Mendocino County Today: Friday, Feb 19, 2016

• Strong Thunderstorms
• False Spring
• Tribal EPA
• Education Office
• Warrant Wednesday
• Look Back
• Shelter Pics
• Homeless Stats
• FB Projects
• Constitutional Crisis
• Clinton Platform
• Scalia Legacy
• Syria
• Dem Dogmas
• Green Jill
• PA Agenda
• County Investments
• Drinky Drinky
• Trumpty Dumpty
• Dem Debate
• Feb14 Catch
• Feb15 Catch
• Feb16 Catch

SIGNIFICANT WEATHER ADVISORY for southwestern Humboldt and northwestern Mendocino counties until 7:45 am PST...

At 6:57 am PST, Doppler radar was tracking a line of strong thunderstorms along a line extending from Myers Flat to 15 miles west of Albion, and moving east at 30 mph.

Dime sized hail and winds around 40 mph will be possible with these storms.

Locations impacted include Fort Bragg, Shelter Cove, Honeydew, Whitethorn, Rockport, Redway, Briceland and Ettersburg.

Precautionary/preparedness actions...

Heavy rainfall is also occurring with these storms, and may lead to minor flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways.

Isolated cloud to ground lightning is occurring with these storms. Lightning can strike 15 miles away from a thunderstorm. Seek a safe shelter inside a building or vehicle.

A READER SENDS ALONG a nice description of false spring in the Anderson Valley:

A week ago the young scene stealer, Spring, strutted into the valley, shoved El Nino and winter into the wings, and took center stage without so much as a curtsy. The performance has been a tour de force — one day cold, next day hot, following day everything in bloom. In her hat bedecked with daffodils, iris, calendula, quince, plum, peach and pear blossoms, Spring is a gorgeous strumpet.

Extroverted, blowzy self-promoter that she is, we love her but can't trust her. Winter still lurks in the wings and we've had only half of our normal rain so it's hard to be carried away by the performance. If you live in a place where Spring has sashayed on stage, clap for joy. If you're still viewing a frozen proscenium, hang in and she will come.

ADVISORY AGAINST DRIVING IN STREAMS IN WINTER

The Round Valley Indian Tribes reside in southeastern Mendocino County and their Reservation covers over 36 square miles in and around the community of Covelo in the Middle Fork and North Fork Eel River watersheds. In order to protect Reservation waters and to maintain conditions suitable for fishing, swimming and drinking, the RVIT Tribal Council has set up the RVIT Environmental Protection Agency. Tribal EPA works closely with State and federal water quality agencies and the community to protect and maintain water quality. This press release is concerning driving through rivers and streams on the Reservation, but RVIT also has concerns about such activities other areas of the Eel River basin.

Roads in Round Valley have wet fords in some locations where the RVIT and Mendocino County have not been able to afford bridge construction. Mill Creek that runs through Covelo usually has very little flow in summer, so damage from driving through a dry stream bed has been somewhat limited. However, numerous scientific studies have shown that petrochemical substances are highly toxic to fish and aquatic life and any introduction to streams of oil or other similar products is highly undesirable. Risk of introduction of oil or other products increases as people also use the stream bed as a road in summer.

It has also come to the attention of the RVIT EPA that driving in the bed of Mill Creek has not been restricted to the summer and in fact Tribal members living along the stream have reported numerous people driving in the stream this winter. In some cases vehicles stalled out due to the engine being submerged and were abandoned, which poses a major threat of introduction of hazardous substances into the water. Tribal EPA is working together with the Tribal Council, the RVIT Police Department, and other agencies to stop this practice and to set up coordination for prompt vehicle removal in the event of future problems.

Tribal elder Ernie Merrifield called the RVIT to report a car in Mill Creek in December 2015. “There is a Tribal ordinance that was passed back in the 1980s that prohibits dumping in creeks a also driving in them. People seem to have forgotten this is illegal and that it is bad for the fish and water quality.”

The RVIT works closely with the Eel River Recovery Project (ERRP), which is a basin-wide group that monitors fish and water quality and shares concerns about people driving in the water. ERRP has found a similar problem with people driving in other areas. In November 2015, the Chinook salmon run spawned in the lower Eel River because there was insufficient flow for them to migrate and access headwater tributaries. ERRP counted over 200 salmon nests or redds in riffles in the lower main Eel River below Dyerville. Unfortunately, the shallow areas selected by salmon to spawn are also the areas shallow enough to drive through and there were several locations that it was evident that people were driving over salmon nests.

RVIT and ERRP would like to educate the community on problems that can arise for fish and water quality when vehicles are operated in streams, especially in fall and winter. Anyone with questions or who wants to work on this issue can contact RVIT EPA at (707) 983-8204 or ERRP at (707) 223-7200

I DON'T DARE FEEL any schadenfreude at Mendo County School chief Galletti's DUI, because I've been behind the wheel myself in an impaired condition, not that I'm bragging. It's a stupid, dangerous thing to do. There's never any excuse for it, and the difference between me and Coach Galletti is that he got caught and I didn't.

MENDO BEING MENDO, our educational leader is not likely to suffer consequences beyond those that come with getting caught driving drunk. Of course there will be some pro forma tut-tutting from the edu-establishment as they wash down their prozac with mineral water, but Galletti will sail on in his lavishly compensated position, a position that comes with no duties, a position that anybody could occupy after mastering a few basic terms — in-service; proactive; paradigm; dedicated; conference and travel. Throw out an occasional, "Gosh, I sure love these little bastards," and you're in until you shuffle off to full-time alcoholism. (cf former superintendent Tichinin, perhaps the dumbest person ever to function as head of an educational apparatus anywhere in the English-speaking world, was living proof that literally anyone can function as Mendocino County's Superintendent of Schools.)

GALLETTI not likely to be mistaken for an intellectual, but he's not a bad guy. He just peter-principled himself into a position way above his gifts, and he's sure got lots of company in the public ed game, and that's an obvious fact. (California is neck and neck with Mississippi for the worst public schools in the country.) If he'd simply installed a cot in his office, if there isn't one in there already, Galletti could swim in the bottle for weeks at a time without anyone noticing. Anyway, in these ethically elastic times, and especially in the county that runs on intoxicants, who dares cast the first stone?

---

IF YOU'RE NEW to Boonville's beloved community newspaper, here's the oft-repeated truth — the truth, I tell you! — about the Mendocino County Office of Education.

UNTIL THE AUTOMOBILE was prevalent in the County, which would have been about 1920, the County Office of Education functioned simply and efficiently as a teacher's hiring hall. There was a superintendent and a secretary. He interviewed teachers and off they went on horseback to all corners of Mendocino County's far flung outback.

EVEN WITH THE AUTOMOBILE, The office functioned in this simple way right up through the 1950s, with the superintendent also overseeing, from his Ukiah distance, the functioning of school districts with their own school boards. And the superintendent and his secretary or two checked credentials and wrote a few checks.

SOME TIME in the middle 1960s, the office began to grow, neatly keeping pace with the social collapse of the country but the rise in experts, accruing to itself functions that had been the responsibility of individual school districts. And the federal and state governments grew larger, too, and with them came thousands of instant educational authorities, and many millions of dollars accompanied their expertise. Funny thing is, the more money spent, the fewer and fewer children who learned to read and write with anything approaching facility. Typical of the edu-expertise was the new math interlude, a decade during which our nation's future became permanently mathematically handicapped. That was followed by “whole language” which did roughly the same thing to spelling, grammar and vocabulary. Videos and computers have since taken over the classrooms. (I've never seen a thoroughly corrected, or even a cursorily corrected, language paper, and I go out of my way to check every year here in Boonville, a typical school district in, these, The Last Days.)

---

THE COUNTY OFFICE OF EDUCATION, in the middle 1970s, moved from a modest modular office on Low Gap Road to the old state hospital dairy facility at Talmage, spending several mil on a glorious remodel, converting one large room to a free lunch cafeteria for MCOE staff. The agency, like much of County government, became its own purpose.

AS MCOE glommed on to all kinds of vague state and federal funding programs, its bureaucracy grew and grew, with MCOE taking a large cut of the money to pay all these hires before passing on what was left to (all rise) "the kids."

MCOE'S RECENT HISTORY includes a superintendent jailed for stealing stuff from the agency; another took school video equipment to his bar on North State where he made pornographic films featuring underage girls; another made the newspapers when he announced that the word niggardly was an ethnic slur. A Native American was fired because he wanted ethnically-earmarked monies spent directly on Indian ed programs. MCOE installed their own Indian.

I COULD GO ON, but the only conclusion a rational person can draw from the functioning of this parasitical operation is to disband it in full realization that MCOE does not perform a single function that could not be performed better and cheaper by the school districts of Mendocino County. Superintendent Galletti, when he sobers up, might even drink to it.

MENDOCINO SHERIFF'S 'WARRANT WEDNESDAY'

ANYONE SEE MARK HUGHES ?

Mark Hughes is wanted on a $50,000 warrant for transporting with intent to sell Marijuana, possession of marijuana for sale and possession of a controlled substance.

Height: 6' 4"
. Age: 53 years old. 
Hair: Black. 
Eyes: Brown
. Weight: 190 lbs
.

If you have any information regarding this individual's location, please call MCSO Dispatch at (707) 463-4086.

NORTHCOAST LOGGING HISTORY

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/5204292-181/a-look-back-at-the

A READER REACTS TO ANIMAL SHELTER PICS AND COMMENT:

“Re: Candid camera

“No byline from your candid camera? As usual, another anonymous, opaque, incorrect (and poorly photographed) slur. How about we close the shelter until noon to the public so they never have to face the fact that animals crap and staffing is limited. OMG people grow up! This is what happens in shelters, even dogs at PAS look like this depending on the time of day. Kennels are two sided for a reason and that is NOT so they can hold two dogs. We could just euthanize half of them and the problem would be largely solved, crap on one side hang out on the other. How would that suit your undercover sleuth? Damned if you do, damned if you don't; call 'em killers then fabricate lies about care. Another hard day's work for a very vindictive group.

“PS. And you can add to the list of inaccuracies: of course kennels are cleaned on Sundays and Mondays. In fact, those are the days the kennels are deep cleaned. That your candid camera cloked in mystery letter writer would even think the shelter left dog kennels uncleaned for two days shows their obvious bias and negative imagination. As for what's going on behind the blue coverings — maybe staff are getting humor transfusions to be better able to ward off the daily, no, hourly, slander being anonymously presented on facebook along with the AVA.”

PRESS HERE FOR MENDO HOMELESS STATS

https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/reportmanagement/published/CoC_PopSub_CoC_CA-509-2015_CA_2015.pdf

BUT…

https://www.theava.com/archives/43990#2

FORT BRAGG FINISHING PROJECTS: NEEDS SEASONAL LABORERS

The newest department at the City, Administrative Services, is finalizing a number of projects – some of which will affect everyone in Fort Bragg. Downtown Wi-fi is now here! We are working with MCN to bring this free service within the downtown business district. Testing is almost complete and if the free service is utilized by the public, we will look into extending the Wi-fi signals to additional areas of downtown. We also continue to work with Mendocino TV to expand programming for the PEG station (Comcast Channel 3). In the coming weeks we will be working with Norcal communications to upgrade the City’s phone system – one which is almost 15 years old and in desperate need of the upgrade.

The City’s Human Resources office will be working with the Mendocino Coast Rec & Park District Board of Directors in the interviewing and hiring of its new District Administrator. Applications have been coming in with the deadline to submit Friday, February 12th. Other open positions at the City are seasonal laborers (to begin in May) as well as a seasonal parking enforcement attendant. Please spread the word if you know of anyone interested in these positions.

Finally, we encourage all of you to stay informed on what is happening at the City and be a part of the conversation. Visit our website to sign up for any number of email lists and alerts. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Your participation in local government helps Fort Bragg succeed as a thriving community.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I figure “Oh, it can get THAT bad.” Now we are set to have a Constitutional Crisis, even if Obama does what Reagan and Bush the First did: make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court.

The Party of Evil will block it, and its worst elements will even call for violence. The Party of Lesser Evil with dither as always, and its worst elements (my peers in academia) will say something like:

“This reifies the phallogocentric hegemonic urge, a ghost-dance of whiteness in the death throes of late-stage capitalism, atop the Cartesian-cum-Nietschean will to power, as ineluctably as white privilege is again (re)inscribed as a sort of monological palimpsest upon generations of genocide upon dark-skinned and queer bodies.”

Free beer to whomever finds a really strong active verb in there. Thus, America in decline.

(ED NOTE: 'Reifies' is weak but it's a verb. Thanks. I'll have a Boont Amber)

IN OFFICE, CLINTON PURSUED REPUBLICAN OBJECTIVES. He launched a prison-building empire, gutted welfare, deregulated the financial markets, produced astonishing tax breaks for the rich, passed a trade bill that destroyed American jobs and wrecked Mexican agribusiness, and decided there was no good reason to maintain a wall between the unscrupulous capitalist investor and unwitting depositor. After all, as the Nineties refrain went, banks can police themselves. All the while, of course, he continued to peddle his sincerest sympathies to Main Street.

— Jason Hirthler, The Clinton Monster That Won't Die

SCALIA

Editor:

Justice Antonin Scalia did not promote the concept of the Constitution's original intent. On gun control, Scalia stripped from the Second Amendment the preface to right to bear arms that says a well-educated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. Scalia instead decided the Constitution gave unregulated individuals a right to keep guns for home use.

On voting rights, he violated the express language of the 15th Amendment that gives Congress the power to protect voting rights. He did so by simply claiming that Congress had relied on obsolete facts in maintaining scrutiny over certain states and localities. Along with opening the door to voter suppression, he thus seized for the court an unconstitutional power to overturn any law the court majority decides is obsolete.

As for corporations, which weren't even in existence at the writing of the Constitution, he gave them free speech consisting of the right to spend unlimited amounts to influence elections. Not content, he and his conservative colleagues decided a corporation has a constitutional right to profess a religion on the basis of which it could discriminate.

The writers of the Constitution and its amendments would probably have been appalled.

--Peter Liederman, Berkeley

SYRIA: THE FINAL ACT BEGINS

by John Wight

In Ankara and Riyadh a decent night’s sleep must be hard to come by  nowadays, what with the prospects of the Sunni state they’d envisaged being established across a huge swathe of Syria slipping away in the face of an offensive by Syrian government forces that is sweeping all before it north of Aleppo, threatening to completely sever supply lines from Turkey to opposition forces in and around the city, and all but ensuring that its liberation is now a question of when not if.

The success being enjoyed by government forces and its allies on the ground is a testament to their remarkable morale and tenacity despite the battering they have endured over five years of unremitting conflict. Key to this reinvigoration and success in routing opposition forces – forces which only a few months ago were in the ascendancy – has of course Russian air, communications, and logistical support. Moscow’s decision to intervene at the end of September last year may have been pregnant with risk, but so far it has been validated, and perhaps even beyond initial expectations.

Moscow not Washington is calling the shots in the region now, announcing the birth of a multipolar world and marking an astonishing recovery given the parlous state of Russia throughout the 1990s as it struggled to recover from the demise of the Soviet Union. No sooner was the hammer and sickle flag removed from atop the Kremlin than a procession of crazed free marketeers descended from the United States, and elsewhere in the West, to impose neoliberal nostrums in return for an IMF loan that was necessary in order to avert complete economic collapse. The record shows that rather than this collapse being averted it was accelerated by the structural adjustment reforms implemented by Yeltsin and other Russian converts to the new religion.

In Washington at the time ‘end of history’ triumphalism reigned as oh how they laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now.

Regardless, at this stage in the Syrian conflict neither the Russians nor anybody else with a vested interest in the country’s survival as a non-sectarian state will be prepared to predict victory. Not with the noises coming out of Ankara and Riyadh over the possibility of both countries sending in ground troops.

Though they claim that any such troop deployment would be carried out with the objective of confronting ISIS, only those of a gullible disposition who could possibly believe it. In truth any such intervention would carry with it the primary goal of regime change in Damascus, staving off the complete collapse of opposition forces   in and around Aleppo, with Turkey harbouring the additional objective of crushing the Kurdish YPG forces that have been enjoying inordinate success against both ISIS in the north east and rebel forces further west as part of the general tightening of the noose around the city.

Saudi aircraft deploying to Incirlik airbase in Turkey, from where the US has been flying sorties over Syria in recent months, is a significant development, one that indicates the extent of panic in Riyadh at the way the conflict has turned against them since this latest offensive by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies began.

The days when an American president could pick up the phone to Washington’s allies in the Middle East and have his bidding done have passed. The impotence of the Obama administration in the face of these developments has arrived as the culmination of a decade and half of disastrous overreach in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving US power and credibility severely weakened. Even if the President wished to follow a vigorous and assertive policy towards the region and the conflict in Syria, the cost not just in money but political and public support at home negates it as a serious proposition. In Washington what was once known as the Vietnam Syndrome is now the Iraq Syndrome.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is acting safe in the knowledge that his popularity and support at home remains rock-solid, with a consistent approval rating of around 80 percent making him the envy his Western counterparts. It probably won’t be until historians a generation from now look at this period and crisis, doing so with the benefit of hindsight and distance, that Putin’s political, tactical, and leadership nous will be properly appreciated. The same goes for his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who’s reduced his US counterpart John Kerry to the role of a hapless apprentice looking on in awe at the finished article.

Proof of this comes with the outcome of the most recent talks on the conflict in Munich. Russia, in the person of Lavrov, arrived with its air campaign proceeding at full tilt, and left again having reached an agreement that it should continue at full tilt. The speed with which the narrative promulgated by the US and its allies has unravelled as a consequence of Russia’s presence is measured in the way they cling on to the fiction of ‘moderate rebels’. The most grievous example involved British Prime Minister David Cameron during last year’s Commons debate on British participation in the conflict. His claim there were 70,000 of these moderates in Syria, just waiting to install a nice and cuddly liberal democracy in Damascus the morning after Assad is forced out, met with howls of laughter everywhere apart from Syria, where Cameron’s ‘moderates’ have turned a large swathe of the country into a living hell.

It bears emphasizing: the only moderates fighting in Syria are the troops of the Syrian Arab Army, made up of Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Druze and Christians. They and their allies comprise the forces of non-sectarianism in the country and the region, engaged in a pitiless conflict against the most reactionary and retrograde current of extremism the world has seen since Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were rampaging across Cambodia.

For Saudi Arabia and Turkey talking tough is one thing, backing it up is a quite another. The world already got the measure of Erdogan after a Turkish jet shot down a Russian bomber a few months ago. The Turkish president went scurrying straight to his NATO allies requesting that Article 5 of its treaty, committing its members to the collective defence of each when under threat, be invoked. His request was denied by Obama and, no wonder, given he’s had reason to doubt Erdogan’s credentials as an ally since. Turkey’s attempt to paint the Kurds of the YPG as a terrorist threat to rank with ISIS is not going down well in Washington, where the Kurds are rightly viewed as an invaluable ground component of the anti-ISIS struggle and have been receiving US and Russian air support with this in mind.

With Russia’s military presence in and around Syria entrenched, and with the US increasingly disenchanted with Erdogan’s Janus-faced role in the conflict in Syria, not to mention the bellicosity of its Saudi client over Iran and a human rights record that makes every utterance in support for the kingdom a howl of hypocrisy, we are at the absolute tipping point when it comes not only to Syria’s future but the future of the region. The stakes involved leave no doubt that the mounting threat of a Saudi-led invasion of Syria speeds the hour when Iran and Russia commit their own ground troops in significant number.

The second act of the conflict in Syria is drawing to a close. The third and final act is about to begin.

(John Wight is the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir – Dreams That Die – published by Zero Books. He’s also written five novels, which are available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1. Courtesy, CounterPunch.org)

THE ISSUE IS NOT HILLARY CLINTON'S WALL STREET LINKS BUT DEMOCRATS' CORE DOGMAS

by Thomas Frank

Stunned by the rise of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has been at pains to assure the Democratic rank and file that she too understands their concerns; that just like her rival, she is capable of denouncing wealthy interests, of promising to break up big banks and even of hinting that she might prosecute powerful financiers.

After her landslide defeat in New Hampshire last week, she conceded that “the way too many things were going just wasn’t right”. There was a difference between her and the senator from Vermont, however: she was the candidate who would get things done, who could “actually make the changes that make your lives better”.

Hillary Clinton aides' Wall Street links raise economic policy doubts

These are noble sentiments. Unfortunately, what voters are rejecting is not Hillary the Capable; it is the party whose leadership faction she represents as well as the direction in which our modern Democrats have been travelling for decades.

In my younger days, the Democratic party seemed always to be grappling with its identity, arguing over who they were and what they stood for all through the 1970s, the 1980s and into the 1990s. What Democrats had to turn away from, reformers of all stripes said in those days, was the supposedly obsolete legacy of the New Deal, with its fixation on working-class people. What had to be embraced, the party’s reformers agreed, was the emerging post-industrial economy and in particular the winners of this new order: the highly educated professionals who populated its clean and innovative knowledge industries.

The figure that brought triumphant closure to that last internecine war was President Bill Clinton, who installed a new kind of Democratic administration in Washington. Rather than paying homage to the politics of Franklin Roosevelt, Clinton passed trade deals that defied and even injured the labor movement, once his party’s leading constituency; he signed off on a measure that basically ended the federal welfare program; and he performed singular favors for the financial industry, the New Deal’s great nemesis.

Among the legions of the respectable at the time, Bill Clinton’s many reversals of Democratic tradition were thought to establish him as a figure of great historic significance. A telling example of this once-common view can be found in an admiring 1996 book by the then Guardian journalist Martin Walker, who asserted that the president’s few failings were “in the end balanced and even outweighed by his part in finally sinking the untenable old consensus of the New Deal, and the crafting of a new one”.

That Clintonian consensus, which slouches on in the bank bailouts and trade deals of recent years, is what deserves to be on the table in 2016, under the bright lights of public scrutiny at last. As we slide ever deeper into the abyss of inequality, it is beginning to dawn on us that sinking the New Deal consensus wasn’t the best idea after all.

Unfortunately, focusing on the money being mustered behind Hillary Clinton by various lobbyists and Wall Street figures misses this point. The problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; it’s that many years ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street – and also to bid for the favor the tech industry, and big pharma, and the telecoms, and the affluent professionals who toil in such places.

Consider the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street, which drew so much public outrage in the early days of the Obama administration … or the revolving door between Washington and Silicon Valley, which has been turning briskly in recent years without much public notice at all. Or the deal the pharmaceutical companies got as a result of the Obamacare negotiations. Or the startlingly different ways in which Obama’s Treasury Department treated beleaguered bankers and underwater homeowners. Or the amazing double standard his Justice Department seems to have erected for dishonest mortgage financiers and dishonest mortgage borrowers. Or the way office-holding Democrats of nearly every rank throw money at the people they call “innovators” while telling working-class Americans that little can be done about their ruined lives.

The reason Democrats treat these professionals so respectfully in everything from trade deals to urban bike paths is because that is simply who the Democrats are today. Read through the party’s favorite works of political theory from the last few decades and you repeatedly encounter the same message: the highly credentialled experts and innovators at the top of the nation’s hierarchy of achievement belong there by virtue of their brilliance. That these people also happen to be colleagues and classmates of leading Democrats only reinforces the party’s identification with them. Liberals love to mock the One Percent and their self-serving ideology, but they themselves serve the needs of the top 10% just as blindly.

In truth, our affluent, establishment Democrats can no more be budged from their core dogmas – that education is the solution to all problems, that professionals deserve to lead, that the downfall of the working class is the inevitable price we pay for globalization – than creationists can be wooed away from the tenets of “intelligent design”. The dogmas are simply too essential to their identity. Changing what the Democratic party stands for may ultimately require nothing less than what a certain Vermonter is calling a “political revolution”.

(Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal, forthcoming from Metropolitan Books, What’s The Matter With Kansas? and Pity the Billionaire. Courtesy, The London Guardian.)

STAY GREEN, JILL

Dear Secretary of State Padilla,

I offer the following remarks in further support of your correct decision to remove the name of Jill Stein from the presidential contenders to be listed on the June 7, 2016 PEACE & FREEDOM PARTY's primary ballot.

Irv Sutley
Chair, Sonoma County Central Committee
PEACE & FREEDOM PARTY
Member, State Executive Committee
California Peace and Freedom Party
Past State Chair (1970-1972)
State Central Committee
Peace and Freedom Party

PS. Jill Stein should never have been placed on the Peace and Freedom Party ballot. Jill Stein is a GREEN Party member and one of their repeat candidates. The fact that Stein parrots early Peace and Freedom Party rallying cries like "Power to the People" (without attribution) does not make her committed in any way to the survival and continuation of PFP. The back story of course is that Stein's aspirations are being used cynically by a block of "officers" and their Harvard educated ally in order to stop the leading contender of the remaining three presidential candidates who will appear on our June primary ballot.

Imagine the shock when these PFP "officers" had their game plan overturned when the Secretary of State dumped Stein, Of course you have to imagine it, because the "officers" never share their secretive machinations with the membership of the State Central Committee.

Alex Padilla the Secretary of State was absolutely correct in his removal of Stein who already has her candidacy listed for yet another try on the Green Party ballot. And we have fierce words about a lawsuit to restore Stein to our ballot by the very same people who couldn't raise enough funds to retain party counsel for Peace and Freedom's ill advised participation in state court with Rubin v. Padilla

Jill Stein is the 2016 equivalent of 2012's Roseanne Barr - a party jumping candidate being imposed on Peace and Freedom registrants who have no real voice in the primary selections made by the party's Politboro, the state "officers". There is no provision in the California Elections Code (CEC) to have a Fusion approach by  allowing a candidate to appear on more than one party's ballot. Previous instances seem to have arisen earlier only from the SoS office neglect of third parties.

There was not even a straw poll done of the PFP State Central Committee members to aid in the selections. These "officers" will again in August ignore the registrants' votes and blame the losing candidates for not complying with the Byzantine by-law manipulations to gather enough convention delegates.

THE NEXT REGULAR POINT ARENA CITY COUNCIL MEETING will be held at City Hall, Tuesday, February 23, 2016, 6 P.M.

Two important Public Hearings will be held.  At 5:30 pm, there will be a closed session that will end before 6 pm.

https://files.acrobat.com/a/preview/0683eed1-70b9-4e47-8623-703bcb0176e3

COUNTY PENSION FUND SHOULD DIVERSIFY INVESTMENTS

http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/opinion/20160218/county-should-diversity-investments

THE GOOD NEWS

Scientists at the University of Southampton found drinking two additional cups of coffee a day was linked to a 44 per cent lower risk of developing liver cirrhosis, typically caused by excessive alcohol consumption.

THE LAS VEGAS TOWN HALL DEBATE between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton will be archived on YouTube just as the previous debates have been archived. It usually takes a day or two before it's posted (see link below), but you can watch previous debates right now on YouTube. Tonight's event should be listed soon as something like: "Las Vegas Town Hall Hillary Bernie Feb. 18, 2016" - good luck. I hope you get to see it.

---

The Las Vegas Sun quickly posted something like a transcript/summary:

Intro: “Just two days before Nevada Democrats caucus, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders made a final pitch to state voters Thursday night at a town hall event in Las Vegas.

The televised forum, held at the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, featured the candidates in separate, back-to-back appearances. It was moderated by NBC's Chuck Todd and Jose Diaz Balart and co-sponsored by cable news network MSNBC and Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo.

The crowd of about 350 supporters peppered both candidates with diverse questions involving issues such as immigration, the economy, Social Security and health care. Some questions — and follow-ups — were surprisingly tough, appearing to catch the presidential hopefuls off guard.

Sanders, the Vermont senator, opened the town hall question-and-answer session before the former secretary of state took her turn…”

http://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/feb/18/clinton-sanders-campaigning-for-edge-in-tight-neva/

CATCH OF THE DAY, February 14, 2016

TIMOTHY FISCHER, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ANTHONY FRANK-FREMONT, Fort Bragg. DUI.

NEAL GEVING, Brownville, CA/Fort Bragg. Drunk in public.

DANIEL HEATH, Ukiah. Controlled substance, probation revocation.

AUSTIN KISTLER, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

JOHN KOSKINEN, Fort Bragg. Shuriken (weapon), controlled substance, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

CHRISTOPHER LOPEZ, Ukiah. Drunk in public.

MICHAEL MCCLELLAN, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

ARMANDO MONTER, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI, probation revocation.

JARRETT NELSON, Ukiah. DUI.

CALVIN PIFFERO, Redwood Valley. More than one ounce of pot.

SCOTT REDDEN, Westport. DUI.

DAMON REICHARDT, Ukiah. Drunk in public.

MICHAEL RODRIGUEZ, Ukiah. DUI.

SERGIO SALAS, Covelo. Battery of peace officer, resisting,

JENNIFER SMITH, Willits. Probation revocation.

CATCH OF THE DAY, February 15, 2016

DANIEL ANDERSON, Domestic battery, probation revocation.

BRUCE BATES, Laytonville. Vandalism, paraphernalia.

ROBERT BERG, Ukiah. Under influence, resisting, probation revocation.

MARK BRANDT, Ukiah. Pot sales.

PETER COLE, Ukiah. Receiving stolen property, controlled substance, suspended license.

SAMUEL GREEN, Federal Way, Washington State/Laytonville. DUI-drugs, more than an ounce of pot, syringe.

JESUS HERRERA, Willits. Drunk in public.

JUSTIN HILL, Willits. DUI-drugs, under influence.

DOUGLAS KENYON, Willits. Court order violation.

KEVIN LANE, Fort Bragg. DUI.

GERONIMO ORTEGA, Hopland. No license, evasion, false ID.

IUTA PITTMAN, Gualala. Vehicle theft.

DAVID SIMONSON, Willits. DUI-drugs with 4 or more priors, reckless driving, controlled substance

RAYMOND SNYDER JR., Nice/Ukiah. Controlled substance, suspended license, probation revocation.

JASON TUCKER, Ukiah. Drunk in public.

JERIMIAH VALADOR, Ukiah. Vehicle theft, receipt of stolen property, suspended license.

CATCH OF THE DAY, February 16, 2016

JUAN ALVAREZ, Greenwich, Connecticut/Ukiah. DUI, resisting.

KORY ANDERSON, Ukiah. Failure to appear, court order violation.

HUGO BARAJAS-HERRERA, Ukiah. Under influence.

JAMES BROWN SR., Redwood Valley. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

JILL CLELAND, Laytonville. Domestic assault, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, criminal threats, suspended license.

ARIAN ESPINOZA, Gualala. DUI-drugs.

MICHELLE FABELA, Willits. Under influence.

MICHELLE HASELIP, Rio Dell/Ukiah. DUI-drugs.

JONATHAN HOUSE, Mendocino. Ex-felon with loaded firearm, paraphernalia, stolen property, tear gas, switchblade in vehicle, suspended license.

SOPHIA LOUMPOS, Potter Valley. Paraphernalia, probation revocation.