Mendocino County Today: Saturday, Mar 5, 2016

• Wind Advisory
• Championship Game
• Shelter Tussle
• DA's Advice
• Bingo Maniac
• Sauna Groper
• Loach Films
• Future Home
• Jaywalker Killed
• Laytonville Bust
• Crabber Bailout
• Kyle Byer
• Yesterday's Catch
• Trump Respect
• Hillary Jilted
• Del Berg
• Rising Left
• Bale Gardening
• Black Panthers
• Planning Agenda
• Quinta Brigada
• Wildlife Films
• PA Agenda
• Chinese Jews
• Drug Testing
• Quills Opening

FLOOD WATCH continues, and the National Weather Service has issued a Wind Advisory from 10 am to 6 pm PST Saturday.

• South wind 15 to 30 MPH with gusts up to 50 MPH.
• Locations include Crescent City, Eureka, Arcata, Fortuna, Kneeland, McKinleyville, Fickle Hill, Fort Bragg, Point Arena, and Mendocino.
• Highways impacted: 101, 36, 199 and 299 including Berry  Summit.
• Strong winds can make driving difficult, especially for  high profile vehicles.

For a detailed view of the hazard area visit wrh.noaa.gov/map.

COACH LUIS ESPINOZA of the about-to-be small school champs of the Northcoast, the Anderson Valley High School Panthers, writes:

Watching the Championship Game Live Online

While I don't want to discourage anyone from attending what could be the game of the year for the Anderson Valley Boys Varsity Basketball team, I don't want anyone to miss it either. Because it is the championship game and it's close to the Bay Area I learned it will be broadcast live online on the National High School Sports Network. It's not free unfortunately but a one day fee is somewhere around $10. You would want to login and pay for it the day of the event and buy a 24 period to watch. I've attached what I believe is the link.

http://www.nfhsnetwork.com/events/cifncs/7aa41724a0

Of course, everything is better live and in person so anyone that can should go. We match up well against this team and our speed will make this a fast paced game based on scouting reports coming out of other schools in our division who don't feel Emery should even be competing. I for one agree with the adage "You want to be the best, you've got to beat the best." Go Panthers. Glad you made the game the other night. Ugly but in the end a wins a win. For those traveling to the game it will be located at the Emery HS Gym 1100 47th St, Emeryville, CA. Start time for game is 7 PM. I know it's a busy weekend for the valley but I promise those that go, there will be another Variety Show next year, I'll cook spaghetti when I get back and the Quincenera can be a Sweet Sixteen. See everyone there.

Coach Espinoza

A READER WRITES:

The Ukiah Daily Journal got a few points wrong in their article on the Ukiah Animal Shelter posted in the online AVA yesterday. Most glaring is that during the Supes meeting Tuesday, the interim shelter manager was NOT responsible for mentioning a "hostile work environment" investigation in regards to several volunteers. That was Supervisor Gjerde. Also, Ms. Mountainfire was put on leave before the volunteers were restricted.

One volunteer who was mistakenly put on restriction has followed the guidelines asked of her (no participation in shelter activity.) The others have not, and continue to post unnecessary and negative stuff — their own, or reposts from elsewhere, on the NEW county facebook page, which is set up to alert people about lost dogs and cats, and showcase adopted dogs and cats and event fliers. The past couple of days on the site has seen overtly negative articles about poor sheltering practices elsewhere in the country, etc, with an all too obvious purpose.

Though the shelter is obliged to let stand on its Facebook page posts written to imply its poor work, the social media pages of the pro-outsourcing people can and do delete posts they do not like and attack community members who ask questions or disagree, calling them names, etc., all while on a public forum. The whole enterprise is like junior high school on steroids. Welcome, brave new world.

BALLOT MEASURE NOT REALLY ABOUT PUBLIC SAFETY

by C. David Eyster

Thank you for your recent coverage of my efforts, as well as those of the California District Attorneys Association, to shine a spotlight on a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” initiative that is now pending review in the California Supreme Court. In brief, the Supreme Court has been asked to determine whether the Sacramento County judge’s order was correct in finding that the proponents improperly attempted to “take cuts in line” to get a bad initiative to the November ballot. To be clear, this is an initiative that will further wreak havoc with public safety by overriding important voter-approved laws without revealing those consequences and impacts to the voters.

Unfortunately, your page 2 headline last Friday -- “DA’s successfully stall proposed public safety measure” – inadvertently clouds what is happening. The measure in question -- The Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016 -- is not a “public safety measure;” rather, it is the opposite -- a sentence reduction and prison depopulation measure cynically intended to save money for the annual state budgeting process at the expense of public safety. My colleagues and I are not merely attempting to stall the measure; rather, we are trying to educate the public with the end goal of defeating bad policy and rebuking a false and misleading ballot measure.

If approved, the measure in question would overturn four decades of laws passed by the voters and Legislature that have lowered crime rates and protected the public by keeping the most serious criminals behind bars. Additionally, the stated goal of rehabilitating inmates, although laudable, is largely illusory because the measure neither defines nor funds programs necessary to accomplish this goal.

At its core, the initiative is a throwback to past failed policies that allowed corrections officials to release felons after they had served very short periods of incarceration. These practices produced record levels of violent crime and are strikingly similar to the policies the current initiative seeks to revive.

Among its many negative impacts, the so-called Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016 would make the following changes:

• Give the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation virtually unlimited authority to reduce sentences for “good behavior” without regard for the current limits on credits approved by the voters and Legislature. The initiative would enshrine this bureaucratic power in the California Constitution and authorize reductions for all classes of crime, including murder, rape, child molesting and human trafficking.
• Grant criminals a constitutional right to be considered for parole after serving just a portion of their sentences without regard to the gravity or number of offenses committed.
• Make criminals eligible for early parole consideration by disregarding consecutive sentences imposed by a judge for additional crimes, prior offenses and enhancements. This effectively treats the worst offenders the same as first-time offenders.
• Nullify provisions of the Victims’ Bill of Rights enacted by voters in 1982, which requires enhancement of sentences for prior serious felony convictions.
• Undermine the protections of Marsy’s Law, a second Victims’ Bill of Rights enacted by voters in 2008, which requires that sentences be carried out as ordered by the court, and mandates that sentences “shall not be substantially diminished by early release policies intended to alleviate overcrowding in custodial facilities.”
• Abolish much of the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act, passed by 62 percent of voters in 2000, by restricting the prosecution in adult court of juveniles charged with murder and other serious offenses.
• Disregard the will of 81 percent of voters who enacted the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act, by allowing prison officials to reduce prison sentences of human traffickers.

The proponents should not be allowed to keep these adverse consequences hidden in the shadows. These consequences need to be openly discussed and that is what my colleagues and I will continue to do. As a group, we are committed to protecting our local communities from criminals. Serving as I do on the front line of the fight for public safety, I respectfully assert that the voters should be told the truth about the negative impacts that proposed laws will have on local public safety.

If and when this measure shows up on a clip board at a supermarket near you, it is my request that you please decline to sign the petition. Instead, save your signature for worthy causes that will not threaten or adversely impact the quality of life we all enjoy in Mendocino County.

(C. David Eyster is the Mendocino County District Attorney.)

FROM THE DESK of the SFPD's laughing policeman, Captain Silverman of the Richmond District Station: Geary & 9th Ave

The suspect boarded a casino bound shuttle bus but she did not have a valid pass. The driver asked her to pay $10 and she refused. The suspect argued with the driver and declined other passengers’ offers to pay her fare. The driver called the SFPD and officers tried repeatedly to convince the suspect to leave the bus. They explained that she would be arrested if she did not get off. When she refused, they tried to gently escort her off. She punched one officer and bit another so hard that his wound required medical attention.

Captain’s Note: Some days you take a bite out of crime… Other days, crime takes a bite out of you. Fortunately, the officer is okay. The suspect has been charged by the DA’s Office.

SAUNA GROPER

On Friday, February 26, at about 12:15 pm, Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputies responded to a reported sexual battery that occurred at a resort located in the 13000 block of Orr Springs Road in Ukiah. Upon arrival, Deputies contacted an adult female who reported she was lying down in a sauna steam room when she was inappropriately touched on an intimate part of her body by an unknown adult male. The adult female slapped the adult male's hand away and confronted him about the conduct, resulting in him leaving the sauna. Deputies searched the resort property and located the unknown adult male who was identified as being Armen Novosartov (age 44) from Novato. Novosartov was subsequently arrested for the listed charge (243.4(A) PC [Touching the intimate parts of another against their will]) and booked into the Mendocino County Jail where he was to be held in lieu of $20,000 bail.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING: Two movies from Scotland (My people! My people!)

An ultra-vi thriller called The Disappearance of Alice Creed and The Angels' Share, the former a clever kidnap saga, the latter centered, more or less, in fine whiskeys, and also heavy on the ultra-vi. Both are by the great director, Ken Loach, whose dramatic film about the Spanish Civil War, Land and Freedom, is wonderful beyond wonder. Alice Creed and Angels are also interesting as blue collar slices-of-life. I won't spoil things for you with plot lines — NPR's movie critics are so annoying in a hyper-academic way you want to track them down and… Anyway, as most of you know, the Brits (we'll include the Scots as Brits here, much as they'd rather not be included) employ actors who (1) can act (2) look like real people, not the Barbies and Kewpie Boys who dominate our movies, not that there aren't some good ones down there in Tinsel Town. And, boy, can the Scots swear!

FUTURE HOME: America's Last Newspaper

ON MARCH 2, 2016, at about 9:08pm an unidentified male was described as walking in lanes of traffic and not moving for vehicles on Talmage Road east of Babcock Road. Catherine Higgs was driving a 2004 Infiniti on Talmage Road westbound east of Babcock Road. The male was walking in the westbound lane for an unknown reason. Subsequently the Infiniti collided with the male causing moderate damage to the passenger side of the Infiniti. The Infiniti came to rest on the right hand shoulder of Talmage Road westbound. The male succumbed to his injuries at the scene. Catherine Higgs was determined to be under the influence of drugs and was subsequently arrested. Higgs was then booked into the Mendocino County Jail. The identity of the deceased pedestrian is being withheld pending notification of family. The investigation continues.

ON MARCH 1, 2016, 7:01 AM Deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office with assistance from law enforcement personnel from the Mendocino County Major Crimes Task Force, County of Mendocino Marijuana Eradication Team, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California Department of Justice executed a search warrant at a residence located in the 46000 block of Fisherman Drive in Laytonville.

During the execution of the warrant, Nicolas Scarberry, 36, of Laytonville, was seen to have a handgun in his waistband and was confronted by law enforcement personnel. Scarberry was given verbal commands, which he failed to follow. Sheriff's K-9 "Ruddick" was deployed at which time Scarberry was apprehended without injury to the K-9 or law enforcement personnel. It was later determined that Scarberry was in possession of a loaded handgun. During a search of the property personnel located over 100 pounds of processed marijuana, an active hash oil lab, processed hash oil, over 1,000 butane canisters, a small amount of heroin, numerous prohibited firearms and bullet resistant body armor.

Johnathan Jay French, 40, and Armando Quiroga, 52, both of Laytonville, were contacted at the scene resulting in them being placed under arrest for the manufacturing of hash oil and committing or attempting a crime while armed with a firearm. French and Quiroga were subsequently booked into the Mendocino County Jail where they were to be held in lieu of $50,000 bail. Scarberry was arrested for possession of hash oil, possession of a controlled substance, manufacturing hash oil, being a felon in possession of a firearm, possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony, felon in possession of body armor and being in possession of prohibited weapons. Scarberry was booked into the Mendocino County Jail where he was to be held in lieu of $100,000 bail. In addition, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office has received information that Scarberry may have been involved in the commission of numerous thefts while posing as a law enforcement official. If you have any information regarding this potential activity then please contact the Sheriff's Office tip line by calling 707-234-2100 or at crimetip@mendocinosheriff.com by email.

CASH RELIEF FOR STRUGGLING CRABBERS?

California commercial crab fishermen, many struggling to keep their businesses afloat amidst an unprecedented season closure caused by a toxic algae bloom, could see more than $130 million in disaster relief under a last-ditch federal proposal to bail them out of financial doom.

Bay Area Reps. Jackie Speier and Jared Huffman introduced the legislation this week, more than three months after commercial crabbing was shuttered by state officials due to dangerous levels of a neurotoxin found in Dungeness and rock crabs caught along the coastline from Santa Barbara County to Oregon.

“We are here today, as you can tell, surrounded by fishermen who aren’t working,” Speier, D-Hillsborough, said at a news conference Friday outside Scoma’s Restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. “To lose that money, to lose that income, is devastating.”

Speier’s office estimated that commercial crab fishermen have lost $68 million this season, while related businesses, such as restaurants that depend on selling the seafood delicacy to diners, are down about $70 million.

Last month, the California Department of Public Health green lighted recreational Dungeness crab fishing near San Francisco, Half Moon Bay and Monterey — but commercial crabbing remains dead in the water.

The bill proposed by Speier and Huffman — the Crab Emergency Disaster Assistance Act of 2016 — seeks to appropriate about $138 million in disaster funds to fishermen and small businesses, including restaurants, that were banking on the commercial season. Sen. Barbara Boxer is expected to introduce its companion bill on Monday.

On top of disaster assistance, the legislation would include $1 million for sampling and monitoring of the neurotoxin, domoic acid, which is produced from marine algae blooms. Another $5 million would go toward grants administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for research on the biotoxin and the growing blooms from which it sprouts.

But it may take quite a bit of time before anyone sees the money.

Funds from the legislation are contingent upon a disaster declaration by US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, whose office declined to comment Friday on the possibility, and a potentially lengthy appropriations process in the House and Senate.

“This is a Congress that doesn’t do a heckuva lot,” Huffman, D-San Rafael, said. “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

John Barnett, 50, a fisherman who has caught crabs commercially for 10 years, had to take out loans from his retirement account to do engine work on his boat, The Amigo. But he counts himself among the lucky ones in his hard-hit industry. Fishermen who watched the news conference at the pier said they know crabbers who needed to mortgage their homes to make ends meet.

“We’re just waiting,” Barnett said. “We want to go out and fish. No one wants a handout.”

Crustacean fishing for many is the most lucrative time of year. Many of those in California’s $90 million crabbing industry also took a hit last year with a blighted salmon season, another one of which may be around the corner.

Fisherman Jim Anderson, 64, who sits on the state’s Dungeness Crab Task Force, said about 95 percent of his income depends on crabbing. The disaster assistance, he emphasized, would “make us whole — it’s not asking for a windfall.”

The crisis in fisheries and on dinner tables originated in a massive harmful algal bloom that contains an algae by the name of Pseudo-nitzschia. The diatom is believed to produce domoic acid, which climbs up the food chain and can wreak permanent brain damage on consumers — be they Dungeness crabs, clams, sea lions or humans, for whom the illness is called amnesic shellfish poisoning.

Years before the closure of fisheries, Sausalito’s Marine Mammal Center was dealing with the biotoxin in pinnipeds.

The domoic acid cases appear to be on the rise, according to Dr. Cara Field, a veterinarian at the center. In previous years, the algal blooms spiked in the summer and autumn, she said, but it persisted year-round in 2015, leading to an intake of about 235 patients, some of whom “don’t remember where to go to be a normal sea lion,” Field said.

Cessation of commercial crabbing cast newfound scrutiny on the rise of harmful algal blooms, which have largely stumped marine scientists. Doctors like Field are hopeful research funds from the bill could help close the knowledge gap.

In the meantime, commercial fishermen are cautiously awaiting a possible go-ahead from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, despite the best part of the season, which begins in November and lasts until June, having come and gone.

Jacky Douglas, 87, who captains the Wacky Jacky and takes people salmon fishing, lamented the closure of crab fisheries.

“It’s their livelihood we’re talking about,” she said. “We’re all part of the ocean brotherhood.”

(Courtesy, the San Francisco Chronicle)

KYLE BYER, 34, of Willits, was killed Thursday night when his westbound Ford F350 truck careened off the Covelo Road and into the Eel River near Dos Rios in Mendocino County, CHP officials said. The cause of the accident is not known, but Byer's truck turned over many times on the long and steep incline between the road and the river before it landed, cab down, in the fast-flowing water.

CATCH OF THE DAY, March 4, 2016

RENEE BADGER, Santa Rosa/Fort Bragg. Protective order violation.

TABOR BAILEY, Modesto/Fort Bragg. Controlled substance, failure to appear.

DAVID BORUP, Laytonville. Court order violation, failure to appear.

ZACHARY BRINT, Ukiah. Criminal threats.

ROBERT CLARK, Boonville. Under influence, failure to appear, probation revocation.

KAILEB DAVIS, Ukiah. Battery, petty theft, misdemeanor hit&run, vandalism, drunk in public.

DAVID HERNANDEZ, Eureka/Ukiah. Meth possession, sale of meth, possession of drugs while armed, armed with firearm, concealed weapon, etc.

MIGUEL HERNANDEZ-SUTHERLAND, Ukiah. Under influence, dirk-dagger, probation revocation.

PATRICK MCCONNON, Lucerne. Drunk in public.

MARTIN PAGE, Willits. Under influence, probation revocation.

CHEYENNE SPECIEDAY, Fort Bragg. Vehicle theft, controlled substance.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

A certain Rolling Stones song has been playing in my head all day. “And Goodbye, Rubio Bluesday…..” Who will be Ruby this time around? Trump is a genius. No other mortal could take on the world the way he has. Not even Hitler. He’s ten times the man Hitler could have ever hoped to be and he has a beautiful wife and beautiful children. The entire Global Elite has lined up against him and he’s winning. Since I generally lean anti-establishment, I have to say, I respect what he’s accomplished.

HILLARY MUST BE FEELING SCORCHED. How dare some multi-married megalomaniac upend destiny and orchestrate her defeat with such aplomb when she has been a lady-in-waiting loyalist, working from Wife Of and stand-by-her-man sycophant despite his flagrant philandering to……….. an exalted station, a political force in her own right, a power dealer, pushing mind against muscle, overthrowing heads of state, producing wastelands, breaking lives, tossing human beings into hopelessness? If it’s Hillary and Donald: He. Will. Peel. Her. Skin.

— Missy Beattie

"WHILE THERE IS A LOWER CLASS, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
--Eugene Debs, Statement to the Court, Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act (September 18, 1918)

THE DEATH OF THE LAST VETERAN OF THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE

Del Berg, 100, was one of the Americans who volunteered to fight Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and he never stopped fighting for leftist causes.

by David A. Graham

Del Berg nearly died around 10 a.m. one sunny day in August 1939.

The 23-year-old American was staying at a monastery outside Valencia, Spain, when Italian bombers flew over and dropped their payload. The bombs were aimed for a nearby rail depot, but they hit the monastery instead. Berg, who was on the second floor, and the men he was with frantically climbed downstairs on a pipe. Berg was last, and it was only when he’d gotten down he realized his shirt was soaked in blood. Shrapnel had struck his liver.

That piece of shrapnel was still in Berg’s liver when he died — more than 76 years later, on Sunday at his home in California. He was 100.

Although the bombardment was not intended for Berg and his compatriots, the Italians wouldn’t have shed any tears. Mussolini’s air force was flying sorties in Iberia on behalf of General Francisco Franco, the Fascist fighting for control in the Spanish Civil War. Berg was there as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of idealistic, often far-leftist Americans who took up arms on behalf of the doomed Spanish Republic. He was believed to be the last surviving member of the brigades.

Around 3,000 young men volunteered for the fight, slipping surreptitiously into Spain. About 800 of them were killed. The war ended in 1939, with Franco victorious. He would go on to lead a repressive dictatorship until his death in 1975. Some of the brigadiers who returned led fairly straightforward mid-century American lives, but not Berg. After returning to the United States in 1939, he was drafted by the U.S. Army and sent to New Guinea. Discharged in 1942 because of his wounds from Spain, Berg promptly joined the Communist Party USA, and led a life of activism throughout his life.

Berg was an old-school leftist—the type who came by his politics not from theory but from life. Born Delmer Berg in December 1915, his father was a tenant farmer. “I was born into a very poor farm family in Southern California.” he told the Anderson Valley Advertiser in 2013. “We lived near Modesto, and I became a radical early on in life.”

A dishwasher with a union card, 21-year-old Berg was walking down a street in Hollywood when he saw a sign on the side of a building: “Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” He walked in and asked to go to Spain. They explained they couldn’t directly send him, but they helped direct him. What followed was a circuitous process involving various offices, unmarked doors, and a dour, crippled World War I veteran. Eventually, Berg took a cross-country bus to New York, and then he and other volunteers took an ocean liner to Paris followed by a broken-down bus to near the Spanish border.

In Spain, Berg helped install communication lines for anti-aircraft batteries. The war is considered a test-run for the heavy bombardment of the Second World War, and it afforded Adolf Hitler and Mussolini a chance to try out tactics on behalf of Franco. The Soviet Union aided the Republicans. (The methods were still a little rough, which is one reason the monastery was struck: “‘If you want to be safe,’ we used to say, ‘go to where the fascists want to bomb.’”) Berg also fought in the Battle of the Ebro, the war’s biggest battle.

He sometimes claimed political naïveté about the conflict—“I didn't know a damn thing politically. We were just kids. We wanted to do something to help the Spanish people” — but back in the states, Berg continued to espouse leftist and radical causes. He was vice president of his local NAACP chapter — at a time when he was reportedly the only white member. He worked with Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers. Later, he protested nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War.

During the McCarthyite 1950s, Berg said federal agents questioned his family and friends, but they didn’t ever question him directly, which he attributed to the place he lived: a trailer between a Pentecostal church and a whorehouse on the wrong side of the tracks in Modesto. “They hesitated coming to the black community,” Berg told The Union Democrat in 2007, but he did not.

In 1966, the House Un-American Activities Committee wanted to question him. “They could never find me to serve a summons,” two proudest moments of his life were “when I was elected vice president of the local NAACP, and when one of my grandsons was valedictorian at his Oregon high school graduation and said in a newspaper interview, ‘My grandfather is my inspiration. He’s a Communist!’”

Berg remained dogged in his political pursuits up until the end of his life. In 2007, he told The Union Democrat that his hearing was making it hard for him to go to meetings and speak out on the topics he cared about — including fighting for national health care and against the privatization of Social Security — but that he had to keep it up: “Sometimes, if I don’t do it, no one else will.”

In 2014, a reporter for People’s World, the digital offspring of the old Communist paper the Daily Worker, visited Berg at his self-built home. The 98-year-old demanded to hear what had happened at the last AFL-CIO convention. In an interview with The New York Times last year, he lamented his unfinished work. “It bothers me a little that at 99 you’re going to die any minute, because I have a lot of other things I want to do,” he said.

Yet it’s hard to imagine many people getting quite so much out of life as Berg did in his century. And with his passing marking the end of the survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, it’s a little harder to imagine the horror of the Spanish Civil War.

(Courtesy, The Atlantic)

THE BIG CHILL: THE DONALD, AND THE JUDAS GOAT: THE BIG PICTURE ON 2016

by Paul Street

Candidates We Hate

What could be more absurd than the longstanding died-in-the-wool neoliberal corporatist and arch-imperial war hawk Hillary Clinton striding up to a victory podium with Black, Latino/a, and Muslim people cheering backstage and signs pasted all around saying “Fighting for Us”? I don’t know…maybe the blustering, white-nationalist real estate tycoon, television bully, and World Wrestling personality Donald Trump posing as the champion of the American working man?

So here it is. The “hidden primary of the ruling class” (Laurence Shoup) has spoken with an ugly verdict this last stupefying Super Tuesday. We can smell what the Rock of Class Rule is cooking up for the latest quadrennial extravaganza. It’s emitting the usual faint odor of inverted fascism more strongly than any time in recent memory.

We can feel the Big Chill[ary] in our bones as The Queen of Chaos gears up for the ultimate quadrennial cage match with the new Latter Day Mussolini, poised to become “Silvio Berlusconi with nukes” (Roger Cohen). We are being handed a great authoritarian “choice” between two noxious, super-wealthy presidential candidates we rightly loathe. In one corner, Hillary “My Turn” Clinton weighs in with a Quinnipaic rating of 56% unfavorable vs. 39% favorable. In the other corner, The Donald tips the scales at 59% unfavorable v. 34% favorable. “You hate your selection? Too bad, ungrateful underlings! Now open wide so we can shove this slop down your throat.”

Both of the candidates exude violence and authoritarianism to a disturbing degree. Hillary says “we came, we saw, he died.” The victims of the blood-drenched madness she’s helped advance in the name of humanitarianism in Syria, North Africa, Honduras and elsewhere can testify to the misery she inflicts. Trump talks flippantly of shooting people and punching protesters in the face. He mocks the disabled, engages in the macho jeering of women, and goes off on anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican tirades. He promises to expand U.S. militarism like no previous president to “make America great again.”

Judas Goat

Oh but what about Bernie? Send the Judas Goat back to his comfortable perch as Vermont Senator for Life, I say. My distaste for Sanders has only grown with the primary contest. His doomed and nominally socialist, socialism-neutering campaign feeds the deadly illusion that progressive, social-democratic policies lack majority support in the U.S. Nothing could be further from the truth but the Bernie madness and failure helps cloak the reality. It also helps Hillary seem to have emerged victorious from a serious and democratic debate about the issues. Truly, it would have been better for her to ascend to the top of the Democratic ticket through a more transparently corporatist coronation.

Then comes the deepened sense of popular powerlessness engendered when Sanders tells his supporters to vote for Hillary, a candidate who epitomizes much of what he at least claims to be against. He promised to do this from the start, pledging not to be “spoiler like Ralph Nader.” Trump likes to tweet a quote attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” Bernie will ask millions to vote like sheep on the day he gives his concession speech.

On the very day that Sanders announced his candidacy as a Democrat (still pretending to not already have been a de facto Democrat for many years) last May, the veteran Black left activist and commentator Bruce Dixon identified Bernie in Chicago as a “sheepdog”: a fake “contender” whose basic mission is to rally understandably disaffected voters and non-voters to the dismal corporate-military Democratic Party. Sanders as much as admitted the accuracy of the designation when he gave the following debate remarks in the course of telling CNN‘s Anderson Cooper what he meant by “democratic socialism”: “The facts that are very simple. Republicans win when there is a low voter turnout, and that is what happened last November. Sixty-three percent of the American people didn’t vote, Anderson. Eighty percent of young people didn’t vote. We are bringing out huge turnouts, and creating excitement all over this country. Democrats at the White House on down will win, when there is excitement and a large voter turnout, and that is what this campaign is doing.” That sure made Frederick Engels proud.

Actually, I think “sheepdog” is too mild. Here is Wikipedia’s definition of the term Judas Goat: “a trained goat used in general animal herding. The Judas goat is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them to a specific destination. In stockyards, a Judas goat will lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared. Judas goats are also used to lead other animals to specific pens and onto trucks. They have fallen out of use in recent times, but can still be found in various smaller slaughterhouses in some parts of the world, as well as conservation projects.”

A “sheepdog” the canine just moves the sheep around in the pasture. They get to live on eating grass and getting shorn of their wool every so often. Not bad. A “Judas Goat” send other sentient beings to their death. The second metaphor better captures the Democratic Party’s time-honored role (ably documented in Lance Selfa’s excellent book The Democrats: a Critical History) as the graveyard of social movements and independent people’s politics. Maybe I’m overdoing the anthropomorphic thing (apologies to Orwell and others) but the analogy stands. The Democratic Party (with which Sanders has been strongly if stealthily affiliated since at least the early 1990s) is the great and longstanding killing floor for radical and grassroots activism and protest. Its dreadful track record as a social justice cemetery goes back at least to the Populist rebellion of the 1890s and up through the industrial workers’ movement of the 1930s and Civil Rights, Black power, feminist, Chicano/a rights, immigrant rights, and gay rights movements during and since the 1960s. The dismal, demobilizing Dems’ leaders have not been averse to combing repression with co-optation, as when Democratic president Woodrow Wilson incarcerated and deported American socialists and anarchists during and after World War One. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson harassed, infiltrated, and spied on Civil Rights and antiwar activists. Barack Trans Pacific Obama’s savagely neoliberal administration helped coordinate the violent dismantlement of the Occupy Movement (this even while “Wall Street Barry” stole Occupy’s rhetoric for deployment against Mitt Romney) by Democratic Party-run city governments across the U.S in the fall of 2011.

The “Purist” Charge

One of the more depressing parts of The Bernie Sanders Experience for an actual independent American radical socialist like (well) myself has been to be told by fellow “progressives” and even “leftists” that one is engaging in a selfish, even narcissistic exercise in “moral purity” and “extremism” when one has the decency to situate the longstanding de facto Democrat Sanders in this unpleasant history. It is apparently the duty of all serious leftists to muzzle their observations of fake-left sheep-doggery and Judas Goatery past and present. We are expected also to suppress basic reporting and commentary on some rather ugly parts of Sanders’ record, past and present, including his failures to seriously attack the American global Empire project and Pentagon system (whose massive budgetary take renders Bernie’s ambitious progressive domestic agenda largely mute); his open embrace of Obama’s Drone War; his reference to the anti-totalitarian hero Edward Snowden as a criminal; his sickening defense of Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian children in Gaza; his vote for the funding of U.S. military forces occupying Iraq (despite his admirable vote against authorizing George W. Bush to invade); his support of the Obama administration’s criminal and provocative actions in Ukraine; his equally terrible support (as a fake-independent US Congressman) for Bill Clinton’s unnecessary and criminal bombing of Serbia (urged on Bill by the Queen of Chaos in her First Lady days); his championing of the murderous F-35 Fighter Jet in the name of stealth military Keynesianism (“jobs for Vermont”); his call for the arch-reactionary and arch-fundamentalist, head-chopping Saudi Arabian regime (leading center of Wahhabist ideology) to step up its murderous military role in the Middle East (good grief!); his ridiculous defense of the abjectly corporatist and terribly misnamed Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) as a first step to real social-democratic health care (single-payer); his sad support of rampant, mind-numbing standardized testing in K-12 education; his tepid record and statements on immigrant rights and racial justice; his abject failure to seriously call the Clintons out on their full, longstanding, and deep records of corporate neoliberalism, imperialism, classism, eco-cidalism racism, and mass-incarceration-ism.

For an actual radical socialist to note all this and more terrible to mention (including not least of all Sanders’ insidious, Judas-like watering down of the meaning of socialism to connote at leftmost a hint of Scandinavian social democracy) in Bernie’s record is to be accused of parading around to “demonstrate the superiority of one’s politics.” Wow.

Racial Fail

Nothing is more pathetic perhaps than Sandernistas who say they just can’t understand why Hillary has beat Sanders so badly with the Black primary vote. If Sanders had been remotely serious about getting Black voters, he would have run early and hard against the Clintons’ vicious and deeply racist 1996 welfare “reform” (a measure that Hillary writes about with great admiration in her recent memoir). He would also have gone after Hillary’s horrible, racist remarks on Abe Lincoln and Reconstruction and at the (co-president) Clintons’ three strikes mass incarceration-ist crime bill. He would have spent more energy trumpeting the contrast between his early 1960s civil rights activism and Hillary’s racist Goldwater Girl origins. He would have talked about how the corporate-neoliberal “New Democrat” tendency that the Clintons helped champion in Arkansas meant pushing the Democratic Party further away from any substantive concern with racial justice. He would have avoided his foolish standoffishness about reparations and dropped his underlying suggestion that liberal-Keynesian economic policy will provide a nice color-blind and social-democratic solution to the nation’s stark racial disparities and oppression. There was a lot of racial justice material for Bernie to work with and an old white guy from super-Caucasian Vermont needed to work with it if he was at all serious about taking Black votes from the Clinton machine. He failed badly here.

Match-Up Fantasies

Nothing is more lame than the Sandernistas’ whining about Blacks except perhaps their citing of primary season match-up polls to tell us that Bernie would do better than Hillary Clinton against the Republican candidate (Trump, barring a coup of some kind at or before the Republican National Convention) in November. Sorry, but no. Match-up polls in the primary season are worthless, or close. The bigger reality is that a nomination of the “socialist” Sanders by the Democratic Party – always a wild progressive fantasy – would send vast piles of 1% and Super-PAC cash otherwise earmarked for Hillary to the GOP candidate. The red- or at least pink-baiting project funded by big Republican donors would likely be effective and it would get no small assist from a corporate media that has obsessed over the quasi-fascist Trump’s every word and gesture while steadily downplaying and ignoring the giant crowds turning out for Bernie’s progressive rallies.

My semi-educated guess is that the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money would prefer the – let’s be honest – moderate de facto Republican Hillary in the White House over a GOP lunatic and wild card like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. At the same time, the real masters atop the deep state financial corporatoracy love divided government and would like to keep the game going with one party in charge of the WH and the other party in charge of Congress. But not to the extent of letting a self-described socialist into the presidency.

A Radical Hillary Dividend?

Is there anything for leftists to be happy about here? Sure. The smart money still has Hillary prevailing in November and it’s better for the left to have a corporate Democrat than a corporate Republican in the White House for two key reasons different from those given in the self-fulfilling, viciously circular Lesser Evil argument many progressive intellectuals and activists (including some of the left’s best and brightest) make every four years. First, the presence of a Democrat in the nominal top U.S. job is always usefully instructive for young workers and citizens. It helps demonstrate the richly bipartisan nature of the American plutocracy and Empire. The people need to see and experience how the intolerable misery and oppression imposed by capitalism and its evil twin imperialism live on when Democrats hold the White House.

Second, the presence of a Republican in the White House tends to fuel the illusion among progressives and others that the main problem in the country is that the wrong party holds executive power and that all energy and activism must be directed at fixing that. In other words, if McCain had won in 2008, we wouldn’t have gotten the briefly remarkable Occupy Movement but rather a big Get the Vote out for Barack or Hillary movement in 2011. (It’s the same perhaps for Fight 4 15 and Black Lives Matter if Mitt Romney had won in 2012.) And here let me quote a self-declared Sandernista, Ron Jacobs, who disagrees with me about Bernie but shares my sense that it is not at all useful for left organizing to have Republicans in the White House:

“There are those who incorrectly think having an extremist like Trump or another Republican in the White House will make it easier to organize opposition, like it was during GW Bush’s regime…The problem with this line of thinking is that those numbers in the streets in the Bush years ended up being used by the Obama campaign – a fact that effectively stifled most movements for social justice once Obama was elected. If Hillary Clinton wins the White House the likelihood of a popular movement for social justice and led by the Left has a much better chance than one that merely opposes a reactionary GOP regime. Remember, it was during Bill Clinton’s term that the anti-neoliberal capitalism movement organized and grew into a massive popular and militant movement around the world.”

There is, yes, the problem of Democrats in the White House functioning to stifle social movements and perhaps especially peace activism. But there’s more good news here about a Hillary presidency. Not all Democratic presidents are equally good at shutting progressive activism down. As the likely Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein recently noted in an interview with me, Hillary Clinton will have considerably less capacity to deceive and bamboozle progressive and young workers and citizens than Barack Obama enjoyed in 2007-08. Obama, Stein notes, was fairly new on the scene. Hillary, by contrast, “has been a warmonger who never found a war she didn’t love forever!” Hillary’s corporatist track record – ably documented in Doug Henwood’s book My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (her imperial track record receives equally impressive treatment in Diana Johnstone’s volume Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton) – is also long and transparently bad.

By the Way…

Dare I say that a Hillary Clinton administration might, combined with objective circumstances of capitalist and imperial rule that are only going to get worse and worse (the profits system has nothing left to offer any but the wealthy few), help make America a left organizers’ paradise? I will also add something that the mass corporate media and the broader, Big Business-managed media won’t tell you this year any more than they did in 2012 or 2008 or 2004 or 2000: if you want to vote (and it’s certainly understandable if you don’t) for a presidential candidate who is neither a lesser nor a greater evil next November, guess what? That candidate – imagine – will be on your ballot, even if kept out of the officially sanctioned debates. Her name is Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose core platform includes a thoroughly do-able program to save livable ecology (the biggest issue of our or any time, by the way) while creating millions of good paying and socially and environmentally-necessary jobs, slashing the disastrous Empire budget to help pay for programs to eliminate poverty, health care insecurity and eco-cide. Now that Bernie is done for (and he is, despite the denial that prevails among his more passionate supporters), those who want to use the presidential ballot as a vehicle for progressive change (I’m more of a social movement type but I always take five minutes once every four years to vote for the most viable and sensible third party left candidate) might want to think outside the two party box that way next fall.

(Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014. Courtesy, CounterPunch.org)

CREATE A GARDEN ANYWHERE WITH STRAW BALES

by Melinda Myers

Add productive garden space and raise your planting bed with straw bale gardening. This technique allows gardeners to create raised bed gardens on a patio, lawn or any area with poor compacted soil. Straw bale gardening has been around for centuries, but thanks to Joel Karsten’s book “Straw Bale Gardens” it has gained new popularity.

All that is needed are a few straw bales, fertilizer, a bit of compost and time to condition, plant and water the garden.

Be sure to purchase straw bales made from alfalfa, wheat, oats, rye or other cereal grain that have less weed seeds than hay. Start a few weeks before the designated planting date.

Place the bales in their permanent location with the cut sides up and twine parallel to the ground. Once you start the condition process, the bales will be very heavy and hard to move. When the bales are in place you are ready to start the conditioning process. This is done to start the inside of the straw bales composting, so they’ll support plant growth.

On day one, spread fertilizer over the top of the bale. Use a ½ cup of a complete garden fertilizer or three cups of an organic fertilizer like Milorganite (milorganite.com). Then completely moisten the bale. The organic fertilizers feed the microorganisms that help decompose the straw into a nutrient rich planting medium.

Thoroughly soak the bale everyday. On days three and five you will add more fertilizer at the same rate used on day one.

Days seven through nine use half the rate used on day one. This would be ¼ cup of a complete garden fertilizer or 1 ½ cups of an organic fertilizer. Thoroughly water the bale each time.

On day ten you will add one cup of 10-10-10 or three cups of an organic fertilizer rich in phosphorous and potassium. This completes the conditioning process.

Bales treated with a complete fertilizer should be ready to plant. You may need to wait a few more days when using an organic fertilizer. The inside of the bale should be the temperature of warm bath water or cooler for planting. If it is hotter than this, wait for the bale to cool a bit before you plant.

Use a trowel to pry open a hole in the bale. Place the plant in the hole and cover the roots with potting mix or compost.

Create a planting bed for seeds by covering the bale with a one- to two-inch thick layer of planting mix. Follow the planting directions on the back of the seed packet.

Regular watering is critical for success with this method. Soaker hoses or drip irrigation make this an easier task. You can also use gallon milk jugs with holes in the bottom or inverted two-liter soda bottles placed near the base of each plant to provide water where it is needed.

Give your straw bale garden a nutrient boost about once a month or as needed throughout the growing season.

Follow these steps and you’ll be well on your way to growing a productive straw bale garden to enjoy throughout the season.

Gardening expert Melinda Myers has more than 30 years of horticulture experience and has written over 20 gardening books, including Small Space Gardening and the Midwest Gardener’s Handbook. She hosts The Great Courses “How to Grow Anything: Food Gardening For Everyone” DVD set and the nationally syndicated Melinda’s Garden Moment TV & radio segments. Myers is a columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine and spokesperson for Milorganite. Myers’ website is www.melindamyers.com.

“THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION"

by Big Man Howard

The film by producer Stanley Nelson, entitled "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution" is a well-produced documentary with a specific focus. Nelson makes good use of footage of actual events and music from the era to serve as both a background and accompaniment for the main ingredient of this film - comments from a number of former Black Panther Party members, featuring mainly some of the so-called "rank and file" members. This is, in and of itself, a unique achievement, as most other films have never done this, but solely relied on interviews with the leaders. This particular film concentrates on giving the viewer a closer look at The Black Panther Party, from a particular perspective. It, by no means, even begins to tell the "whole story" of The Black Panther Party. No one film can do that - the Black Panther Party was the most revolutionary and progressive group of freedom fighters of modern times. I think that Stanley Nelson produced the best film he could with the information, materials, time and money that he had to work with. He also did a good job of getting the film out there to allow as much of the public as possible the opportunity to see it. To critics and detractors of Nelson and the film, I say this: There is indeed much more of this story to tell, including more of the vital and innovative community programs and the many accomplishments of The Black Panther Party. There are still so many of our comrades locked up in dungeons for more than three and four decades. There are still many more former Black Panther Party members who have important stories to tell and I would encourage future film-makers to seek information from them while they are still around.

Some of what we did: The Black Panther Party engaged and worked to solve the problems of poor and oppressed people in America and around the world. We did this through very hard work, commitment, dedication and solidarity. We started with feeding the hungry through our free food programs, then came our free clothes and shoe programs. These programs led to more - free plumbing services, free ambulance services and free medical clinics. We organized rent strikes to force landlords to remove lead-based paints from tenant housing. We escorted the elderly to cash their checks and to the store, etc. We gave rides to people who needed transportation to see their loved ones in the hell-holes this government calls "prisons".We lent support and joined the farm workers in their struggle for fair wages and working and living conditions. With the Black Panther Party Newspaper as an informative tool, many in the world were educated to the evils of wars created by capitalistic and corporate greed and racist aggression against countries of people of color . We exposed the profiteers of these wars and awakened people to the fact that poor and disadvantaged youths, predominantly those of color, were the ones fighting and dying in these wars. We fully supported the student/anti-war movement against the Vietnam War and supported other movements which molded themselves after the Black Panther Party - The Brown Berets, AIM, The Young Patriots and others. With the need for improved education, the Black Panther Party joined with students across America in demanding that Black, Asian, Latino and Native-American history courses be taught in colleges and universities and that degrees be awarded in these studies. So many programs now had their beginnings stem from what we in the Black Panther Party fought for. Taking this a step further though, to combat the sub-standard education being given to poor children in public grade schools in our communities, some Black Panther Party Chapters started their own community schools. These were called Liberation Schools and they were free.

On the international level, the Black Panther Party was followed by and interested, thousands world-wide and speakers from the BPP were sought after.

Our newspaper made this possible and our Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas, was an integral part of all of that. His art reflected the conditions of poor and disenfranchised peoples of color here and everywhere. It spoke to people in Asia, Africa and Latin America. To this present day, Emory is in demand and travels extensively, lecturing on his art and how it reflects the world we live in. Today's crises of police killings of Black and other disenfranchised people is nothing new. This was our struggle - the Black Panther Party formed to put a stop to this some fifty years ago. The fight was not just about guns and confrontations but it was about making efforts to change laws and the system that breeds brutality by so-called law enforcement, along with the militarization of police.

We wanted mandatory Community Control of Police - the Black Panther Party worked very hard and got Community Control of Police put on the ballot in Berkeley, CA. It did not pass but it educated the community and showed that there is strength in unity. So these are some examples of what other films on the Black Panther Party could use as material to educate people and disperse more knowledge around the world. For me, the community programs and the overwhelming desire to serve the people, the struggle of the masses world-wide, how important it is to identify with their struggles and the absolute belief that power lies in the hands of the people, that's what it is all about. Let's have some films which aren't about personalities and super-stars but about what dedicated people working together can achieve for humanity.

--Elbert "Big Man" Howard, March 1, 2016 Santa Rosa, CA

(Elbert "Big Man" Howard is one of the six founding members of the Black Panther Party and is an author, lecturer and community activist in Sonoma County.)

MARCH 17, 2016 MENDOCINO COUNTY PLANNING COMMISSION AGENDA

http://www.co.mendocino.ca.us/planning/meetings.htm

Only one item on the agenda:

CASE#: R_2015-0003
DATE FILED: 5/28/2015
OWNER: CANANDAIGUA CALIFORNIA ACQUISITION
APPLICANT: CANANDIAGUA WEST INC.
AGENT: NORMAN L. DEVALL
PROJECT COORDINATOR: FRED TARR

REQUEST: Rezone of approximately 27.7+/- acres from General Commercial (C2) to General Industrial (I2).

ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINATION: The project was fully evaluated by the Ukiah Valley Area Plan EIR, no additional analysis is required {CEQA Section 15162(a)}.

LOCATION: 0.5± miles north of the City of Ukiah, lying on the east side of North State Street (CR 104), 0.25 mile north of its intersection with Orr Springs Road (CR 223). Located at 2399 North State Street; APN 169-242-11 and -12.

RECOMMENDED ACTION: Recommend approval to the Board.

LOUIS BEDROCK WRITES:

Cartoon plus commie anthem. Try listening to this without standing and raising your fist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQbXO828Vio

INTERNATIONAL WILDLIFE FILM FESTIVAL’S POST-FESTIVAL TOUR

The RVOEP Wildlife Film Festival will screen two powerful films on Friday, March 11th at the Ukiah Civic Center.

Festivities will start at 6:15 p.m. with live bluesy rock music provided by Kim Monroe. Films begin at 7pm.

"Saving Africa’s Giants" (42 min) was nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding nature programming and features Chinese basketball star Yao Ming, who joins forces with WildAid to educate the public about the dire state of rhino and elephant populations resulting from illegal ivory and horn trade.The film follows Ming as he travels to Africa to witness the struggle of orphaned rhinos. Due to the subject matter, parental discretion is recommended. "Tigress Blood" (42 min.) is a coming-of-age story of four sister tigers who battle each other for dominance over their homeland in the forests of Central India. As they struggle to survive, they make a startling choice: join forces and hunt as a pack. Their decision culminates in a never-before-filmed hunt of an unusual prey. Proceeds from the film festival are an important funding source for the Redwood Valley Outdoor Education Project (RVOEP), a special program of the Ukiah Unified School District that provides outdoor environmental education programs to over 2,000 students a year. The Ukiah Civic Center is at 300 Seminary Ave. Tickets are available at the Mendocino Book Company and at the door for a suggested donation of $10 for adults and $5 for children. The film fest continues on Friday nights through March. For a full program and more information about the RVOEP visit its website, www.rvoep.org. For further inquiries, contact Maureen Taylor, RVOEP Education Coordinator, at 489-0227.

Roberta Werdinger
Writer, Publicist, Editor
RWerdinger@Yahoo.com

SPECIAL MEETING FOR MARCH 8, 2016 AT 5 PM!

CITY OF POINT ARENA CITY COUNCIL AGENDA

https://files.acrobat.com/a/preview/44d53d62-5a78-4074-aaca-2da54d142628

I WANTED TO SHARE. When I was producing Suns of the Dead, I met a woman, Iris Rosenthal, Chinese. Her father had gone to China, Married a Chinese woman and opened a plastics factory. Iris had been adopted and worth billions. She had offered to fund a tour on the East Coast. My husband couldn't handle the pressure that comes with public interest so this became the end for the band rather than the leap to national stage as I had worked for. I enjoyed Iris on many levels and I learned a lot about Chinese Jews. Well, five Chinese Jewish women have just made history and this is a 6:48 video of their arriving in Israel. I'm sending it because I appreciated the gentleman who worked to bring the Chinese women to Israel explains a little history of the Chinese Jews, which Bruce, some of the videos of ceremonies and their life style, and where they live where tourists don't go.. it's amazing and beautiful. It's a youtube, and for that I'm sorry, but how else can I show you if you would like to see.. most people have no idea these people exist. — BB Grace

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmcaAfE8GBw

IS BIG PHARMA TESTING YOUR MEDS ON HOMELESS PEOPLE?

https://medium.com/matter/did-big-pharma-test-your-meds-on-homeless-people-a6d8d3fc7dfe#.kvpoqy6wb

GALA OPENING OF QUILLS ON SATURDAY!

Celebrate the opening of the first play of our 2016 season, QUILLS, by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Doug Wright. Enjoy delectable small bites, free-flowing champagne, and authentic French pastries. Visit with cast and crew after the performance! The evening begins at 7:30. Reservations are strongly recommended. Tickets are just $35 per person. Please phone the box office, 707-937-4477 to reserve your seat! For information about the play, please see our website http://mendocinotheatre.org/quills/