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Posts published in “Essays”

Teeter-Totter

Three years ago the County's budget had already grown to $187 million. There was the usual ritualistic rhetoric about belt-tightening, cut-backs and general austerity, but spending increased, fueled in large part by borrowing from sources…

Change? Hope? Obama Must Have Been Talking About Joe Biden!

“Change” and “hope” are not words one associates with Senator Joe Biden, a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political…

Deconstructing Glenda

Last Wednesday, there was an article in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat entitled "North Coast water plan greeted with howls," by the PD's Ukiah reporter Glenda Anderson. The piece was loaded with spectacular errors and much…

What’s Wrong With Wiggins?

STATE SENATOR PAT WIGGINS, whose increasingly erratic public behavior was recently noted by the AVA, startled a public hearing last week when she suddenly and inexplicably swore at committee witness Pastor Robert Jones. Sen. Pat…

The Endless Detention

Days turn to weeks, weeks to months and I think back to when I was first arrested by Border Patrol agents in Texas and told that this would take, at maximum, a few weeks. That…

Made in China

They glide silently through the Golden Gate, ships so large they briefly obscure great swathes of Marin as they move deep into the San Francisco Bay. The seagoing dirigibles with the faraway names are stacked…

Locals To Planners: ‘Enough Grapes!’

The old plan, the young live. Most of the people at last Thursday's Planning Commission hearing to address the Anderson Valley Alternative General Plan Draft at the Boonville Fairgrounds were over the age of 50.…

Don’t Snap These Threads

Imagine yourself making your way from Boonville to Mexico City any way you could when, just south of San Diego, you had to get yourself over, under or through a twenty foot high illuminated steel-plated…

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