Off the Record (Oct. 3, 2018)

RYAN STEARNS stopped by late Monday afternoon to flesh out an episode occurring the afternoon of Monday, September 17th involving himself and 2nd District supervisor, John McCowen. Mr. Stearns, when he walked up to our office last week, had just returned to Boonville from Ukiah on the MTA bus. He frequently makes the commute from Anderson Valley to Ukiah and, after completing his Ukiah errands, often waits out the two or three hours for the return trip to Boonville while enjoying the Russian River where a homeless population has made their home, and where McCowen spends many hours cleaning up the access areas around the Russian River. "I sympathize with McCowen in lots of ways," Stearns said, "but that day under the Perkins Street Bridge McCowen pulled a taser on me, not pepper spray like he said." Stearns explained that McCowen had been yelling at someone across the river, "a person who didn't need to be harassed," when Stearns approached the supervisor to ask, "Is everything ok?" McCowen whirled to face Stearns and pulled a taser. "We were about four feet from each other. I thought I was going to have to throw my bike at him to keep him away," Stearns remembers. "I thought for sure he was going to tase me." Stearns, in the style of many young people, is just scruffy enough to pass for a homeless person himself, but he's insistent that McCowen's claim that he pulled pepper spray on Stearns is untrue. "It was a stun gun," Stearns says. Stearns, following the confrontation, went on-line to research the difference between a taser and a pepper spray. "It was definitely a taser that McCowen had,” he insists. Thinking about it for a couple of days, Stearns called the Sheriff's Office to report the incident. "There's a big difference between a stun gun and pepper spray," Stearns maintains, "and McCowen shouldn't be down there hassling people all the time, although some people camping down there deserve to be hassled." Most people would agree that the potential harm from a stun gun, aka taser, is certainly greater than harm dispensed from a container of pepper spray. "I tried to explain to McCowen that I was not there to trash the river, and that I agreed with him that the people who do trash the river don't belong there." Stearns added that he, too, has hauled bags of trash from the river banks, but said he doesn't think a weaponized supervisor should be patrolling the Perkins Street Bridge area where people, homeless or not, have the legal right to enjoy the river.

I'M ABANDONING MY DUMB IDEA to organize a small school football team from the county's outback schools where the sport has been abandoned, which is all of them except Point Arena, and even there football is a faded 8-man game. It would take public ed’s school managers at least a hundred in-services and thousands of donuts to even consider doing a collective small school football team, let alone actually getting one on the field. Even a simple permission for outback kids to join the 11-man teams in Fort Bragg and Ukiah is probably impossible. I also note the truculent denunciations of my original proposal by people hostile to football, and I say to them, What about the large, immobile kids? The otherwise non-athletic kids who fill the linemen positions? What other sport is there for them, huh? Baseball? Maybe first base or catcher. Basketball? Impossible. Soccer? Totally out for fat kids. Track and field? A strong big kid could shot put, and that's it. All sports at all levels are dominated by the lithe, the highly mobile, the young people blessed with foot speed, hand-eye coordination.

ON THE SUBJECT of gridiron glory, two kids out of Fort Bragg are starting at Santa Rosa JC, both of them having gone from small school football to very tough competition indeed at the college level among and against athletes who will go on to play at Division One colleges. Kaylor Sullivan, quarterback, and Lucas Triplett, a wide receiver at SRJC and team captain, are more than holding their own at the college level.

THE MIGHTY AVA recommends these three candidates for the Coast Hospital Board — Karen Arnold, Jessica Grinberg, John Redding. If Coast can be saved as the great little community-owned hospital it has been for many years, this trio will go a long way to saving it.

THIS HEADLINE from Tuesday morning's Press Democrat: "Residents of fire-ravaged Journey’s End mobile home park await positivity." A rain storm of smiley faces?

PEBBLES TRIPPETT has a point: The marijuana legalization process has proceeded without the pot brigades. Whether or not the long-time growers and pioneer puffers like Pebs would have added clarity to the Mendo confusion is debatable, but the process Mendo’s non-stoners (presumably) came up with is impossible, hence the ongoing failure of the program.

IT WASN’T LOST on County employees (or MendocinoSportsPlus) that the Supervisors and top officials gave themselves big raises with minimal analysis last January while dithering for months and months about the pay of most of their line workers. After the Supervisors raised their own pay to $84k a year plus generous benefits few Americans enjoy a few months ago, most of the non-managerial staff has barely recovered their pre-2009 recession level pay.

SUPERVISOR DAN HAMBURG is famous for angrily denouncing his own constituents as anti-business and general naysayers (which he repeated time and again, for example, when Anderson Valley residents asked a few pointed questions about a movie production company which wanted to take over a bunch of local roads for a few weeks back in 2013): www.theava.com/archives/21056

BUT THE BIGGEST OBSTACLE to any kind of development in Mendocino County is not locals and their miscellaneous complaints (which the County has shown to be quite capable of ignoring) but its own preciously obstreperous senior staff. Whatever the merits or demerits of the Vineyard Crossing proposal, neither lame duck Supervisor Hamburg nor the rest of Mendo Officialdom gives a rat’s ass. Developer Guillon will be on his own trying, like the previously stonewalled developer Mr. Stone, to meet impossibly petty requirements imposed by overpaid, unaccountable people with no deadlines, no money at stake, and no interest in anything but their own rigid rules. (And their own pay and perks, of course.)

“ANYONE who ever attended Catholic school or hung around rich frat boys will have known a Brett Kavanaugh or two: utterly amoral, habitually, compulsively dishonest, and so privileged and coddled that freedom from the consequences of his actions seems to him like the natural order of things.” — Larry Livermore

I CAN'T REMEMBER the last time I saw Senator Grassley, maybe during the Clarence Thomas hearings, but he looked the same and still reminded me of the cranky old guy who storms out of his house and yells at the kids, "If that ball comes over here one goddam more time, I'm keeping it." Rhetorically, Grassley's all over the place, and the last guy who ought to be chairing a meeting, let alone an important one. I think Dr. Ford was/is credible, but had to wonder how she got a PhD without knowing what "exculpatory" means, and I thought Kavanaugh came off as unhinged, like a guy on the edge of a crack-up. Of course, you can hardly be surprised at his anger and tears if he's being lied about. (Only a sadist could have enjoyed watching the guy go to pieces, …. but lots of people did, it seems.) But if Kavanaugh's as smart and as "judicial" as he's advertised to be he wouldn't have blurted out that insult to Amy Klobuchar, the least offensive Democrat on the panel, "Do you have a drinking problem?" He apologized, but losing it like that translated to me that Kav might be the closet nutcase that Democrats apparently think he is. He also came off like a person being challenged for the first time, which would be psycho-consistent with his so far smooth life and career ride.

SO KAV gets another week on the grill while the FBI checks out his secret years as an alleged rapist. As, ahem, a person who once had his own FBI investigation, I can tell you these ace sleuths placed me at the famous Civil Rights March in Selma, 1965, an error I was very proud of, but… In living fact, I spent that entire year deep in the jungles of Borneo, about as far from Alabama as it was possible to get and remain on the globe. Why this agency, founded by a paranoid, blackmailing, closet case of a crackpot, who spent his off hours in a cocktail dress, is considered the last word in investigations beats me, but here we are. Seems obvious that the Republicans didn't sic the feds on Kavanaugh as soon as the Democrats first demanded it because they probably know their boy can't withstand a hard look at his adolescent years. If the libs think Kavanaugh is bad wait until they get a local of the old girl on deck.

SENATOR WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island, gets the Dumbest Questions trophy for his cretinous, close textual analysis of Kavanaugh's high school yearbook. I sat there watching the hearing all the while thinking, "How much more screwed can we be by these people, our leaders? Here's this guy, an American senator, trying to puzzle out high school fart jokes while.... “Well, I'm sure all of you have your own lists of rolling, unaddressed catastrophes. And Kavanaugh obviously lied a whole bunch on the yearbook’s codes. The serial f’s, for instance, were around when I was a teenage degenerate, and that’s a very long time ago.

BRUCE McEWEN WRITES:

The part that got me about Brett Kavanaugh was when he said he bought all the tickets for the ball game at Fenway Park. When I was working as editor at Guns Magazine in those days (36 years ago) I could afford to go to exactly three games a year at Jack Murphy Stadium (at San Diego State), which I could see from my office on the second floor of the Security Pacific building in Mission Valley.

I couldn’t get my mind around how somebody still in college could pay for a whole frat house full of guys to go to a game, and all these years later, still be boasting about the “camaraderie” he remembered so fondly, and repeating twice how he paid for everything.

It was probably the only time anyone ever showed him anything resembling camaraderie in his entire life, even though the other guys in the frat house must have had plenty of ready pocket money themselves.

Having all those guys clapping him on the back and telling him what a swell guy he was could have gone to his head enough to make him feel like he really was such a great guy he could hardly go wrong “jumping her bones” (as the popular phrase went in those days) when a 15-year-old girl showed up.

Another point that grated on my sense of resentment was his boasting about his fairness as a judge and how he even found once in favor of defense — once?

Then he said a Federal Public Defender thought him a very fair-minded judge. A lawyer of any kind would be highly unlikely to say anything else about a judge (publicly), but having recently learned how awful federal public defenders are …well, that’s not much of character witness, to my mind.

Now I hear both his parents are judges, and so there you have it: A lifetime spent enjoying the privileges of wealth and prestige, and the resulting tears of rage when accused of something he is used to deciding the outcome of; in other words, for the first time in his life — for at least two generations — now he knows how it feels to be the accused, rather than the judge.

It would be productive of a better judiciary, I think, “adversity being the touchstone of character,” as Balzac says, if all our judges could routinely go through this kind of thing at least once a year.

ACCORDING to Sunday’s Washington Post, Charles Ludington, a college friend of Brett Kavanaugh's, said he will deliver a statement to the FBI on Monday detailing Kavanaugh’s “belligerent and aggressive” drunken conduct while the pair were at Yale. Ludington, now an associate professor at North Carolina State University, provided a copy of his statement to the Post, which includes a story of Kavanaugh prompting a fight that caused one of their mutual friends to be arrested. “When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive,” the statement reads. “On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.”

FROM my experience as a college baseball player at Cal Poly SLO, circa '61-'62, all us unmarried jockos were housed in Quonset huts down by the baseball field and well away from student housing. Except, ahem, for yours truly, my roomies were not particularly scholarly. There was drinking of course, but not the drop-fall variety described in the Kavanaugh hearings, but only because no one could afford it. But there were plenty of fights — I remember one where a halfback named Fahey bit off most of the ear of Fred Whittingham, the latter going on to the NFL as a linebacker. I got into a couple myself, and I'm not particularly aggressive, drunk or sober. I became pretty good at writing papers for lots of guys at $10-$20 a pop calibrated to be consistent with the putative author's ability level — a very soft C in most cases. Any better than that the professor would have known it was ghost written. Things in the huts didn't calm down most nights until 2 or 3 in the morning. Of necessity, I spent a lot of time in the library, it being impossible to read in one's own room. Given his barely controlled testimony, a drunk Kav was likely a pretty violent dude. Rapist? Who knows? But on the off chance he's the kind of guy who takes advice, he would have been better advised to simply say, "Yes, I got drunk as a high school and college kid but I never sexually assaulted anyone."

INTERESTING booklet produced by Jonah Raskin is yours for a mere five bucks. Called "Paul Krassner Speaks: From Lenny Bruce and Obama to Hebdo," a must read for all of you who remember Krassner's seminal "Realist" magazine, which began to appear about the same time the great Lenny Bruce was breaking all free speech barriers with comedy simply impossible at many venues today. It would be interesting to slap one of Bruce's recorded acts on KPFA or KZYX, slap it on blind with no intro in prime time to see how many people get it. Anyway, for this handsome little collector's item, please send the author $5 cash, check or money order to 4903 Petaluma Hill Road, Santa Rosa, CA 95404 

ACCORDING to Blythe Post, via the Ukiah Daily Journal, 1,063 homeless Mendo children live such precarious lives that they need regular snacks to carry home with them after school, wherever home happens to be that day. School people determine which kids might need the extra nutrition, and bless the County Office of Education for organizing the program. I don't know how many Mendo County children get free and reduced school meals, but it's a depressingly high number, and one more sign that our society is crumbling faster than it can be repaired.

I HAPPENED to be wondering at that very moment about how much more irritating Google could get when a new "service" finished a sentence for me as an on-screen message asked something like, "Finish your thought for you?" No! I know my thoughts tend overwhelmingly to the mundane when they aren't simply infantile, but they're mine, not the property of these extraterrestrial dweebos who run our lives these days. And will someone please murder the ginks who think emojis are a communications aid? Ditto for the crew who come up with the daily google graphic, invariably a cartoon figure waving out at us or somersaulting and otherwise just being vomitously cute. Gawd! Are there any adults left in this country?

I SPOTTED THIS COMMENT somewhere that stuck in my craw: "It is laughable to say Kap's skills are excellent. No one who understands football would agree with you. Also, Kap's fight for justice and equality, which included wearing socks depicting cops as pigs, was short lived. His agent let every NFL team know that if they signed him to a contract, he would stand during the national anthem."

FIRST TIME I've heard that Kaepernick would sacrifice principle at this point for another shot at the NFL, and I don't believe it. The writer seems unaware that a whole bunch of defensive backs, including the great Richard Sherman, are on the record as saying that Kaepernick is better than at least half of the quarterbacks presently starting in the NFL. The guy’s clearly been blackballed, and he’ll win his lawsuit no problemo.

PEOPLE WE'RE HAPPY we haven’t seen lately in the booking logs as we sincerely hope they’ve stopped drinking and pulled themselves together:

Leon Gibson: Last booked in May of 2016
John Bolton: Last booked in February of 2017.
Heather DeWolf: Last booked in February of 2018.
Charles Hensley: Last booked in April of 2018.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Please, please, please explain how any investigative body can confirm or disprove Mrs. Ford’s claims – that she was sexually assaulted at an unknown time, in an unknown place, in a room with three people present – one of whom denies it ever happened, the other who states he has no recollection of any such event – The Federal Bureau of Clairvoyance, perhaps?

[2] The Kavanaugh situation has shown what really is behind the curtain: America’s war between the sexes (all 294 of them). It has been a forgone conclusion since the 1960’s. Changing times always raise stress levels, resulting in conflict. As a bonus, trial by media advances the Sexual Revolution II to its ultimate end point, aided by the incredibly dimwitted public. The whole matter seems especially contrived. The plan is working.

[3] I'd love to see the truth come out. I can only rely on what we know. There's no date or address. The four people named (by the accuser) as having been there have denied (under penalty of felony) having any knowledge of it happening, or even being at such a gathering. I believe that Dr. Ford believes that something happened to her. If true, I don't believe it happened in the way she claims it did, and I most certainly don't believe (with the evidence that's been presented or more correctly, the lack of) that it was Kavanaugh.

[4] Dr. Ford comes from the same place of prep school privilege. Her own semi reliable memory is an example of the malleability of recollection. Her timorous demeanor is emblematic of her cosseted life, her early years a series of gentle challenges guaranteed to buttress her ascension into a highly collaborative, verbal, safe position in academia. It’s believable that the lowest point in her life was being dry humped by a couple of stumbling drunk boys in high school. It’s believable that this gentle flowering young woman’s delicate petals were rumpled so rudely. People jumped to defend her honor. She took a polygraph and passed. But I also think people will spring to defend his honor against such an insult. Because Brett is a special flower too. So special… all those lawns he mowed in high school, all the football games, the long hours studying, the Perfect Lawyer rating, all the friends he rented the bus for in high school to travel to a football game, all the parties he threw, his love for the old man and his diaries, his endless clerking for GW Bush… It would be just tragic if he wasn’t entitled to get this job. So on his honor he will refuse, hoping the rest of his life people genuflect to him as “Your Honor.” I find tears to be manipulative, in adults of either sex, in situations like these. Make him take a polygraph.

[5] Brett Kavanaugh has probably become a liability to the Republican Party to the extent that they will be looking to drop him. Even if he should survive his hearing, he would be a still-deeper shadow over the Court--already suffering from loss of esteem so needed by such institutions as courts. He would be the opposite of the added power he was expected to bring to the Right. The capacity of our leaders to be unbelievably ridiculous (observe how helpless they have been for the last ten days because they are confronted with a novel, open-ended situation that's not covered in the congressional playbook; they've acted like headless chickens)--anyway, their capacity for blinding foolishness makes prediction risky, but simple reason watches for a withdrawal of his nomination. Excuse me. I have to get in front of a rock video and dance. I won't be as fluid as my grandkids, but nobody's around, and I need it!

[6] When a group of Dems ask you the same question over and over nine times, you can be certain that it’s for rhetorical effect. Why answer a question that everyone already knows the answer to? Fact: No FBI investigation will “clear Kavanaugh” as Dems claim. There are only two ways his name might be cleared: 1) Ford admits she made the whole thing up to stop Kav’s confirmation; 2) The actual people involved in her allegation come out of hiding. The reason Dems want an FBI investigation is to delay matters and allow them to cook up more crazy Creepy Porn Lawyer charges, to keep the Kav-as-sexual-predator narrative going until everyone just gives up. If Dems were so concerned about truth, why didn’t they question Dr. Ford? They didn’t ask a single question to clarify Ford’s claims. Not one. Instead, they spent their time grandstanding, and praising Ford for her “courage” and “inspiration.” Why didn’t they ask her why she lied about her fear of flying? Her credibility was shot the moment she testified that she routinely flies all over the place.

MEMO OF THE WEEK

(From Jen Banks, Coastal Valley EMS Agency EMS coordinator and contact point for Mendocino County at the Sonoma County-based agency, date not specified but recent)

Good evening Mendocino County EMS partners,

Coastal Valleys EMS Agency (CVEMSA) received notification today from Verihealth/Falck regarding ambulance staffing levels. Effective 9/30/2018, Falck will be reducing unit deployment and staffing as follows:

Willits -- M9132 0800-0800 seven days per week

Willits M.9133 (brown out as a 24 hour unit)

Ukiah North M9134 (0800 to 0800) 7 days per week

Ukiah South M9131 (0800-0800) 7 days per week

Ukiah M9130 (browned out as a 12 hour unit)

It has also been brought to our attention that due to a paramedic staffing shortage in general, many of our agencies are down staffing units with the Howard Forest emergency command center but not notifying the EMS agency. This e-mail is to serve as a reminder that down staffing units from the 911 system should be reported to the EMS agency.

Until an approved policy is implemented agencies shall send an email to Coastal Valley EMS Agency at coastalvalleyemsagency@Sonoma County.org when down staffing ambulance units from our system.

Due to the recent staffing issues, Coastal Valley EMS agency is scheduling a Ukiah provider group meeting on Wednesday, October 30, 2018 at 10 AM (location TBD). Please send a representative from your agency if you are unable to attend. We will be reviewing the current system status management plan and discussing staffing and notification. If this time does not work for the majority of the group we can attempt a second day if needed.

Please provide me with any additional agenda items as well.

Thank you and I hope everyone has a good evening.

Jen Banks, Coastal Valley EMS Agency EMS coordinator

Santa Rosa

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ms notes: It’s hard to know how much this reduction in service will affect the Ukiah Valley or Anderson Valley. It does show that giant corporate ambulance operations can just up and decide they’re cutting back service or hours if and whenever they feel like it, and is yet another reason to look very askance toward privatizing such an important emergency service. Apparently, the County and local emergency response agencies will discuss the situation further at a meeting in Ukiah next week. It may also make staffing air ambulances with paramedics more difficult. We’ll be following developments.