–or look at the images of devastation and death, without feeling anguish and despair. To dismiss this atrocity as a justifiable consequence of France’s foreign policy is deranged.

Reading: You might try your own advice …

Heilig: Deal. I appear here or in the paper an average of about once a month. Try that, and more readers than I will thank you.

Bruce Anderson: I think Harv's simply expressing what will be the “left’s” collective opinion — that the West brought it on ourselves. Whatever one’s opinion on the WHY of it, they’re here, and now that they’re here they’ve got to be rolled back fast and hard. How that can be done will be the argument. Call me a fascist, but I’ve always thought it was suicidal of France to allow naturalized French Islamic citizens to go back and forth between the battlefronts in the Middle East. Ditto for the Brits and the other countries of Europe that permit these jihadi commutes. It should go without saying that the crackpot mullahs preaching war on the West should have gotten the toss yesterday. The fanatic wing of Islam is small and without popular support among most Muslims. They’ve imposed themselves by force on the people in the territories they control in Iraq and Syria. They can be destroyed, and probably fairly easily by multi-national special forces while the West purges our countries of their small bases of support. By the way, in all the media coverage of this most recent atrocity, has a single major media yet invited a Muslim to explain (again) that ISIL, Al Qaeda etc. do not represent Islam? (Mike Jamieson was quick to point out that CNN invited the well-known Muslim scholar, Maajid Nawaz, to explain that Isis is about as representative of Muslims as the Kill the Fags church is of Christians.

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FARM BUREAU STALWART TED STEPHENS sits on the Mendocino County Employees Retirement Association (MCERA) Board of Directors. Stephens is one of three public members appointed by the Board of Supervisors. Five of the members are current County employees who will one day draw a retirement check from the system they are managing, including Supervisor Gjerde, Treasurer-Tax Collector Shari Schapmire, and three County employees elected by their peers. The ninth member is retired Treasurer-Tax Collector Tim Knudsen who was elected by the retired employees and who draws down a fat retirement check from the system every month. Former Supervisor and newly anointed Point Arena City Manager Richard Shoemaker also sits on the Board as an alternate to Knudsen.

THE RETIREMENT BOARD represents the ultimate conflict of interest since six of the nine voting members are in line to get a check from the retirement system when they retire. Except for Supervisor Gjerde the self-interested members of the retirement board are auto votes for anything that will inflate their personal retirement benefits. Retired Treasurer Knudsen, the architect of the so-called "excess earnings" that allowed him to divert upwards of $50 million dollars from the retirement fund to pay retiree health insurance is merely the most prominent of the foxes guarding the retirement board chickens. Knudsen's primary function on the retirement board is to make sure the financial skeletons stay securely locked in the closet.

THE EXCESS EARNINGS SCAM worked like this: if the retirement fund met its "assumed rate of return" (8% + 1% for a contingency reserve) every dollar above that amount was diverted to a retiree health insurance account. It seemed like a great way for the Board of Retirement to give themselves (and all other County employees) a nice little benefit at no cost to themselves. And the Board of Supervisors could appear to be conferring a benefit without making a draw on the General Fund. So the retirement fund was shackled with a 9% cap on earnings in good years, but had to absord unlimited losses in bad years. And with most of the fund invested in the Wall Street Ponzi scheme, it was only a matter of time until the bad years hit. In 1996 and again in 2002 the County issued Pension Obligation Bonds in a futile effort to bail out the retirement fund.

BUT EVEN IN BAD YEARS, Knudsen kept writing checks out of the retiree health insurance account. By about 2004 all the phony "excess earnings" had been spent and the account was tapped out. But Knudsen came up with a double phony baloney theory of excess earnings and kept writing checks. The original excess earnings policy was ludicrous, but apparently legal. The alternative method of calculating excess earnings was criminal and would have continued to this day if retirement board gadfly John Dickerson hadn't blown the whistle on the rolling scam. But considerable damage had already been done. Dickerson's pointed attacks on the obvious mismanagement of the retirement fund didn't win him any friends among local government types. But Dickerson was also joined by Ted Stephens, an independent investment adviser, and John Sakowicz who claims to have been a high flying wall street hedge fund guru.

THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS, on narrow 3-2 votes, appointed Stephens, and then Sakowicz, to the Board of Retirement. Sakowicz, who had been a harsh critic, calling for the indictment of Knudsen and his cohort, former County Auditor-Controller Dennis Huey, soon became a complacent lap dog, lavishing praise on Knudsen, traveling to numerous conferences at taxpayer expense and rubber stamping almost everything put in front of him. Stephens, a very sophisticated and credentialed numbers guy, stayed true to his original mission to get to the bottom of the mismanagement of the retirement fund. Stephens (and Supervisor Gjerde) are just about the only ones who ever spend time delving into the numbers and asking questions that make their colleagues squirm.

STEPHENS, A LIBERTARIAN KIND OF GUY, is obviously frustrated working within a system where the rules, much to the detriment of the people paying the bills, are all rigged in favor of the beneficiaries. Much of the damage has already been done, and given the set-up, not much can be done about it. But the main frustration is that the unfunded liability continues to increase even though the economy/stock market has been on the upswing for the past five years.

STEPHENS OCCAISIONALLY UPDATES his friends at the Farm Bureau with a recounting of his latest frustrations which recently centered on the decision of the current retirement administrator to cancel the regularly scheduled October meeting on short notice because there "wasn't much to talk about." Stephens complained to the Farm Bureau types that the administrator, on the job less than a year, had quickly adapted to the Mendo Board of Retirement culture of "no accountability." Stephens went on to complain to his Farm Bureau buddies "I have about 20 items that could and should be discussed (and have tried, to no avail, to get 'excess earnings' policy on the agenda for five years!)

JOHN DICKERSON, Stephens’ mentor, picked up the cudgel in advance of last Thursday's Board of Retirement meeting and urged the Farm Bureau types who just don’t like government pensions as a matter of principle to show up and support the beleaguered Stephens. Dickerson went on at length about Stephens' valiant, but futile, efforts to get the Board of Retirement to talk about "excess earnings" and fix things so it "will never happen here again."

THE ONLY PROB with Stephens and Dickerson complaining about Stephens' inability to get the excess earnings policy on the agenda is that it isn't true. Excess earnings, re-christened with the sanitized name of "Undistributed Earnings" were included on the agenda on September 16, 2015. The "Undistributed Earnings" policy adopted by the Board in 2010 provided that undistributed (excess) earnings could be spent for any lawful purpose (including retiree health insurance) only if the retirement fund was 100% funded. Current funding hovers around the 70% mark. Stephens was appointed to the Board of Retirement about five years ago, not long after the original policy on excess earnings was adopted.

BASED ON A SERIES of improbable assumptions, including the long-term viability of the Wall Street Ponzi, the retirement fund could be fully funded in only 20 or 30 years. Which means there is no chance of diverting excess earnings for any purpose for the foreseeable future. But just to make sure, on September 16 the Board of Retirement revised the policy to say that even if the system is 100% funded, all undistributed earnings will be held "as a reserve against future economic downturns." The problem being that on-going economic downturns will likely prevent the retirement system from ever being 100% funded.

WE ARE TOLD THAT excess earnings have been discussed many times over the last five years but given that they don't exist, and according to policy, can't be spent, even if they did, the Board did not view the issue with any particular urgency. But excess earnings was on the agenda on September 16, and Ted Stephens himself made the motion to amend the policy. And barely over a month later wrote a lengthy diatribe complaining that he "tried, to no avail" to get the policy on the agenda for 5 years.

STEPHENS, probably encouraged by Dickerson, seems to have stepped off the rhetorical deep end on this one. Dickerson, who sounded the alarm about the retirement system, but who gets some of his facts wrong, and has been unable to offer any solutions, is easily dismissed as an ax grinding ideologue. And  Stephens' obsession with the subject has reduced his influence with his fellow board members. But Stephens can be forgiven since he has had to endure nearly five years of close quarter meetings with the likes of Knudsen, Shoemaker and Sakowicz.

SATURDAY’S DEMOCRATIC PARTY DEBATE was between one guy, Bernie Sanders, and two moderate, Kasich-like Democrats called Clinton and O'Malley. Of all the people running for president Sanders is the only candidate addressing the realities of contemporary American life. The Republican candidates are simply a pack of clowns, one of whom, the brain surgeon, may be mentally ill. Compare Sanders, and even Hillary, to the statements of the Republican candidates, and ask yourself who should be running the country.

OF COURSE HILLARY, with carte blanche access to billionaire funding, already has the nomination sewed up via "superdelegates." She'll be the candidate. Bern will be up on stage with her at the convention holding her victorious arm aloft in the usual lib-lab show of solidarity. The Republicans will unite behind that crafty little psychopath, Rubio, and Rubio will defeat Hillary because a broad swathe of the libs who supported Bernie will sit out the election. I've assumed for months I'll be voting Green again.

THE DEBATE was at least available to everyday people on television via CBS. Prior debates have been on cable television although millions of Americans don't buy cable. Those debates, as we saw and will see, have been regularly interrupted for commercials for boner meds, fat pills, insurance, and so on. "The future of the world is being brought to you by Cialis. If your erection lasts more than three days, please see a medical professional. And now back to the Republican debate."

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS? Thank you for asking. As a guy who feels the Bern, I was delighted to see him take a couple of real punches at Hillary who, I must say, coolly turned them right around with some fast demagogic footwork. Bernie pointed out that Hil has always gotten huge funding from Wall Street. Hil replied with a breathtakingly demagogic comeback immediately invoking 911, that as the senator from New York at the time, and Wall Street being at Ground Zero, she was simply doing what she could to help business get back on its feet. (!)

I THOUGHT it was striking that Bernie brought to a mass audience the basic facts of American life that ordinarily go unheard — that regular people are getting screwed by the radically under-taxed oligarchy busily fleecing the country. He pointed out that the very rich were taxed at 90% "by that great socialist, Dwight D. Eisenhower." And now, they basically go untaxed, hiding their money in overseas accounts and hiring accountants and lawyers to devise tax-avoidance schemes.  Bernie was on-task, saying things seldom heard out loud in this country, and he deserves major credit for that.

O'MALLEY was pathetic. He presents like a guy at his first Toastmasters. And he's pretty much full of it. He tried to make Baltimore, presently leading the country in murders, and Maryland out as some kind of dual paradises, all because of his grand leadership as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland.

HILLARY'S ADVISORS ought to warn her against her forced laughter. Every time I hear her trying to yuk it up, my blood runs cold and I think to myself, "Someone's going to die here tonight." I was only truly startled once all night by Hil's defense of her and Obama's work on Libya as some kind of foreign policy triumph, presently a country now in the hands of bandits and warlords. American policy has managed to destabilize the entire world, although it was Republicans and Bush who shoved the globe over the cliff, but Hillary made it clear she would only be more of the same vis a vis the rest of the world.

LAST NIGHT'S DEBATE, though, was at least an argument adult-type people could take seriously. Unlike the clown show underway among Republican candidates, and I speak here as a reluctant, nay hostile Democrat, with Sanders us lefties finally have a candidate we can get behind (with a lot of reservations, natch) with some enthusiasm. He offers a real alternative to Clinton who seems to me a much more formidable, much smarter version of her husband, but she's wrong about everything and is basically a moderate Republican when there used to be moderate Republicans. I'll say it again, and you read it here first: Hillary will be the nominee because the process is rigged, but she will lose to Rubio because millions of Democrats like me, all us Bernie enthusiasts, will not vote for her.

FROM THE UKIAH POLICE DEPARTMENT: "A Ukiah woman was arrested Monday after allegedly punching medical equipment while being treated at the hospital, the Ukiah Police Department reported. According to the UPD, officers responded to Ukiah Valley Medical Center shortly before 11 am on Monday, Nov. 9 when it was reported that Kelisha S. Alvarez, 26, of Ukiah, had become angry and smashed the screen of a machine that monitors heart activity and blood pressure before leaving the hospital. Officers located Alvarez in the parking lot of J.C. Penney and arrested her on suspicion of felony vandalism. She was booked into Mendocino County Jail."

THE REST OF THE KELISHA STORY. Kelisha passed Frequent Flyer status years ago. She can now be considered a Perpetual Flyer. She gets arrested so often, and often with her boyfriend, Scotty Willis, also a Perpetual Flyer, because no agency will assume responsibility for either of them, and because our jive, revolving door Superior Court simply processes them endlessly on through the local justice system.  Note that the charge against her is felony, but she'll be back on the street in a week. The Ukiah Police Department and Sheriff Allman are Scotty and Kelisha's de facto caretakers. If Kelisha is new to you, you should know that she is very large, very strong and quite agile. She is also prone to violence, as in the above episode, which is not her first in the hospital venue.  She will seriously hurt someone eventually; it's a minor miracle she hasn't already. Kelisha and Scotty like to watch tv in the emergency room but are otherwise unhoused, making their home in the culverts of feeder streams to the Russian River. Supervisor McCowen is probably on a first name basis with them, as is the Ukiah Police Department. Mendocino County's privatized Mental Health apparatus says the troubled and troublesome pair should be the responsibility of the Regional Center in Lake County. The Regional Center says they are the responsibility of Mental Health Department. The Superior Court doesn't give a hoot. Kelisha and Scotty have become the full-time responsibility of the police, and are likely to become more or less permanent residents of an expanded mental health capacity proposed by Sheriff Allman at the County Jail. Until that glorious day, if that glorious day ever dawns, they will remain roving nuisances. At the present time in our retro but allegedly "progressive" county the only people thinking realistically about the homeless are the police departments and Supervisor McCowen, who spends much of his free time cleaning up after the homeless in the Ukiah Valley.

INTERESTING RUMOR circulating in Fort Bragg's helping circles that a top helper has helped herself to a former homeless guy, much to the physical displeasure of her husband, who has violently clashed with the new beau. Talk of restraining orders and court cases toss and turn in the turbulent wake of Lust In The Free Lunch Line.

ALDERPOINT POT LAWYER, excuse the redundancy, Ed Denson, was fined $500 in Judge John Behnke’s court Monday morning for what the judge called “gamesmanship” and what District Attorney David Eyster called “sandbagging” in the case of Brian Woodson. Denson was in court last Thursday for pretrial motions (Motions in Limine) and asked for more time because his star witnesses, Dr. William Courtney, and self-certified pot expert Chris Conrad were not available. The no shows should have been taken care of long before, and there were other signs the lawyer had been hitting the bong to the point he was couch-ridden during working hours. The DA objected that he hadn’t even been given notice that these witnesses were going to be called — the law requires reciprocal discovery in reference to witnesses and a timely notification to the other side by both parties, at least 30 days before trial. This hadn’t been done by Denson. Then as the trial was supposed to be getting under way Monday morning, the DA said that more last-minute discovery from defense had been faxed to his office over the weekend. This was so out of line that the judge had half a mind to go ahead with the trial and refuse to allow any of the defense’s witnesses. He said he’d done this before and the appeals court had upheld his ruling but in this case, his honor felt it would be punishing the defendant who was not responsible for Denson's laxity in following the rules, so he asked for other suggestions. The DA suggested Denson pay a $1000 fine. Judge Behnke liked this idea but only imposed half of the suggested amount. “Was there any defense discovery provided to the DA?” Behnke asked.  “Only some pictures of some cows,” Eyster responded. After viewing the cow photos the judge said it was the only part of the whole mess he’d enjoyed.  It used to be assumed that things put off indefinitely were like waiting for the cows to come home, meaning that unless somebody went and got them, they probably never would …come home. (Bruce McEwen)

DENSON is an old crackpot become an attorney at a late age. I think he ran some kind of half-assed music business with uber crook Darryl Cherney before he passed the bar, and given the guy's natural intelligence the test has clearly been dumbed wayyyyyy down. I tangled with him over the Bari Bombing case years ago. Naturally, Denson took the Bari Cult position, a position which obtains to this day at Humboldt County's stoner venues, notably KMUD Radio where dissenting opinions were never allowed on the matter while hours were devoted to grand conspiracies involving (of course) the FBI, corporate timber (natch), men resentful of "strong" women (o yea), religious nuts (never forget to drag them in) and so on. In other words, everybody except the ex-husband, the person who actually did the bombing. I always wanted to get a one on one or a one on all with Denson-think but these people don't do debate. They know the truth about all things. Clearly Denson is an incompetent attorney, as his latest dereliction establishes beyond all doubt. But in Southern Humboldt the guy's regarded as Supreme Court material.

ASSET FORFEITURE is alive and well in Mendocino County. The District Attorney has caused to be published in the Ukiah Daily Journal Legal Notices for November 3, 10, and 17 a Notice of Seizure Pursuant to Health & Safety Code Sections 11471-11488 and Notice of Intended Forfeiture Pursuant to Health & Safety Code Section 11488.4. The notice gives the date and location of twelve separate seizures between Sept. 9 and Oct. 27, with a listing of the assets seized, usually a stated amount of cash, but also including two vehicles and a motorhome. The cash has a stated value of over $200,000. Each of the vehicles is estimated to be worth $15,000 and the motorhome is estimated at $40,000 for a grand total of over $280,000.

THE LISTED PROPERTY will automatically be forfeit unless someone files an affidavit claiming the property is rightfully theirs and should not be forfeited. Every fall law enforcement from Humboldt County to Marin assigns officers to dope interdiction on Highway 101. The cops say they do not profile drug dealers, but of course they do. (Frequently they profile vehicles, more than their occupants.) In a carefully choreographed charade, the officers disclaim any intent to pull over ropey haired dudes driving rental cars or pricey SUVs. Instead, the officers always say they observed the vehicle speeding, crossing over the centerline, etc. Crooks are usually dumb, so a fair number of them are caught barreling down the highway over the speed limit without current registration and working taillights. But more often they are pulled over for fitting the dope dealer profile. But dumb as they are, we doubt any dope dealers will come forward to say, in effect: "The $50,000 confiscated at milepost marker 32 in Redwood Valley was money I gave to my partner to buy 40 pounds of Mendo Mellow which I was going to distribute to the members of my medical marijuana collective at street dealer prices. I should not lose my cash just because it was seized by law enforcement in a profile stop before my partner could buy the dope, uh, I mean the medicine." And so the asset forfeiture merry-go-round rolls merrily along, financing a large chunk of Mendo law enforcement as it goes.

EVEN THOUGH TOM PINIZZOTTO was promoted out of his position as Director of Mendocino County Mental Health Director it appears he’s still got his hands firmly on the reins, whatever his new title may be.

ACCORDING to the minutes of the 10/21/2015 Mental Health Board Meeting meetings, “HHSA Staff Present: Tom Pinizzotto, MSW, HHSA Assistant Director Health Services, Stacey Cryer, HHSA Director, Bev Rae, BHRS Program Administrator, Heidi Poor, Office Assistant III, Larry Ainbinder, Compliance Manager, Todd Storti, Administrative Service Manager, Bekkie Emery, Deputy Director Social Services.” Ms. Cryer who got the new title of Mental Health Director was not listed as such in the minutes.

ALSO PRESENT were members of the “Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) Stakeholder Committee”: Mark Montgomery, Psy D, Vice President of Operations, Ortner Management Group, Susan Wynd Novotny, Executive Director, Manzanita Services, Anna Shaw, Executive Director, Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center, Tim Schraeder, Chief Executive Officer, Redwood Quality Management Group, Camille Schraeder, Chief Systems Director, Redwood Quality Management Group, Tom Pinizzotto, MSW, HHSA Assistant Director.” Listed last were “Members of the Mental Health Advisory Board.”

IN THESE MINUTES recorded at the incestuous confab, we are told that “Effective 10/19/2015 Integrated Care Management Solutions (iCMS) [an Ortner subcontractor with offices on Dora Street in Ukiah next to all the other care facilities over there] has entered into a contract with Integrated Psychiatric Services, Inc. (IPS, Inc.) to provide Medication Management and support services.” Integrated Psychiatric Services is a Connecticut based outfit, which, according to its website “is made-up of Licensed Clinicians; APRNs, MDs, LCSWs, LMFTs, LPCs. Integrated Psychiatric Services was founded on the principle of treating individuals with varying needs within the community.” The “services” IPS provides are: “Genetic testing, Medication management, individual and family counseling, couples counseling, psychological assessments, and psychiatric evaluation and with medication management as well as TELE-counseling for you [sic] convenience and privacy.”

IN OTHER WORDS, Ortner has farmed out a chunk of their work (along with another layer of administrative cost and overhead) to a separate for-profit outfit run by a Yuba City-based member of the Ortner Management Group, Mr. Jeff Payne, MBA, which in turn has sub-contracted out to a Connecticut outfit that obviously will do some kind of remote TV-psychiatric "counseling," known at the County Jail as "doc in a box." No one will ever know anything about what this involves, who it allegedly helps, or how much these multiple layers of admin will pull down from the County's mental health budget. The web of contractors, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors here is beyond belief, not to mention beyond Mendocino County. And it further complicates the already shady arrangement Mendocino County has with Ortner. If Ortner was to lose his lucrative deal with Mendo, the new contractors would have a real mess to unravel.

WE ARE ALSO TOLD of another tenant in the Old Coast Hotel, a tenant probably not anticipated when the sweetheart deal to buy the building from the Carine family was completed. “Mendocino County Hospitality Center and iCMS will co-locate in the Old Coast Hotel when renovations are completed in December or January to centralize services.”

CO-LOCATE?

SO THE Old Coast Hotel conversion will be mostly office space for mental health administration and overpaid contract managers. Which means that they didn’t need the Old Coast Hotel for "services" at all; all they needed was office space, as this arrangement clearly indicates — office space that could have been easily obtained without turning the Fort Bragg landmark into another government-funded administrative operation.

ACCORDING to the attached data charts provided by Ortner and Redwood Quality Management Services in the October meeting minutes we find out who is — and is not — getting the alleged crisis services and an explanation of why the County’s more difficult mental health “patients” (the ones who end up cycling in and out of jail) are not getting much “service.” Ortner reports that less than 10% of their “clients” are “indigent.” RQMS reports that just over 1% of their under-25 patients are “indigent.”

UNFORTUNATELY, none of this — Pinizzotto’s continued involvement, the decision to sub-subcontract through an Ortner business associate to IPS, the services being denied to the indigent, the misuse of the Old Coast Hotel, and many more important subjects — was discussed by the Mental Health Board and its numerous self-interested hangers-on, er, “stakeholders.” If you are curious about the reason for such non-discussion, simply go back to the beginning of this item and re-read the list of who was present.

ATTENTION SUPERVISOR DAN GJERDE: This administrative layering with sweetheart subcontracts to Ortner’s friends and associates in Yuba City is the main reason Ortner’s administrative rates are so high. According to Ortner’s website: “Jeff Payne is founder of Payne and Associates, an organization providing social and mental health services in northern California and blah blah blah on through a thousand self-devised atta boys.   Payne is also listed as owner of North Valley Behavioral Health, 1721 Claire Ct, Yuba City, CA 95993. North Valley Behavioral Health was the outfit that Mental Health Director (or Assistant Health and Human Services Director) Tom Pinizzotto worked for before coming to Mendocino County and engineering the privatization of Mendo’s Mental Health Care to Ortner Management Group, which, surprise! owns and operates North Valley Behavioral Health.

FROM THE NOVEMBER 20, 1965 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle: A bill of unsavory particulars by attorney Melvin M. Belli against his estranged wife, Joy, was revealed yesterday in San Francisco Superior Court. Belli’s 12-page accusation charged his wife with a long list of sins from adultery and keeping company with “a rather unusual interior decorator” to throwing worldwide tantrums and making “indecent suggestions” to comedian Jerry Lewis. Belli also claimed that his wife said that she despises him and that “all he is good for is to make money.” He also charged that she had an affair with an unnamed airline pilot while denying Belli for the past six months. Belli said his wife became intoxicated at parties and created scenes to embarrass him in New Orleans, Houston, New York, Hollywood and Vienna. In Vienna, he charged, she “deliberately extinguished a cigarette” on the back of the hand of their cute guide. Belli also charged that his wife “became drunk and abusive” at a party at Tony Curtis’ home in Hollywood and made “indecent suggestions” to Jerry Lewis. Other charges were that Joy Belli never sewed a button on his clothes and never cooked, shopped or cared for their Twin Peaks home. Not only that, Belli said, but she also told him she was going to stay married to him because he “is older and would die first.”