PLANNING DIRECTOR Nash Gonzales reported to the Planning Commission on the rebuilding in Redwood Valley since last fall’s catastrophic fires: “So far we have issued 73 building permits, 18 are in queue. I always talk about manufactured homes and stick built homes. 38 of them are manufactured homes for single families and the rest of the permits are for garages and outbuildings. So every day we continue to see more and more permits coming in.” According to Calfire there were 546 homes destroyed in the Redwood Complex fire, so that still leaves 508 to go just to recover lost housing stock — and lost property taxes.
GOODBYE, EUREKA, an on-line comment: “I don't hate it here but I am one of the ones leaving soon. Even though I have done reasonably well financially and in every other way, the economy here is marginal at best. The best and brightest of our young people have been leaving for years. The drug culture here is out of hand. Yes it is a beautiful area but the homeless issue is out of control, as is the crime. It is embarrassing to drive down Broadway. No end in sight either. Yes, I will miss some things about this area but this county has been going downhill for years. I am heading to greener pastures.”
HAD TO LAUGH at NBC TV'S interview with the head moose at the Lake County Moose Club, again pressed into service as a fire refuge, this time for the Pawnee Fire: "The Red Cross wants us to close our bar down. That's not going to happen," declared the head moose. Absolutely correct. What's a Moose Club without a bar?
RECOMMENDED READING: “Grant,” the new bio of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow. It's too bad Grant didn't directly succeed Lincoln, because under the assassinated Lincoln’s vice-president and successor, the retro Andrew Johnson, much of what had been won in basic human rights for black people was steadily undone by the backwards-looking Tennessean. When he was elected president, Grant deployed the Army to beat down the Klan and generally behaved in the principled manner utterly lost under recent American presidents, although a case can be made, kind of, for Jimmy Carter. Grant almost died a pauper; he was saved by his memoirs written while he was dying of throat cancer, which became a best seller, bailing him and publisher Mark Twain out of financial ruin.
THE SIMILARITIES are striking between the violent public opinion during the run-up to the Civil War and Trump/anti-Trump feeling we see and hear everywhere today. Chernow, incidentally, also wrote the Hamilton bio that was turned into the hit musical. Somehow I don't see Grant, a much more interesting man, being turned into song and dance routines, but then it took real genius to convert Hamilton into a trendo-groove-o must see, and whatever else you might say about our fine, fat population we produce geniuses galore.
‘SERVICE.’ There's a word wayyyyyy past its pull date, especially as applied to government officials and professional officeholders, as if these people haven't profited mightily from their "service."
HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT the two Central American countries with leftist governments — Costa Rica and Nicaragua — are never mentioned as contributing to the northward immigration crisis?
THE SUPERVISORS have issued a proclamation heralding the 100th anniversary of the Farm Bureau in Mendocino County. Since the average audience at Supe's meetings, live and on-line, averages at best 25 Mendo people, proclamations outta the County's leadership are much like the Zen koan: If a tree falls in a forest, who hears it and who the hell cares? Audience size notwithstanding, I'd amend the proclamation to read, "The Mendocino County Farm Bureau: Wrong on Every Public Issue Since 1916." Of course, if you can think of an issue our noble sons and daughters of the soil have been right about, please write in to set us straight.
CHANNEL 7 TV NEWS at 4pm Wednesday, began with a woman in an evacuation center who'd lost her home in Lake County's Pawnee Fire. She said she'd wanted to buy fire insurance but nobody would sell it to her. All she had left in the world, she said, were her cats.
A DISSIDENT DEMOCRAT named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has knocked off Joe Crowley in a New York primary. Crowley was so entrenched in office since 2004 he was in line to succeed Nancy Pelosi as leader of the collabo wing of the party. Supported by Big Democrat, Crowley out-spent the Bernie supporter Ocasio-Cortez 18-1, inspiring Orange Man to this tweet: "Wow! Big Trump Hater Congressman Joe Crowley, who many expected was going to take Nancy Pelosi's place, just LOST his primary election. In other words, he's out! That is a big one that nobody saw happening. Perhaps he should have been nicer, and more respectful, to his President!" Ocasio-Cortez's platform was identical to Bern's, right down to MediCare for all and practical assistance for struggling families.
HERE on the "progressive" Northcoast, a clear majority of Democrats also supported Bernie, and clearly yearned for the party to be at least as relevant as the New Deal Democrats of the 1930s. Instead, earlier this month, us North Coast Demos re-anointed the more of the same Democratic officeholders foisted off on us by Big Demo — that trio of uninspiring hacks funded by the party and, locally, the wine industry. Unfortunately for us, we don't have dissident Democrats active in the party who could take on Huffman, McGuire and Wood. Up and down the Northcoast, current Demo officeholders are a dreary collection of Huff-clones, so timid they won't even come out for Single Payer.
WEDNESDAY MORNING ON NPR, O-C was asked this typically craven question from NPR hack Steve Inskeep:
Inskeep: “Is there any danger to Democrats in seeming too extreme in their opposition to President Trump - calling for impeachment, for example, or shunning his aides in public, as people have done recently?”
Ocasio-Cortez replied: “No. I don't think so. I mean, you look at the extremity of this current administration, and trying to instill fear or spook the Democrats that are trying to hold the unconscionable actions of this administration accountable — it is not extreme. It is clarity.”
I WAS HAPPY to encounter the following reference to my late friend, Joe Neilands, in Seymour Hersh's just published memoir, "Reporter." Joe spent many happy days at the home he and his wife Juanita built in the hills east of Philo. He retired from UC Berkeley where he was a professor of bio-chemistry and, as it happened, a faculty advisor to Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize laureate and also a part-time resident of the Anderson Valley. Then-Governor Reagan tried mightily to get Joe off the UC Faculty where, prior to Vietnam, Joe had refused to sign the state-mandated loyalty oath required of all state employees. Joe won that one. Always a fighter for the just cause, Joe agitated throughout his life for PG&E to become a truly public utility. His life could serve as a textbook for effective "activism" of the most principled type:
“HERSH: After a speech in Berkeley in early 1969, I was approached by Joe Neilands, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, who had traveled to North Vietnam in 1967 and participated in the questioning of three American GIs at the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal that took place that year in Stockholm and near Copenhagen. Neilands, who passed away in 2008, gave me a published copy of the tribunal’s proceedings, which included devastating testimony from the three American GIs. One of them, David Kenneth Tuck from Cleveland, Ohio, who served as a specialist fourth class with the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division, told of freewheeling raids on villages in suspected Vietcong (Vietnamese communist, or VC) territory in which there routinely were what he called “mad minutes” during which all Americans involved—including machine gunners on tanks—opened fire and poured “everything that they had into this village, because . . . we had assumed that until proven otherwise every Vietnamese was a VC.” Tuck’s public testimony was summarized by the AP and relayed around the world, but only a few American newspapers published the dispatch, and I found no evidence of any effort by the American media to follow up on Tuck’s assertions. More typical of the response was a venomous attack on the tribunal by C. L. Sulzberger, the Times foreign affairs columnist, that personally vilified Russell, a Nobel Prize–winning philosopher and mathematician, who was then ninety-four years old. Russell, wrote Sulzberger, had “outlived his own conscious idea and become clay in unscrupulous hands.” The tragedy of the tribunal, Sulzberger added, “cannot fairly be laid at the door of the wasted peer whose bodily endurance outpaced his brain.”
ATTENTION APPROPRIATE POLICE! South Coast Little Leaguers lose but got to go to Hooters.
FROM LAST THURSDAY MORNING'S PRESS DEMOCRAT: "The surprise win for a 28-year-old Latina activist over a 10-term incumbent in a New York congressional Democratic primary Tuesday may simply be down to the differences between the two candidates as people, Rep. Jared Huffman said Wednesday. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a political newcomer who stunned Rep. Joe Crowley in the Queens-Bronx district, came across as “an extremely compelling candidate” — a young, hard-working, articulate woman — “in a year when people are looking for change,” said Huffman, a San Rafael Democrat who represents the solidly blue North Coast. News reports cited Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist affiliation and far-left platform, promoting universal health care and abolition of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But Huffman said she and Crowley, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, were not far apart on the issues."
TALK ABOUT not getting it. The diff was two people as people? But leave it to the PD to out-dumb Huffman, who at least pointed out that Crowley and O-C weren't all that far apart on the issues. But the paper's writer, Guy Kovner, blithely contradicts himself with a characterization of O-C as "far left."
SHE'S a Bernie democratic socialist, not a Leninist. Democratic socialists are hardly the "far left." Compared to the squishy party hack Huffman and the Billery wing of the Democratic Party, O-C is certainly on the left, but for all you slo-learners and deliberate obfuscators out there let's walk through the basic distinctions one more time:
STALIN and the Bolsheviks were the far left on the left-right spectrum. They banned capitalism and nationalized all property right down to the family cow. By force. North Korea is the last "far left" state in the world of Stalinist type.
THE BOLSHIES were opposed by the Mensheviks, who were also socialists but held out for a peaceful transition to beneficial public programs. The Bolsheviks murdered all the lead Mensheviks who didn't flee. The basic Bolshevik-Menshevik distinction obtains today, although there are very few Bolshevik, Stalinist-like political groupings left in the world. The primary difference between the left of the socialist type and, say, liberals like Jaren Huffman, is that socialists don't compromise, the good ones don't anyway. Bernie, for example, is more of a liberal than a socialist, but in the American context he's routinely libeled by the Koch Bros and other One Percenters as the "far left." If Americans woke up tomorrow in the country envisioned by O-C and Bernie they'd think they'd died and gone to heaven. The Koch Bros and the One Percenters would whine about high taxes and re-locate with their money to Switzerland, and the only people still listening to them would be Huffman, the Press Democrat and Trump.
MARILYN DAVIN OBSERVES: “...that the same ‘liberals’ who so passionately destroyed the visual history of the South chose as last week’s Pride Week symbol the pink triangle that identified homosexuals in Nazi Germany. Several publicly gushed about it as a reminder of crimes past. That’s just what I would have told my kids if we walked by a statue of Robert E. Lee...”
THE CLOSE VOTE FOR MEASURE C — the Coast Hospital parcel tax that barely passed in the final count — and the accompanying recount (which we understand is underway but so far no changes) reminded us of the November 1992 race between incumbent Fourth District Supervisor Liz Henry (a good supervisor, one of Mendo’s best over the years) and challenger Heather Drum which had with Henry winning by one (1) vote in the initial count. Drum called for a recount in which Henry won by a couple more votes. Drum then sued saying that some of Henry’s voters were not legitimate Fourth District voters, either not having their primary residence in the Fourth District or not living there for the required 30 days, or that then-County Clerk Marsha Wharff had incorrectly tossed out some of Drum’s voters for similar reasons. One of those disputed votes was Coast Planning Commissioner and Drum-voter Nancy Barth whom Wharff had ruled wasn't living in the Fourth District since she maintained a home in Mendocino. Barth apparently lived (and voted) part-time in Fort Bragg with a relative. It was all very contentious. Wharff had ruled that 22 votes, including Barth's, for Fourth District Supervisor were not from valid Fourth District residents, which is how those 22 got rolled into Drum's lawsuit for careful scrutiny. After several weeks of doubt, the court ultimately upheld Wharff’s count and Liz Henry served as Fourth District Supervisor for another term, from 1992 to 1996.
AS FAR AS WE KNOW, the recount now underway for the Coast Hospital Parcel tax, which apparently won by seven votes, is being paid for by Karen Calvert of Albion who owns several timber parcels which would be individually subject to the new parcel tax funding Coast Hospital. MRC owns parcels in the Coast Hospital District as well. Calvert (who may be getting some support from MRC) has put up several thousand dollars to finance the recount. But the recount will only examine ballots, not envelopes (which would be a separate question with substantially more cost to check voter validity and residency). So far nobody has claimed that any of the Measure C votes (pro or con) were submitted by other than legitimate Hospital District resident voters.
FORT BRAGG should sit down before reading this front page headline from the Curry Coastal Pilot out of Brookings, Oregon: "Retiring manager lauded. Gary Milliman named city manager emeritus, party set Thursday afternoon…"
MILLIMAN or, as he was popularly known when he functioned as Fort Bragg's city manager, "Gary Middleman," functioned as errand boy for the same Fort Bragg businessmen responsible for the Fort Bragg Fires of 1987, and answered to a Fort Bragg City Council several of whose members were granted no payback loans from the criminals then calling Fort Bragg's tune. I laughed, though, when I saw this story accompanying Milliman's Oregon send-off: "Curry County Board of Commissioners. Boice facing paying back travel expenses…"
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE WEEK
If someone feels it’s hopeless or too late, I can’t really argue with them, but until I know it’s totally hopeless I’ll support trying. I limit my CO2 emissions to a fair extent but am nowhere near hair-shirt level, so can claim no virtue. My life is still comfortable. And I know full well that if it comes to lifeboat time, when push comes to shove people pushier and shovier than me will get in the lifeboat before me, even though I’ve tried to put their need to get into a lifeboat at all back as far as possible, but that’s life. You can only live it the way you see fit. Changes need to be made at local and national level – some of us doing without cars and planes, keeping our heating turned down or off as much as we can in winter, and buying less stuff isn’t going to save the world. It’s very ‘light green’. I can look at a wealthy person with half a dozen children I know will all grow up to have fancy houses, fancy cars and fancy holidays and I might ask myself why I’m bothering, but I’d feel a hypocrite if I didn’t (bother).
As the late Prof. Mackay used to say (author of ‘Renewable energy without the hot air’), every little helps – but only a little.
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