Mendocino County Today: Monday, Aug. 27, 2018

• Cache Fire
• Complex Updates
• Little Dog
• Flea Market
• Baseball Season
• Ed Notes
• Disaster Preparedness
• Campesino
• Home Invasion
• Yesterday's Catch
• Docile People
• Pink Houses
• Superdelegate Reform
• Irresponsible Logging
• Elites Grifting
• Dress Code
• Craig Removed
• John McCain

ANOTHER LAKE COUNTY FIRE started Sunday evening east of Clearlake Oaks. Called the Cache Fire, Calfire reported at 7:20 this morning that it is 120 acres and 30% contained.

lakeconews.com/index.php/news/57567-firefighters-hold-down-acreage-raise-containment-on-cache-fire

RANCH FIRE STATUS, Sunday night. Now over 402,000 acres. Still at 67% containment, meaning it’s growing at the same rate the containment lines are drawn.

Calfire: Firefighters continue to make good progress on the Ranch Fire. Increased acreage is due to completed firing operations in the northeastern areas. Firing operations are expected to continue on interior portions of the burned area focusing on reinforcing containment in the northeastern areas of the fire as weather conditions permit. Crews continue to build and reinforce containment lines and mop up throughout the north and northeastern portions of the fire area. Firefighters continue with fire suppression repair efforts in the northwestern portions of the fire. The southern portion of the fire remains in patrol status as crews continue with suppression repair and mop up.

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US FOREST SERVICE MENDOCINO COMPLEX NEWS RELEASE — Sunday morning, August 26, 2018

Ranch Fire:

Interior burning increased the fire size by 13,994 acres in the last twenty-four hours. The fire is now estimated at 392,767 acres is 67 percent contained. Currently there are 3,114 personnel assigned to the Ranch Fire

East Zone:

On Saturday, firefighters continued to make good progress, strenghthening containment lines and moving toward completion of firing operations. Large interior stands of fuel exist between and are expected to produce smoke as they burn off.

West Zone:

Firefighters are engaged in suppression repair efforts and mop up. Heavy equipment operators are constructing water bars in an effort to prevent erosion. Firehose is being pulled out of the area as hot spots are extinguished.

Felling teams with chainsaws are cutting down hazardous trees to make conditions safer for crews working in the burned area and chipping crews are removing vegetation that was cut to widen containment lines. This work will continue throughout the weekend.

On Saturday, Lt. General Jeff Buchanan, commander of United States Army North, visited soldiers of the 14th Brigade Engineer Batallion based out of Joint Base Lewis-McCord, Washington. Two hundred thirty-three soldiers from the brigade are assigned to the Mendocino Complex. Lt. General Buchanan received an operational briefing from California Interagency Incident Management Team 3 commanders prior to visiting the line.

All Lake County mandatory evacuations have been reduced to evacuation advisories. This includes Lake Pillsbury and surrounding areas within the Mendocino National Forest. On Sunday, only landowners showing proof residency at roadblocks will be allowed access to their property. Starting Monday, Aug. 27 all residents must obtain an access permit from the Mendocino National Forest, Upper Lake Ranger District, 10025 Elk Mountain Road, Upper Lake, CA 95485, phone: 707-275-2361 in order to legally enter the Ranch Fire Forest Closure Area.

Residents allowed into the area must travel to and from their property directly. Law enforcement will be patrolling the area to assure that the conditions of permits are followed.

Fire Area Weather: A persistent marine influence is expected to remain over the fire area Sunday and into next week creating cooler temperatures and higher than average relative humidity. Temperatures will be in the low to mid-80s with light southwest winds.

Smoke: Haze and smoke will fill the skies again in regional communities surrounding the Ranch fire. The majority of impacts will be felt in the Stonyford and Elk Creek areas as dense smoke drains downslope from active fire to the west. Communities such as Potter Valley and Covelo should have heavy smoke midday as the inversion breaks and mixes smoke aloft down to the ground before improving again in the evening. This trend will also occur in the Clear Lake area where periods of worsening air quality is expected during the day. Generally moderate air quality will continue in outlying regional communities, such as Ukiah and the Sacramento Valley.

Below is the link to the smoke forecast: wildlandfiresmoke.net/outlooks/MendocinoNationalForest-SacramentoValleyArea

* * *

CALFIRE'S MENDOCINO COMPLEX UPDATE (Monday 7am): 451,388 acres; 83% contained; 318 structures damaged or destroyed; 3 firefighters injured, 1 killed.

"The Ranch Fire has increased acreage due to successful firing operations in the northeastern areas of the fire. Crews continue to reinforce containment lines and mop up throughout the north and northeastern portions of the fire area. Smoke is expected to be visible on the interior portions of the burned area as unburned pockets of fuel may burn with lower humidity and warmer conditions approaching. Firefighters continue with fire suppression repair efforts in the western and northwestern portions of the fire. The southern portion of the fire remains in patrol status as crews continue with suppression repair and mop up."

(click to expand)

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “Sunday was National Dog Day, but do I get the day off? Nope. ‘You're the only dog we've got, sorry,’ they tell me. I was gonna meet a friend at the Giants game where all us dogs were being honored. Skrag walks by chuckling. ‘Heard the bad news, chump. Bow wow!’ They had to hold me back.”

FLEA MARKET LABOR DAY WEEKEND

Anderson Valley Senior Center

AV Senior Center, Veterans Building, 14410 Highway 128, Boonville, 95415

August 31 to September 3, 2018

Friday to Monday 9 AM to 6 PM

To reserve a space call Dave at 707-895-2325

Or AV Senior Center at 707-895-3609

$20 per day or $40 for the weekend

Clean out that barn or shed, make a few bucks and support the AV Senior Center

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL 2018: REFLECTIONS AND PREDICTIONS

by Jonah Raskin

I’ve written about Major League Baseball for the AVA for the last two seasons. So here’s another piece about the All-American game that’s too slow for the likes of me and that doesn’t have the action and the excitement of the National Basketball Association.

The most exciting thing about Major League Baseball this season has been the Oakland A’s who have won 78 games and lost 52 and who are in a fierce fight for first place in the AL West with the Houston Astros, the World Series champs in 2017. The San Francisco Giants, who are battling the San Diego Padres for last place in the NL West, are the biggest disappointment of this season, though the Giants’ record of 64 wins and 67 loses isn’t unexpected. The team hasn’t rebuilt big enough or fast enough to become a contender. The front office is too timid. For those who are paying attention, the Boston Red Sox are the real wonder team for 2018, with 90 wins and 41 losses and who are seven games ahead of the Yankees, their closest competitor. If I had to pick the two teams that will face one another in this year’s World Series I’d pick Boston and the Chicago Cubs who have the best record in the NL Central and who still remember that they were champs in 2016.

The Giants might remember that they won in 2010, 2012 and 2014, but they don’t have the same fire in the belly or the same competitive spirit. Oh well, there’s always next year, though without big trades and big bucks, look for the Giants to repeat as losers. The A’s have power hitters led by left fielder Khris Davis who has banged out 39 home runs and knocked in over 100 runs. Eight A’s players have hit more than ten home runs each this season. Daniel Mengden has zero home runs to his name but he’s batting .333 and has only struck out once all season. The team is consistently fun to watch. Can Oakland get past Houston and then Boston? The odds are against them, but I won’t bet against them; they’re scrappy and they have real grit. This is the time of year to begin to start following MLB; the previous four-months have been foreplay. Now is the time for clutch hitting and for clutch pitching. Now is also the time of year when a few players rise to the top. Think Reggie Jackson who played for 21 years in the majors, helped the A’s win three consecutive World Series, from 1972-1974, and who is known as “Mr. October.” There will be great players again this October, but there will never be another Reggie Jackson.

* * *

ED NOTE. My annual thoughts on baseball are variations of one opinion: Trade Bochy for any of the A's coaches. Bochy's Giants are listless; all of them except Crawford are mailing it in most days. They are no fun to watch, partly because Bochy is the most predictable manager in the history of the game — pitch counts (remember that Cub's game when he pulled Moore?), never bunts, even so much as a safety squeeze, never a double steal, name one time since Bochy became manager anyone tried to steal home, and so on. PS. Trade Belt, or outsource him to the Arcata Crabs. The Giants should be a much better team but they're aren't even going to make the playoffs.

ED NOTES

McCAIN: He behaved courageously as a prisoner of the undeclared, criminal war on Vietnam. Politically, he was a disaster, another rubberstamp rightwinger whose judgment was so poor he signed off on Sarah Palin as his running mate. Of course Trump and his legions of keyboard warriors and his Fox News Draft Dodger Battalion are not qualified to criticize McCain's courage under the great duress McCain suffered in Vietnam because they're unlikely to experience, ever, anything more stressful than a misplaced hair dryer.

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TWO HIGHLY RECOMMENDED series just released on Netflix are absolutely riveting. I Am A Killer not only interviews Death Row inmates, most of whom further incriminate themselves, but delves into the details of the murders that got them the death penalty. I've never seen this grim subject explored in the detail this Brit-made film does. The first interview is with a lifer who killed a cellmate simply because murder was the only way he could get out of isolation and on to Death Row, which he viewed as a far more desirable prison placement than his years of sequestration in isolation cells. First-rate filmmaking and absolutely unforgettable.

THE MIGHTY AVA'S second must-see recommendation is Netflix's Five Came Back, the World War Two experiences of five great American movie directors – John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens — who volunteer for the combat zones of the War to make propaganda films to vividly explain the War to the home front. The three-part series draws on archival footage of their brilliant work as explained by five great contemporary directors — Steven Spielberg (Wyler), Francis Ford Coppola (Huston), Guillermo del Toro (Capra), Paul Greengrass (Ford), and Lawrence Kasdan (Stevens). The whole of it is nicely narrated by Meryl Streep. Netflix is also offering the 13 documentaries made by the great ones that are discussed in the film:^[5]

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AS POPES GO, the present one, Pope Francis, isn't bad, what with his strong stands for social justice and general commonsense, but he's just the latest Pope to shuffle off the ongoing and seemingly endless pervo-rama playing out in his church in vague promises to do better. If Il Papa were serious about ridding the church of predatory priests he'd purge the entire hierarchy from bishops on up through the boys in the Vatican. But on it goes, all of it reminding me of a Mendocino episode back in 2002 wherein two local teenage boys nearly beat a priest to death who'd, as the chaste phrase goes, "made sexual advances." The assaulted priest worked the Mendo outback, serving the small congregations in places like Elk and Philo. My late friend, Jerry Cox, was quite angry with me for writing it up. Father Cox had left the church to marry a nun just before he was made a monsignor. The Church had been his life. He told me that the molesto priest was a great guy, that the rumors that he was gay were simply slander, and that the priest's two attackers were merely a couple of murderous punks who made up the molest story to cover up their robbery of the man. The two teen yobbos certainly didn't have to beat the priest nearly to death but, as I believe the shrinks claim, they were deep in the throes of "homosexual panic," so terrified of their own homoerotic musings they re-established their hetero-hood by attacking a defenseless homo. I've never forgotten Father Cox's heated defense of the Mendo priest, but ever afterwards the Church's denials that it has a major pedo problem have seemed all of an ongoing piece. The whole show is still in denial, it seems.

* * *

TWO ANNOYING COMMENTS I couldn't help but responding to:

Eric Sunswheat:

RE: Patton gives the reader of his essay many examples – “disproportionately impacts poor people and minorities and greatly diminishes the egalitarian process [and] demonstrates how we have moved from an adversarial to an inquisitorial one.” Nothing would be more to DA Eyster’s liking than such an arrangement – nor any other prosecutor, for that matter – like at the federal courts; for the DA’s office to enjoy these advantages over the PD’s office. This may give us a hint as to why our excellent DA is so delighted with the appointment of Jeffery Aaron.

Is this opinion reporting of DA Eyster’s purported true colors, an accurate reflection of his professional career. Or is it a bump in the road, with such cases as the coverup of the unjustified jail house death of Steve Neuroth, at the hands of law enforcement with unlicensed medical oversight. What happened with the much ballyhooed Sheriff Allman ‘little fat man’ slight of hand, an almost impossible to view edited death event video, and press release announcing a federal court date of August 2, 2018, as to have the civil rights institutional manslaughter neglect, and all allegations of the legal suit thrown out. Inquiring public wants to know!

James Marmon:

I’m sure that “Eyster the Shyster” and the new “Public Pretender Jeffery Aaron” will have a fine working relationship together. I can hear the the dump truck backing up already. The Board of Supervisors are most likely already counting projected savings for the County, no big costly defense trials in Mental-cino’s future.

TOTALLY WRONG, Eric and James, and not to defend either Eyster or Allman, both of whom are more than capable of defending themselves, but Eyster’s welcome to the new PD is basic civility, seldom in evidence on internet chat lines. The Courthouse is a small society in itself. How would you greet the new member? The Supes were always pleased with Thompson because she kept within her budget, which meant justice for her trapped “clients” was not the first consideration. Second, I watched the entire Neuroth video and didn’t see anything there that indicts the Jail’s handling of him. He arrived heavily tweeked, was quiet for a period, then suddenly went off in the predictable amphetamine paranoid state most of us now recognize for what it is — drug induced psychosis. The jailers struggled to subdue him without anything at all resembling excessive force and he died. Not to be too hard about it, but Neuroth caused his own death.

DISASTER PREPAREDNESS

by Mark Scaramella

During my early days in the Air Force one of my duties was Base Mobility Plans officer. It was a dull job that nobody would volunteer for. I got stuck with it because Colonel Taylor thought I was reasonably well organized, a delusion I didn't dare disabuse him of.

The job involved preparing, maintaining, updating, and practicing response checklists for a wide variety of incidents, accidents, crashes, disasters and other troublesome pranks visited upon us by the sky gods. Once a month, typically during weekends, the Base Safety Officer would pick one of the scenarios and we would go through these detailed checklists as if something had actually happened. I had the master checklists. Someone in each organization on base had their own sub-checklist. Everybody acted as if The Bad Event had actually happened. Phone calls were made, people were dispatched, everything was exercised according to the checklists and checked off when the practice response was complete.

The Base Safety Officer (a persnickety Major who was a former pilot I had had run-ins with when he was an active pilot) oversaw it all and reviewed every detail. On Monday I would be called on the carpet to Colonel Taylor's office with the Base Safety Officer who would tell me about everything that he thought had gone wrong during the exercise. In each case, the checklist had to be updated and each failing corrected and redistributed to everyone involved in the response scenario, ready for the next drill for that particular scenario.

It's dull work; nobody wants to go through the hassle of responding to a fake disaster especially when everybody knows it’s fake. But the process is essential because without it, important, perhaps lethal details in the real thing could get overlooked.

I was reminded of this last week in the aftermath of Sheriff Allman's complaint about county workers not responding to requests that employees report for disaster duty during the big fires, and the response to the Sheriff from Human Resources Director Heidi Dunham.

To this day, Mendocino County has conducted no formal independent review of the initial response to the fall 2017 wildfires in Redwood Valley and Potter Valley. (Sonoma County has, and they have improved some of their response protocols.) One would have thought that the fire-response problems encountered in late July of this year would have been mostly resolved if someone had done a review of the 2017 fire response. We also do not know of any exercises or drills having been conducted to practice for the variety of disasters, emergencies and accidents that could occur — and they are long overdue.

That's not to say that a lot of people did reasonably well considering the lack of the kinds of planning, checklists, preparation, training, and exercises that we were required to do in the military.

Nobody is suggesting that every scenario be planned for in detail like we did in the Air Force, but one would think that at least the most predictable ones — fires, mass communications breakdowns, mass casualty incidents, etc. — would certainly be planning priorities.

We would agree that pointing the finger at the people who at first seemed unable to unwilling to respond to emergency call ins turned out to be somewhat misplaced. But someone should have told Ms. Dunham that the problems she described (phone id, weekends and evening calls, etc.) should've been encountered, identified and corrected long before the recent fires.

* * *

At last Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, several Brooktrails residents told the Board that more needs to be done regarding disaster preparedness and warnings. Brooktrails resident Doreen Blumenfeld's remarks were typical:

“I live at the top of Ridge Road which is at the very top of Brooktrails and I look out on thousands of acres of fuel toward the coast. I am here to address the issue of an early warning system and also Nixle [the county’s expanded reverse 911 system]. As we all know there are so many residents on Sherwood Road that would be affected by fire. Whether the fire comes from Highway 20 or from Sherwood Ranch or the gate, whether it comes from Brooktrails or in town on Sherwood Road… We would have a huge problem in leaving the area in a safe way. Our Sheriff has indicated that there could be hundreds of fatalities in a situation where we had a hard time evacuating. I appreciate the sheriff’s recently use of Nixle. It is a device, a method of communication that both Lake and Sonoma County use as well as many other counties. However, I strongly request that the Office of Emergency Services be given sufficient funds to hire public information officers to fully utilize the potential of Nixle. Otherwise it's like having a flashlight with no batteries when it's dark. Full use of Nixle would include reported and verified incidents from fire departments, public works and utilities. Only by having an early warning system can those of us with disabilities, special needs or those of us who live further out respond in an appropriate and orderly way. If Nixle reported all incidents under its three-tier system we could choose notices we want to subscribe to and act upon. This is currently done in Lake and Sonoma counties. I spoke with people from a fire department in Lake County and the chief of police in Lakeport. They use a public information officer to put information out. They support the policy that more information gives us more choice. It allows us to be responsible for ourselves and our neighbors. Facebook pages are not enough. Reverse 911 is not enough. We need an early warning system so we can choose to leave. On Monday there was an incident on the Willits grade with a fatality there. That would be an excellent example of using Nixle to so that those of us who need to travel the grade would know about the problematic traffic tie up. I heard about the two fires on Highway 20 from neighbors who were using scanners an hour before anything came out on the official facebook pages. That's not acceptable for various reasons if there was a problem.”

* * *

After the Brooktrails contingent finished, Sheriff Tom Allman told the Board:

The Sheriff's office is certainly aware of the need to notify the public 12 months of the year, not just during fire season, but during flood season and we are in California so earthquake season 12 months a year. Nixle is great, we are very grateful to have Nixle. One of the things that Nixle has told us is that if you do a big push and get everybody on Nixle and you start notifying them even within the three tiers you see a statistical drastic reduction of people who have signed up for it because we are notifying once a day over something and they really don't care because they live on the south coast and they are not that concerned about what's happening in another part of the county, or vice versa. So we want this to happen. We will gladly start improving our Nixle alerts. But we know on the other hand we are going to see a reduction in sign-ups. We do have a contract employee who comes in or who we can contact on the phone immediately when there is an emergency and he puts it on facebook and Nixle and so forth. So we do not need a full-time public information officer. I would love for the board to say, here's an extra chunk of money to hire a full-time public information officer. It would ease a lot of the work we are doing. I love sirens. Sirens are very very important. We learned from last year's fire in Redwood Valley that sirens are a great way of notifying. But let me tell you that there are no siren manufacturers in America anymore. Sirens have pretty much gone the way of the dinosaurs. The best we can do is pick up some old sirens and refurbish them. If a fire department has a siren, let's talk about it. One of the reasons that sirens stopped being used is that people complained about being awakened or disturbed. So we want to make the noise, we want to let people know, notify people. Then we get to one of the real problems that we learned through the tsunami sirens that we installed on the coast. The tsunami sirens are activated through digital communications and when you have a fire and you lose cellphones and cellphone towers you lose the ability to activate them. So we need manual activation of sirens. Then what about the power? How is the power going to be given to the siren if the electricity has been cut off? So there's a whole bunch of concerns on this. It's not as easy as saying let's just put six sirens in Brooktrails. I have looked at the area of and I believe six sirens would be the right number. I would love for the Brooktrails Township Community Board to say let's talk about this, between the Sheriff and the citizens. Let's come up with a program where maybe the fire chief or his designee could activate them. Let's go through this. This is on the front edge of everybody's mind. I was in Utah yesterday with the Lake County Sheriff. At the funeral for the battalion chief who died. We certainly understand the devastation of not just the communities but the human tolls that fires can do and we want to work on it 12 months of the year. If everybody would follow the Pine Mountain Fire Safe Council our county would be in better fire safe awareness right now. They have taken this to a new level of organization throughout the state. I appreciate what they are doing. I would welcome an agenda item specifically on emergency alerts because one of the things that we learned during this last Ranch and River fire was that we all have the wide area alerts that were given to us over cellphones. Whether you are signed up or not you got the wide area alert about the Ranch and River fires. With reverse 911, it's an opt-in, not an opt-out. So if people believe there is a conspiracy that the government is trying to track them they will not opt in. Those are some of the issues. The same goes with Nixle. But none of that is true. We don't do anything except to alert people. I would welcome an agenda item not just at this level but city councils and Brooktrails townships need to have this where you can't just say, Office of Emergency Services, what are you going to do for us? We will work with you and we will work to get funding if it's a mutual benefit. But if we don't have a buy-in at every other level when an emergency happens, everybody points to the county saying what are you going to do about this? And we have the 3490 square miles. That's a lot of area to cover. I would put some of the responsibility back on to the elected bodies throughout the county. We are in this together. It's not just one county organization. So to the citizens: thank you! We need to talk about this 12 months out of the year. I would welcome you to be here in January, I would welcome you being here in June when we talk about the budget. Because the budget is when we decide, the board decides where your dollars are going to be spent. We have to come up with a rational conclusion of keeping the public safe.”

* * *

But the Sheriff didn’t say anything about disaster planning, preparation or practice. Fire season is not over. Has the County even fixed the phone-contact problem? Have they practiced the notification system for their own employees? Did it work? Was it practiced on the weekend or at night?

Maybe Official Mendo should worry less about who’s responding to what, and instead look a little harder in the mirror.

CAMPESINO

by Gary Soto

Spring ’73, I’m two time zones from my country

And hacking at the soldier-straight weeds —

I’m captain of their destruction. But the army

Of weeds keeps advancing, day after day.

I was a math teacher in Mexico,

But now I’m a number squeezed into a white van,

The stars blue as my life at 5:30 in the morning.

But don’t feel sorry. I have my hands and back,

My face dark as a penny in a child’s palm.

I walk a straight row. My lean shadow keeps up.

But look at the circling seagulls,

Landlocked with no way home.

 

If there’s work, I hoe nine hours in the beet fields,

Sometimes with a friend in the next row,

Sometimes alone. You would be crazy

To open your mouth — the wind and dust ...

In a year, my face will be tooled like my wallet,

Dark and creased. Over the clods,

I sing to myself, or whistle like a parrot.

I practice English —

Waffle, no good tire, nice to meet you.

In the fields,

I stop when the patron on the tractor path says stop.

I pound sand from a boot like an hourglass.

Time pours forever and forever.

Tomorrow I’ll start again. I’ll chop at the earth

But it won’t bleed under my hoe.

I’ll chop, sweat, and think in English —

Toaster, thread, seagulls find a way home.

(From “The Elements of San Joaquin,” by Gary Soto, published by Chronicle Books. Gary Soto is the author of 12 poetry collections, including “New and Selected Poems,” a National Book Award finalist. Born and raised in Fresno, he now lives in Berkeley.)

HOME INVASION SEASON KICKS OFF

On Sunday, August 26, 2018 at about 12:26 a.m. Humboldt County Sheriff Deputies responded to a residence on Dyerville Loop Road, Myers Flat for a report of trespassers on the property which contained a marijuana grow. Upon arrival at the property, deputies noticed the front gate to the property had been damaged. Deputies located thirteen people tied up inside the residence. Deputies were advised there were 5-6 masked subjects who were heavily armed and were still on the property stealing marijuana.

The Humboldt County Special Weapons and Tactics Team (S.W.A.T) was activated and responded to the scene. The team searched the area however no suspects were located. Evidence was collected at the scene and the incident is still under investigation. The identity of the suspects is unknown at this time

Anyone with information for the Sheriff’s Office regarding this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Sheriff’s Office at 707-445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at 707-268-2539.

Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office press release

CATCH OF THE DAY, August 26, 2018

CURTIS ADAMS, Willits. Burglary, receiving stolen property, burglary tools, controlled substance, paraphernalia, disorderly conduct-loitering, probation revocation.

TROY BUSCHMAN, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Shoplifting, under influence, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

FAITH CHAPMAN, Nice/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.

TERRY COUNTERMAN, Fort Bragg. Protective order violation.

JODI HODGES, Ukiah. Petty theft, probation revocation.

WILLIAM OWENS, Ukiah. Under influence, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

JEREMY PENNINGTON, Fresno/Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

JONATHAN PLUNKETT, Gualala. DUI.

SHAWN SMITH, Ukiah. DUI.

RANDOLPH VALLADAREZ, Covelo. Metal knuckles, tear gas, ammo possession by prohibited person, controlled substance, stun gun.

BRANDON YOUNG, Kelseyville/Westport. Battery.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

IMO, nothing serious would occur until after the election in November unless a drastic event happens, like an assassination, a weather or natural disaster, or a major terrorist attack. Our citizenry is so far removed from rebelling for a principle that only a material deprivation like loss of the internet or food would drive the public to act. Impeachment would only cause anger, not revolution. Murphy always decides and only he knows on what.

QUESTION

May I make a small tribute to John McCain?

Song: John Cougar Mellanchamp — Pink Houses

There's a little surprise in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOfkpu6749w

History: John McCain wanted to play the song during his campaign in 2008, but John M. wrote to him and told him he was a Democrat, John didn't play it, anymore — ain't that America?

(Susie de Castro)

DEMOCRATS VOTE TO STRIP POWER FROM SUPERDELEGATES

by Chas Danner

Democrats voted overwhelmingly on Saturday for the biggest reforms to its presidential nomination process in decades, including a major reduction in the power of superdelegates, and a measure to make state caucuses more accessible. The reforms were approved after a four-hour debate at the Democratic National Committee’s meeting in Chicago, and were backed by both DNC chairman Tom Perez and Senator Bernie Sanders, who had sharply criticized the role of superdelegates as he ran for president in 2016.

Under the old process, superdelegates — made up of members of the Democratic National Committee, elected officials, and distinguished party elders — were not bound to the outcomes of primaries and caucuses, but could vote to nominate whichever presidential candidate they wanted at the national convention. This gave them an outsize, and in the minds of many, unfair role in determining the party’s nominee. (Superdelegates made up about 15 percent of the delegates at the 2016 convention.)

Under the new process starting in 2020, superdelegates will still be able to attend party conventions as delegates, but will not be able to vote in the first round of ballots and will be able to vote in the very rare event of a deadlock.

The way state caucuses are governed will also change under the reforms, with state parties now required to accept absentee votes, rather than requiring caucuses voters to be physically present to support candidates at the events. That fundamentally changes the nature of caucuses, which are old-school, state party-run affairs that force campaigns to not only engage and win over supporters, but get them to show up in person and remain organized amid the chaos. Barack Obama’s underdog victory against Hillary Clinton in 2008, for instance, relied on his campaign’s strategy of dominating the state caucuses. And had Obama not won the first caucus in Iowa, he might have never gotten enough momentum to win the nomination.

Caucuses are also run by the state parties, as opposed to primaries, which are run by the states themselves. Saturday’s changes are expected to accelerate more caucus states switching to primaries — another change sought by reformers.

The new rules are a big victory for Sanders, who lost the party’s contentious nomination battle to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but thanks to his newfound popularity and passionate base, now exerts considerable influence over the direction of the party. Clinton won the majority of delegates based on the primary and caucus votes in 2016, but was also the predominant choice of the party elite who made up the superdelegate pool, something the anti-establishment Sanders and his supporters saw as an unfair advantage at a time they had already been accusing the DNC of showing favoritism toward Clinton.

“Today’s decision by the DNC is an important step forward in making the Democratic Party more open, democratic and responsive to the input of ordinary Americans,” Sanders said in a statement after the vote.

The changes marked the culmination of a two-year-long process that began as a way to soothe the intraparty animosity of 2016, and was led by the Unity Reform Commission, a group that was joint-established by the Sanders and Clinton camps at the convention that year. The commission had agreed on the necessary changes in December, and eventually passed along their recommendations to the DNC’s rules and bylaws committee

But opponents of the reforms continued to make their case ahead of the vote, making for a tense and emotional meeting at times.

Superdelegates were created to be the last line of defense against outsider, potentially disastrous candidates, and everyone has now seen a real world example of what can happen if someone like Donald Trump can win a major party’s nomination and its de facto leader. Critics point out that the new rules may make it easier for such candidates to win the right to represent the party regardless of what the party establishment — or the party’s activists — ultimately thinks of them: There was also pushback from older black delegates, who argued that the reforms would reduce the power and influence of hundreds of black and Latino party leaders, and result in less diversity on the convention floor — a possibility reformers dismissed, citing delegate diversity requirements. When former DNC chair Don Fowler, who helped organize opposition to the reforms, said at the meeting that the moves would “disenfranchise” minority groups within the party, some people in the crowd at the meeting tried to shout him down, calling him a liar.

Another former DNC chair, Howard Dean, wholeheartedly endorsed the changes in a video played at the meeting. He argued that the DNC should respect the will of grassroots voters, and that young voters “have lost faith in our party’s nominating process, and make no mistake, this is a perception that’s cost us at the ballot box.”

Trusting the Democratic party’s electorate over its elites was a common theme among the reformers’ pitches in Chicago. “Voters want us to be listening to them, and this is a way to show that we’re listening, to show that we’re understanding the changes that had to be made after 2016,” DNC vice- chairman Michael Blake said on Friday. Perez and others also emphasized before the vote on Saturday that Democrats’ most important common goal was electing a Democrat to the White House. Attracting new and younger Democrats, avoiding intraparty conflict, and respecting voter’s wishes would, Perez insisted, put the next Democratic nominee “in the strongest position possible” to win back the White House.

(New York Magazine)

THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT FOREST FIRES

It seems like every time there is a forest fire, the timber industry blames environmentalists for a lack of “active forest management” and presumes that contemporary fires have catastrophic ecological consequences. David Schott’s opinion piece in the Mail Tribune July 22 does just that, using the Klamathon fire as an example.

mailtribune.com/opinion/guest-opinions/the-inconvenient-truth-about-forest-fires

ON LINE COMMENT 2

If Hillary had been elected, all the crimes of Manafort and Cohen would never have been investigated, because all would have been considered right with the political world.

The Manafort and Cohen crimes would have been ignored as the standard tactics of the elite financial grifting.

The kinds of antics Manafort and Cohen have been prosecuted for went unnoticed when Donald Trump was a donor to the Democratic and Republican parties, and if he had stayed in his Tower doling out campaign contributions, they still would be.

SAGS & BUTTCHEEKS

Editor,

I must confess that I’m shaking my head at the whole idea of “relaxing” the dress codes, to the extent they existed. I recently attended classes at City College here in San Francisco during the last two semesters. I couldn’t believe how many of the students showed up at classes. I was thinking, You consider this dressing for college classes? Some girls were dressed like they were getting ready to go work the streets after class, their clothes looking like they were ironed on to their skin or just falling off.

Many of the “guys” could be seen walking around with their pants literally falling off their hips with a hand under the genitals to hold them up, looking like they needed to find a urinal as soon as possible. I was never aware that anybody was made to feel any shame.

Not in the least. Instead of relaxing codes for dress, how about learning what is appropriate dressing for school? In Europe the code is totally different. Students dress like young adults.

Charles Leyes

San Francisco

IN MY ROOM

So What Do You Want to Do Now?

Warmest spiritual greetings. Sitting here safely in my room at the Plumeria alternative hostel in Honolulu, Hawaii, with Hurricane Lane having brushed by Oahu and now heading westwardly. I have paid for the room until September 5th. Have been keeping up with the news online, and am bored to the point of pain to read of the ongoing stupidity in Washington, D.C., particularly the hopelessness of government in general. Postmodernism as usual offers nothing but more postmodernism, which doesn't amount to a pitcher of warm spit. Sitting here safely in my room, watching thoughts. Not identifying with the body. Not identifying with the mind. Immortal Self I am. And so are you. The only future action that I am aware of which could be relevant, is the bringing in of the "spiritual mojo". Rituals, chanting, prayers, warrior magic. There's nothing else to do at this point. Everybody has protested! And protested! And protested! And protested! And voted!!! Sitting here safely in my room, previously put a request for housing on the Washington, D.C. Independent Media Center newswire. It was removed. Now what? Where are the places to live for those active on the front lines of radical environmentalism and peace & justice? Why was the posting removed from the D.C. IMC anyway? I thought that the D.C. IMC was staffed by radical activists. Sitting here safely in my room, I don't want to pointlessly be in postmodern America, watching the depressing political news, and not seeing anything effective in response. I am interested in leaving Hawaii at some point in order to be active in opposition to the stupidity headquartered in Washington, D.C. I am seeking spiritually realized others. Please share this email message with everybody whom you know. Thank you very much. And if you can't find anybody in the United States who can relate to it, please forward it elsewhere.

Craig Louis Stehr, Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

JOHN MCCAIN, INFLUENTIAL US SENATOR AND PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, DIES AGED 81

by Godfrey Hodgson

Senator John McCain of Arizona, who has died aged 81 after suffering from brain cancer, was for many Americans an authentic national hero. The son and grandson of admirals, he was a pilot who, shot down over North Vietnam, inspired his fellow prisoners by his courage under savage beatings and torture so severe that to the end of his life he could not lift his arms above his shoulders. He refused offers to be sent home, to deny his captors a propaganda victory, and inspired older and higher-ranking prisoners with his exceptional bravery and leadership in jail.

As a Republican senator and as a candidate for the presidency he combined fierce traditional patriotism with an unpredictable independence of mind. The conservative journalist William Buckley said McCain was “conservative but not a conservative” – conservative, that is, in his instincts and beliefs, but not a member of the conservative movement. Barack Obama, McCain’s victorious rival for the presidency, when he learned that McCain had been diagnosed with cancer, commented: “Cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against.”

Only President Donald Trump, who avoided the draft for Vietnam, refused to acknowledge McCain’s heroic status. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “He’s [called] a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

In the Senate, to which he had been elected in 1986, McCain acquired such a reputation as an independent-minded Republican that in 2004, John Kerry, the Democrats’ presidential candidate, asked him to be his vice-presidential running mate. McCain refused, saying he was “a pro-life, deficit hawk, free trade Republican”.

In 2000 he looked for several months the likely winner of the Republican candidacy before he was beaten by George W Bush in one of the dirtiest political campaigns in living memory. In 2008 he came even closer. The previous year he had again been the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, but lost ground because of his support for the war in Iraq. By March 2008 he had won the Republican nomination easily and in August selected the Alaska governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. He hung on within a handful of percentage points of Obama until the November election.

He was a stubborn maverick. He backed gun control and voted for liberal positions on immigration, even though they were unpopular in Arizona. Understandably, he was critical of the Bush administration’s torture of “enemy combatants” in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and elsewhere. But although he insisted that he did not want American troops to remain in Iraq any longer than needed (one of his sons served there as an officer in the Marines), he also said he would support staying there for 100 years if that were necessary to do the job.

In domestic politics, too, once he had emerged as the presidential candidate, he came closer to the Republican mainstream. He came out for tax cuts, which his opponents said favored the wealthy even more than those advocated by Bush. He proposed policies to reduce drastically the US’s dependence on imported energy. Yet in 2001 he teamed up with the liberal Democratic senator Russ Feingold to push through a major reform of election campaign finances.

McCain was an exceptionally complex man, with a political career that often took him in contradictory directions. He consistently opposed the excessive influence of money and lobbyists in Washington, though Democrats pointed out that many of his advisers were lobbyists.

Despite his courage, both physical and moral, he was far from a saint. Capable of great personal charm, he had a volcanic temper and could be enormously rude, even on occasion to his wife in public. This may have been exacerbated by his sufferings in Hanoi, but he was never a model of conventional virtue. As a young man he was a hard-drinking, hard-partying tearaway who excelled at wrestling and boxing.

McCain told off-color stories and memorably once said “Fuck you!” to a fellow senator on the floor of the Senate chamber. The thread that connected all his political instincts was a strong, old-fashioned patriotism. That explained his initially unpopular stance on Iraq. It also explained why he continued to be more sympathetic to immigrants than many Republicans, given that the US was a nation founded on immigration. He was deeply proud of his country but nonetheless felt strongly that much in American public life should be reformed.

McCain’s patriotism was inherited from an originally Confederate family who once owned a 2,000-acre plantation with slaves in Mississippi. His grandfather was an admiral in the US navy during the second world war and was in command at the naval battles of Leyte Gulf and Okinawa. John McCain III was born to John Jr and his wife Roberta (nee Wright) in the Panama canal zone, where the family was stationed at the time. As a child he attended more than 20 schools as his father moved from base to base. When a political opponent once called him a carpetbagger, meaning that he wasn’t a genuine resident of Arizona, he was able to retort that the place he had lived longest was Hanoi.

After attending the Episcopal high school in Alexandria, Virginia, he followed his father and grandfather into the naval academy at Annapolis, Maryland, where he raised a good deal of hell and graduated in 1958 near the bottom of his class. He was sent for flight training, first to Florida, then to Texas, where he was almost killed in an accident.

In July 1967, shortly after arriving in Vietnam, he was at the centre of an even more spectacular incident. His A-4 Skyhawk fighter was preparing for launch when a rocket from an F-4 Phantom was accidentally fired across the deck of his carrier USS Forrestal. It hit the full fuel tank of McCain’s plane and knocked two bombs loose. Before one of the bombs exploded, McCain climbed out of the cockpit, then dropped onto the burning deck, where he tried to free another pilot. The fire caused by the explosion killed 134 sailors, destroyed at least 20 aircraft, and threatened to sink the carrier.

McCain struck up a lifelong friendship with the New York Times reporter RW “Johnny” Apple, who was sent to cover the accident. It was not long before the two of them were carousing together in Saigon. In October 1967 McCain was shot down by a ground-to-air missile and landed in a lake near Hanoi. As he ejected from the plane, he broke both arms and a leg. A mob gathered, stripped him and started kicking him. Then he was taken to the notorious prison known as the “Hanoi Hilton” and tortured almost daily.

When the North Vietnamese found out that his father was commander in chief of the US Pacific command, McCain was offered the chance to go home early. He refused unless his fellow PoWs were freed too. In a nightmare world of smuggled notes, terror and carefully calibrated defiance, he earned the unstinting admiration of his fellow prisoners. He was, they agreed, the bravest of the brave.

After he was finally released in 1973, he returned to naval service. He first commanded a flight training unit called, appropriately, the Hellrazors. Then in 1976 he became the navy’s chief lobbyist with the Senate in Washington, and succeeded in persuading Congress to appropriate funding for a new super-carrier – against the wishes of President Jimmy Carter’s administration. The experience opened his eyes to another field for service.

In 1965 McCain had married Carol Shepp, a model from Philadelphia. He adopted her two sons, Douglas and Andrew, and together they had a daughter, Sidney. While McCain was a prisoner in Vietnam, his wife was badly injured in a car accident.

In 1979 he met Cindy Hensley, the daughter of the wealthy owner of the Anheuser-Busch beer franchise for the rapidly growing city of Phoenix, Arizona, whom he married in 1980, following his divorce from Carol. He went to work for his wife’s father, building a political power base among the influential contacts he made in that state, and decided to run for Congress.

He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, then, in 1986, to the Senate. He replaced Barry Goldwater, the outspoken conservative who was heavily defeated as the Republican candidate in the 1964 presidential election, but who in the process helped to revive conservative politics in the US.

In the Senate his mentor was John Tower, the hawkish Republican from Texas. But he also worked closely with the liberal Democrat John Kerry, trying to find out whether Americans were still being held prisoner in Vietnam.

He got into trouble in 1989 as one of five legislators who appeared to be protecting a corrupt savings and loan company promoter. He annoyed many of his colleagues by his rejection of what is known as pork barrel politics, especially the habit of allowing senators and congressmen to “earmark” large sums for pet projects in their states or districts.

McCain was exonerated by the Senate ethics committee, but the episode left him with a distaste for the influence of money in politics, and no doubt also with a desire to demonstrate his own honesty. What annoyed them more was that McCain and his wife were now rich even by the standards of Capitol Hill. She was worth more than $100m, and he once forgot how many houses he owned.

In 1999, he announced himself as a candidate for the 2000 presidential election. He defeated Bush in the New Hampshire primary, and seemed to be the favorite going into the South Carolina primary. He was beaten there by a particularly nasty dirty trick. Voters were asked what they would feel if they learned that McCain had a daughter by a black mistress. The McCains had in fact adopted Bridget, a Bangladeshi girl, from one of Mother Teresa’s hostels. “I believe that there is a special place in hell,” said McCain, for the Republicans who had concocted this smear.

With the 9/11 attacks, McCain’s old-fashioned patriotism kicked in. He became one of the strongest supporters both of Bush’s homeland security legislation and in due course, of the invasion of Afghanistan and the second Iraq war. “It’s a fight,” he said of the war at the 2004 Republican convention, “between right and wrong, good and evil.”

His continued support for the war ordered by a president he neither liked nor trusted was the background to the collapse of his bid for the presidency in 2007. But by the end of that year he was back in the race and challenging for the lead.

Throughout 2008 he displayed his usual tenacity and more than usual self-control. He continued to attack Obama as a celebrity candidate with too little experience, especially in national security matters.

There was a double irony about McCain’s political fortunes. A man whose career was founded on military virtues and old-fashioned patriotism was trapped by his loyalty to an unpopular war. A politician whose appeal derived from his spontaneous human responses was brought down when he tried to behave like any other professional politician. After Trump was elected president, McCain was one of the few Republicans to challenge the new president openly at a time when only his party could restrain Trump’s irrational policies.

As the new chair of the powerful Senate armed services committee he became one of the most important men in Congress. He had already let it be known that what he wanted on his gravestone was, “He served his country.”

At the end of July 2017 he returned to the Senate after an operation to remove a cancerous tumor from his brain, above his left eye, and made his frustrations clear by calling for co-operation and compromise: “Our deliberations can still be important and useful, but I think we’d all agree they haven’t been overburdened by greatness lately ... We’re getting nothing done.”

He made his own push for a bipartisan approach to healthcare reform as one of three Republican senators to vote against the repeal of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, observed, “I have not seen a senator who speaks truth to power as strongly, as well and as frequently as John McCain.” In September McCain maintained his position, rejecting a Republican-only solution and calling on both parties “to arrive at a compromise solution that is acceptable to most of us, and serves the interests of Americans as best we can”.

Illness then kept him away from Washington, but in his memoir The Restless Wave, published last May, he called for a return to old-fashioned Republican values, pointed to the danger of the information onslaught being waged by Russia, and described how in December 2016 he had passed on the dossier compiled by Christopher Steele alleging that Moscow held compromising material on Trump to the FBI. Both in the book and in an HBO documentary, John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, he expressed regret that he had not chosen his friend and former Democrat senator Joe Lieberman as his 2008 running partner rather than Palin.

This month Trump failed to mention the senator when signing the defense spending bill named after him. McCain’s death came the day after his family announced that he had decided to to discontinue further medical treatment.

He is survived by Cindy, their children, Meghan, John, James and Bridget, the three children of his first marriage, his mother, a sister, Sandy, and a brother, Joe.

John Sidney McCain III, politician, born 29 August 1936; died 25 August 2018

(theguardian.com)