WHAT’S BLACK and never works? Decaf, you racist dog!

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EARLY POLLING shows Hillary Clinton leading the Democratic pack by a wide margin, with a whopping 63% of Democrats telling pollsters that they would vote for the former first lady. Vice President Joe “Joey The Bag Man” Biden came in second with 13% support among Democrats, the party of middle of the road extremists.

THE PARTY OF LINCOLN? New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie leads so far with 15% support among an unappealing pack that includes mega-nut Randian, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and the gringo-ized Ted Cruz.

POLLS CLAIM that Clinton would beat New Jersey Fats with 47% of the vote to his 41%. The woman accurately described by a former female aide as a “monster,” would beat Jeb Bush worse, and the other mediocrities among the Republican frontrunners worse yet.

GIVEN THESE CHOICES, the AVA is already recommending a vote for whomever the Greens put up. The Democrats and Republicans are interchangeable (and disastrous) on the big issues, as Obama has demonstrated beyond all doubt.

THE ONLY DEMOCRAT who appeals to us is Elizabeth Warren, the sole federal officeholder to at least try to control the banks as we head inexorably toward fiscal cataclysm. She’s a lot smarter than Hillary, a much better talker, and she’s undoubtedly much more of a human being. Of course as a smart and principled person, she has no shot at the presidency.

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THE WHOLE SYSTEM STINKS

By Elizabeth Warren

I’ve spent years fighting back against credit card companies that put out zero-interest teaser rate cards, planning to jack up the price later and make all their profits in the fine print. I also fought back against teaser rate mortgages that promised low payments in the first few years, but then shot up to rates that pushed millions of families into foreclosure. So it’s shocking to me that the United States Senate would offer its own teaser rate for our student loan system — a system that is scheduled to make more than $184 billion in profits over the next ten years. That’s not the business the United States government should be in. Speak out right now to make sure the Senate doesn’t pass a deal that would let federal student loans go even higher than their current 6.8% rate. We had a majority in the Senate to keep student interest rates low, but because of Republican filibusters, the interest rate on federally subsidized student loans jumped from 3.4% to 6.8% on July 1st. Instead of restoring that 3.4% rate, a new so-called “compromise” plan on the table raises the interest rate on those loans this year to 3.86% for undergraduate students, and 5.41% for graduate students in 2013. And then it gets worse. The plan is set up to collect higher interest rates in future years. After just 24 months, the rate jumps above 6.8% for graduate students. Within a few years, rates for all loans will be higher than if Congress does nothing — and some could climb as high as 10.5%. Even worse, with the federal government already making billions in profits off these programs, the “compromise” plan is set up to actually increase those profits by hundreds of millions of dollars more. I can’t support a proposal that squeezes even more profits out of our kids, while millionaires and billionaires still don’t pay their fair share. This is a bad deal. Senator Jack Reed has offered an amendment that is a true compromise: let rates move with the market, but set a cap on student loan interest rates at their current rates. I am proud to cosponsor that amendment. It’s the only way to ensure that students don’t end up paying more than they would if Congress does nothing. The Senate will vote on the compromise bill as early as this week. Please speak out now and demand support for Senator Reed’s student loan amendment. In the end, this is a simple math problem. If Republicans insist that we continue to make the same $184 billion in profit off of the student loan program, that just means that students in future years will have to pay higher rates to make up the difference. I don’t believe in pitting our kids against each other. In fact, I think this whole system stinks. We should not go along with any plan that demands that our students continue to produce huge profits for our government. Making billions and billions in profits off the backs of students is obscene. Senator Jack Reed’s amendment is the only plan on the table right now that guarantees student loan interest rates won’t skyrocket above their current levels. We need to pass this amendment for our kids and grandkids. Sign up now to support Senator Reed’s amendment. I appreciate the hard work that my colleagues have done to try to defeat the Republican filibuster so that we can keep student loan rates low. But our students are drowning under a trillion dollars in student loan debt. We need to start now with one basic principle: cut government profits on student loans. I can’t support a deal that actually increases those profits.

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PULITZER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR, HEDRICK SMITH, will be John Sakowicz’s guest on “All About Money” on KZYX, on Friday, July 26, at am to talk about his new book, “Who Stole the American Dream?”

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LIBERTARIANS LEADING THE FIGHT AGAINST THE NSA

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Hero) is leading the charge

by Justin Raimondo

Edward Snowden’s sacrifice was not in vain because many thousands in the United States are rising to take up the battle he started. And they mean to win.

At the head of the libertarian army that’s storming the gates of the Leviathan: Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan), a Ron Paul Republican who won his congressional seat in 2010, and has been in the vanguard of Washington’s young libertarian Turks ever since. And now he has the statist Establishment of both parties fuming, with his amendment to the 2014 defense appropriations bill, the LIBERT-E Act, (H.R. 2399, the Limiting Internet and Blanket Electronic Review of Telecommunications and Email Act) which would outlaw the National Security Agency’s data dragnet, amending the Patriot Act to limit data collection to specific US citizens under active investigation. The bill also requires that secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court opinions be made available to Congress and declassified summaries of the opinions be made available to the public. With liberal Democrat John Conyers signed on as a co-sponsor, and 32 members of Congress from both parties on board, the libertarian movement’s brightest star in the House has thrown a real monkey wrench into the campaign to minimize and whitewash the vast and unaccountable surveillance system secretly set up by the NSA.

And he’s got the Regimists in a real panic. Just reading that Huffington Post headline – “NSA’s Keith Alexander Calls Emergency Private Briefing To Lobby Against Justin Amash Amendment Curtailing Its Power” – was so thrilling that I had to stop writing this column, for a moment, and just bask.

Think of it: forty or so years ago, when the libertarian movement had only just stopped being big enough to fit inside Murray Rothbard’s living room, we often got feedback like “Oh, I didn’t know the librarians had their own political movement.” This morning I read a headline in the Financial Times exclaiming: “Libertarian Republicans Block Pentagon Bill“! Yes, libertarian Republicans – of varying degrees of consistency – in Congress, a small but growing and highly visible vanguard of liberty, which calls itself the Liberty Caucus. And in the fight against the Surveillance State, they are getting support from progressives with a conscience, who are daring to break with this administration over its draconian approach to civil liberties. That’s what has NSA snoop-in-chief Keith Alexander in such a last-minute lather, getting Rep. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D-Maryland) to call a special top secret briefing for members of Congress:

“The invitation warned members that they could not share what they learned with their constituents or others. ‘The briefing will be held at the Top Secret/SCI level and will be strictly Members-Only,’ reads the invite.”

It’s impossible to parody these people – every time they open their mouths they give themselves away. To anyone outside Washington, D.C., this reads like an invitation to a Soviet Politboro meeting, circa 1933. Is this the kind of government Americans want? I hardly think so. We may be decadent epigones of our pioneer ancestors, effete pushovers for any freebie-promising politico, but Americans aren’t ready for Brezhnevism quite yet.

Ruppersberger, a reliably neoconservative Republican who represents a Maryland district with many thousands of NSA employees (NSA headquarters is in Ft. Meade) has defended the NSA’s spying by declaring “if you have to find a needle in a haystack, you need the haystack” – as succinct a justification for an authoritarian state as has ever been uttered.

The stakes are high – higher than they’ve ever been. And libertarians have a key role to play in this unfolding drama. The libertarian congressional leadership has taken the initiative, with Rep. Amash and Sen. Rand Paul both introducing legislation to roll back the NSA and stand up for the Bill of Rights. Nothing less than the future of the republic is at stake. Which is why grassroots libertarians, and the growing number of liberals and conservatives who never knew we were so close to total tyranny, must back them up. The vote on the LIBERT-E Act is likely coming up on Wednesday – that’s tomorrow. So please – call your congressional representatives.

Don’t know what number to call? Find out here.

Listen to me: this is important. When I heard about this effort – and Amash’s procedural victory in getting this bill on the congressional calendar – I dropped my previous plan to write a column on another topic and insisted they post this one early, so we can get a good jump on the vote and really have an effect. When you call, specific that you are urging a vote for H.R. 2399, an amendment to the defense appropriations bill, that would scale back the powers of the NSA. Be nice, and be brief.

(Courtesy, Antiwar.com)

WE’VE BEEN TOLD that local Congressman Jared “Spike” Huffman voted in favor of restricting the NSA.

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PUBLIC SHOWS OVERWHELMING OPPOSITION TO SHASTA DAM RAISE PLAN

by Dan Bacher

One thing became clear from the public workshop regarding the proposed Shasta Dam raise held at the Holiday Inn in Redding on July 16 — the vast majority of local people, ranging from Winnemem Wintu Tribe members to local business owners, oppose the raising of the dam.

When one woman in the crowd asked for a show of hands of those who oppose the dam raise and those who support it, the majority of the 250 people in the audience raised their hands in opposition. Only a small number of hands went up in support of the controversial plan.

The event began with a power point presentation by Michelle Denning of the Bureau of Reclamation, accompanied by other Reclamation staff and consultants.

The primary purposes of the project are to (1) “increase survival of anadromous fish populations in the upper Sacramento River” and (2) “increase water supply and water supply reliability for agricultural, municipal and industrial, and environmental purposes,” according to the Bureau.

The workshop focused on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for raising Shasta Dam. The 90-day public comment and review period for the EIS started on July 1 – and the workshop held in Redding was one of three workshops held throughout the state that week.

The draft EIR evaluates five controversial alternatives that would raise the dam from 6.5 feet to 18.5 feet, increasing the reservoir’s capacity by 256,000 to 634,000 acre-feet. The document also evaluates a “no-action alternative.”

Presenters claimed that the study, the Shasta Lake Water Resources Investigation, would improve the “operational flexibility” of the Delta watershed and increase the survival of salmon and other fish in the Sacramento River by increasing the amount of cold water pool available to be released to improve downstream temperature conditions for fish during critical periods.

Other “benefits” touted in the power point presentation include increased flood protection, providing additional hydropower supplies, and improving water quality in the Sacramento River and the Delta.

However, as one speaker after another pointed out in an informal public comment and question period, there are many adverse impacts of the project. These include the inundation of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe’s sacred sites, the need to relocate boat ramps, campgrounds and other recreational facilities, dislocation of residents and business owners on Shasta Lake, loss of future income by displaced people, the take and loss of habitat for numerous special-status species at Shasta Lake and vicinity, and impacts on south Delta water levels and Delta outflows.

The project would also impact the McCloud River’s status for listing as a federal Wild & Scenic River. Dam raise critics also questioned whether the management of the cold water pool is effective way of managing declining populations of Central Valley Chinook salmon.

Kenwani-Cahee Kravitz, a member of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, said the Shasta Dam raise would violate her religious freedoms.

“My daughter will not be able to do her puberty ceremony if the dam is raised,” said Kravitz. “Our sacred rock where we conduct the puberty ceremony will go under water if the dam is raised.”

Harold Jones, owner of Sugar Loaf Cottages on Lake Shasta, said his operation would go out of business if the dam is raised 18-1/2 feet as proposed.

“If they take the property and pay for the land, then what will we do about our future income? The government doesn’t allow future income loss to be considered in compensating landowners and business owners,” he emphasized.

Caleen Sisk, Chief of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, asked several questions starting with, “When will the 1941 Indian Land Acquisition Act, that took the tribal lands, be addressed?”

The officials refused to answer this question, since they apparently had no answer.

Sisk also asked: “Will raising the dam meet the demands of Southern California?”

Denning responded that the dam raise would provide water to the Central Valley Project and deliver some exported water to people in the San Joaquin Valley, East Bay Area and Glenn and Colusa Counties, but acknowledged that it would be not be enough to satisfy all of the contracts and Southern California.

Finally, Sisk asked, “Where is the plan to get the salmon above the dam?”

Denning responded, “The biological opinion alternatives dedicate 60 percent of storage to cold water to improve downriver conditions for fisheries in dry and critically dry years by meeting the temperature requirements,” but she never really addressed the plan to get the fish above the dams.

The Winnemen Wintu have been for years trying to pressure the federal government to reintroduce winter run Chinook salmon, by means of salmon transplanted to New Zealand around the turn of the century, to the McCloud River above Shasta Dam.

Sisk also emphasized that the current cold water pool management isn’t producing the targeted number of fish, as required by federal law.

The Central Valley Project Improvement Act of 1992 mandated the doubling of all anadromous fish populations, including Central Valley chinook salmon, by 2002. Instead, the salmon populations crashed in 2008 and 2009, due to record water exports out of the Delta and poor ocean and river conditions, and the goal of 990,000 naturally spawning salmon has never been met.

A new analysis released on May 13 by the Golden Gate Salmon Association (GGSA) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reveals that the salmon fishery is limping along at only 20 percent of the population goal required by state and federal law. (http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/05/15/18736849.php

“How do you expect extending the cold water pool for salmon at Shasta will produce more salmon when the current cold water pool management hasn’t made more fish?” Sisk said. “This is not logical.”

Chris, a local resident, l exposed the absurdity of plans to raise the dam when the lake has been has filled only 11 times in the 59 years of the existence of the reservoir, only 19 percent of the time.

“This tells us that the lake has been mismanaged 48 percent of the time. It makes more sense to manage the water that you have in the reservoir than than to raise the dam,” he pointed out.

In response to my question about the relation between the plan to build the peripheral tunnels and the dam raise proposal, Denning said there is “no relationship between the dam raise study and the Bay Delta Conservation Plan.”

However, everybody who has studied the issue knows that there is a clear relationship between the two projects because one is contingent upon the other. The dam is being raised to provide increased water to corporate agribusiness and oil companies that will be shipped south through the peripheral tunnels.

After the meeting Chief Sisk pointed out that participants in the workshop forgot to ask two key questions about emergency evacuation plans and toxic waste.

“No one asked about the evacuation plans for Redding should the dam ever break,” said Sisk. “Just think… no one thought Hurricane Katrina would ever happen.”

“Also, what about the toxic waste at the bottom of the Lake?” she noted.

Background: In February of 2012, the Bureau of Reclamation released a Draft Feasibility Study that determined the project was both” technically and environmentally feasible,” as well as “economically justified;” the study determined that raising the dam 18.5 feet would cost just over $1 billion dollars and would produce from $18 to $63 million in net economic benefits per year.

The project is just in its beginning stages; the Draft Feasibility Report, the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, and the public comments received on both documents will be used to determine next steps. If the project is approved, it could be completed by 2021.

Written comments on the Draft EIS may be provided at any time before midnight Monday, September 30, and should be mailed to Katrina Chow, Project Manager, Reclamation, Planning Division, 2800 Cottage Way, Sacramento, CA 95825-1893, 916-978-5067 (TTY 916-978-5608), or email BOR-MPR-SLWRI [at] usbr.gov. All comments will be considered.

The Bureau will host three formal public hearings to receive oral or written comments regarding the draft EIS. They will be held on the following dates at the following locations:

Tuesday, September 10, 6-8 p.m., Holiday Inn, Palomino Room, 1900 Hilltop Drive, Redding, CA. 96002

Wednesday, September 11, 1-3 p.m., Cal Expo Quality Inn Hotel and Suites, Conference Room, 1413 Howe Avenue, Sacramento, CA 95825

Thursday, September 12, 6-8 p.m., Merced County Fairgrounds, Germino Building, 403 F Street, Los Banos, CA 93635

For information on the Draft EIS, please visit ‘http://www.usbr.gov/mp/nepa/nepa_projdetails.cfm?Project_ID=1915. If you encounter problems accessing the documents online, please call 916-978-5100.

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ROLLING STONE SALES ARE UP BY 20% even though some retailers refused to stock the magazine after it featured the Boston bombing suspect on its cover.

The controversial August cover, which made Dzhokhar Tsarnaev look more like a rock star than a terrorism suspect, sparked outrage when it was released earlier this month.

As Boston officials and victims lambasted the magazine for celebrating the suspect and ignoring the victims, some retailers, including CVS and Walgreens, pulled the edition from its shelves.

But despite this backlash, it appears that the magazine has sold more copies this month than normal.

A circulation source told the New York Post that sales for the issue until the first weekend of the month were running around 20% above its normal rate.

Rolling Stone usually sells around 81,000 copies, but the estimated sell-through is now believed to be at least 90,000 copies, the source said.

A Rolling Stone spokeswoman declined comment on the figures.

The cover of August’s edition is a self-taken portrait of Tsarnaev, 19, and he is identified simply as “The Bomber.” The article promises to explain “how a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam, and became a monster.”

The cover of Rolling Stone is typically occupied by rock stars and actors, and many felt the choice glorified Tsarnaev, who is accused of killing four people and wounding more than 260.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino described the cover as a “total disgrace” and said it should have put survivors or first responders on the cover. “Why are we glorifying a guy who created mayhem in the city of Boston?” Menino asked. “Why would we want to heroize this guy? He’s a terrorist. We don’t want him in our neighborhoods. We don’t want him on magazines. We don’t want him anywhere.”

MBTA Transit Officer Richard ‘Dic’ Donahue, who almost died when he was shot during a firefight with the Tsarnaev brothers, said: “I cannot and do not condone the cover of the magazine.”

In their brief statement, Rolling Stone — founded in the 1960s by Jann Wenner who is still editor-in-chief — said their “hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and our thoughts are always with them.”

“The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone’s long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day,” it said.

Pointing out that Dzhokhar is in the same age group as many of their readers, Rolling Stone said that fact “makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue.”

In response to the cover, police photographer Sgt. Sean Murphy released photographs showing a weak and bloodied Tsarnaev in the moments before he was captured.

The Massachusetts police did not authorize the release of the images, and he has now been put on desk duty until an investigation into his conduct is complete.

Tsarnaev, who is currently being held without bail in a federal prison in Massachusetts, has pleaded not guilty to 30 counts — including the four killings — associated with the bombing.

(Courtesy, the London Daily Mail)

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THE TALMAGE FLAG BURNER

by Bruce McEwen

Doff your hat and clap your hand over your heart! If in uniform, snap to attention and salute! Run up the colors, and play “The Stars and Stripes Forever”!

“I’m not safe at the jail,” hollered Michael T. Grunwald, suspected of torching Old Glory.

Grunwald

“They’re after me!”

Grunwald could be heard howling in anger, fear and perhaps pain, all the way down the elevator and out the back, condemning the court, slandering the judge, the system, the halls of justice, the whole show. Everyone was gape-mouthed. Grunwald had pulled off one of the all-time Courthouse freakouts.

But he hadn’t helped his defense much.

Mr. Grunwald, 58, of Talmage, was arrested June 13^th, the day before Flag Day, and charged with arson. He was accused of burning a neighbor’s flag that same morning at 2070 Old River Road. Nobody saw him burn the flag, so Grunwald seemed to think he had an open and shut case for his own innocence and decided he didn’t need a lawyer. He could handle the matter him­self.

To many people, defending yourself in court seems simple enough. You just tell the judge what happened and he or she will understand. Judges, being fair and reasonable individuals of intelligence and with their share of experience in the big, wide world, will be understanding. Tell it to Judge Simpatico and he or she will cut you loose.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Except in closing arguments, you are seldom allowed to tell the judge what happened. By the time you get to court and find this out, it’s too late to make a new plan. All you are going to be allowed to do, you discover, is ask some questions of a witness, which, in this case, was the cop who busted you.

The cop will have told his side of the story at the prompting of the prosecutor, and your side must be told only through cross-examination of the cop. Ever try to get somebody — someone on the other side — to tell your side?

The cop won’t think you have a side. He will not want to answer your questions, and he will know how to dodge them even if you do get off what you think are real zingers. You will get frustrated and flustered and look like a fool. Worse, you’ll get convicted of whatever you’re charged with. Then, if you’re human, you’ll get angry at the system and everyone involved in it, and make yourself look not only guilty but also crazy, even to those who would otherwise have thought you sane and innocent.

Keep in mind that the rules of evidence are complex and rigid. Even experienced lawyers have difficulty get­ting it right. In fact, most lawyers are not trial lawyers for the simple reason that presenting evidence in court is too demanding, too tricky, and they simply can’t manage it.

The former DA, Meredith Lintott, had a court date last week but didn’t show. She sent her lawyer, Mr. Kin­dopp (see below)*. Ms. Lintott is a seasoned lawyer, been in lots of courtrooms. Why would she feel the need to hire a lawyer? Because she knows better than to repre­sent herself. When professionals with extensive educa­tion and experience know better than to go to court with­out a lawyer, why would you, Mr. Grunwald — espe­cially when the judge is willing to appoint one for free?

Mr. Grunwald was the latest example of this timeless folly of a fool representing himself. It was Grunwald’s word against the cop’s.

Deputy Paoli had arrived after the flag fire had been doused. But Grunwald was still footin’ it on home, and he’d been seen in the immediate vicinity of the flag burning. It still seemed to Grunwald that he had a fair chance of winning the case.

But Grunwald didn’t understand, for one thing, that this was a preliminary hearing, not a trial. The prosecu­tion, in the form of a talented young lawyer named Josh Rosenfeld, did not have to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that Grunwald burnt the flag, making him an ar­sonist, since the flag was attached to a house.

At a prelim, all Deputy DA Rosenfeld had to do was make the judge “reasonably suspicious” that Grunwald may have set Old Glory aflame. And while losing a pre­lim is not a conviction, it is at least halfway there, and most reasonable defendants see the writing on the wall, as it were, and settle for whatever they can get when the facts are laid out during this first hearing. Another thing Grunwald didn’t seem know was that this was a 115 pre­lim, a result of Proposition 115, which meant the prose­cution didn’t have to subpoena all the witnesses they would bring to a trial. In essence, it meant the cop could repeat hearsay as evidence; that is, what other people told him about what had happened.

In the old days, before Prop 115, anyone an officer spoke with would have to be brought to court and sworn in to testify, like in a trial, so the defense could cross-examine them. Not anymore. And herein lay the Mr. Grunwald’s doom on his first excursion into “the sys­tem.”

As mentioned earlier, Mr. Rosenfeld is a talented trial lawyer. But it didn’t take much talent to put Grun­wald on the ropes. Rosenfeld called Deputy Paoli to the stand, his only witness. Paoli said when he arrived at the scene he talked to a cable splicer for AT&T, Brian Far­rer. Farrer told Paoli that he saw the suspect, Grunwald, walking away from the burning flag at a fast pace. Just then a neighbor came out of a nearby house, a Mr. Diaz, who helped Farrer put the flag fire out. Mr. Diaz said he recognized Grunwald from the previous day, June 12th.

On June 12th, a vehicle had hit a power pole in the area and knocked down some power lines which started a grass and brush fire. Mr. Grunwald was there trying to put the fire out, and he became angry at the other resi­dents who had not helped him fight the blaze before the Ukiah Fire truck got there.

Deputy Paoli was allowed considerable latitude in his narration, which an experienced lawyer would have objected to. Grunwald was not an experienced lawyer. And DDA Rosenfeld knew what questions to ask to dig the defendant in deeper.

“Do many of the houses have wells and electric water pumps in that area?” Rosenfeld asked.

“Yes,” Paoli answered, “and with the power lines down, the homeowners were unable to use their hoses to extinguish the fire.”

“So, there was no water and Grunwald was upset, yelling at people?”

“Yes. He was very agitated with the local residents for not providing water.”

The next day, after the flag fire was put out, Sergeant Dan Edwards responded to the arson call and saw Grun­wald, who fit the description Diaz and Farrer had given him, in the 1200 block of Talmage Road and searched him, finding a Bic lighter in his pocket. Grunwald was asked if he had “an issue” with residents in the area the day before, and when he admitted he was upset with them for not helping put out the fire the day before, he was taken into custody.

On cross, Grunwald said, “Supposedly, those people recognized me from the day before.”

“What is your question, Mr. Grunwald?” Judge Ann Moorman asked. “You have to ask the witness questions. You can’t just make statements.”

“I want to know how they recognized me.”

“You have to ask a question.”

“How did they recognize me?”

Paoli said they recognized him as the person trying to put out the fire the day before.

“Right across the street is Buddha Land,” Grunwald said.

Paoli looked on blankly.

“What’s your question,” Moorman asked.

“Well, isn’t Buddha Land right across the street?”

“Yes,” Paoli said.

“And there’s lots of dry grass and fields there, cor­rect?”

“Yes.”

“So if you lived up the street like I do you’d think I was right to fight that fire!”

“That’s not a proper question, Mr. Grunwald,” Moor­man said.

“This was an electrical fire, wasn’t it? And you don’t fight an electrical fire with water, do you?”

Paoli said nothing.

“Oh… Now, you say your sergeant searched me and found a Bic?”

“Yes.”

“Did he also say I smoke cigarettes — it was very nice for you he left that part out?”

“That’s argumentative, Mr. Grunwald.”

“Well, did he find anything else?”

“No.”

“Did Diaz or Farrer actually see me light the flag on fire?”

“No.”

“So we don’t even know who did it. Was anyone seen lighting the flag on fire?”

“No.”

Grunwald was out of questions, and deputy Paoli stepped down.

“Do you want to argue, Mr. Grunwald?”

Grunwald said, “I see there were no eyewitnesses that I lit the flag on fire. I was seen in the area and that’s all. So, I’d move to dismiss this case.”

Moorman said, “The burden on the people in a pre­lim is not to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you set the fire, but only to create a strong suspicion that you may have, and they have met that burden. The testimony from the witness was that you were seen leaving the area in a hasty fashion, and the flag was burning. That is rea­sonable suspicion, and I’m going to hold you to answer.”

Grunwald had lost, but he wanted out of jail. His bail had been set at $100,000 because as soon as he’d bailed out of jail on the flag burning arrest, he went to his ex-wife’s house and took a rather ominous array of items from her — a pair of coveralls, a hatchet, a pair of slip­pers. There was also an allegation that he’d whispered in his ex-wife’s ear while she was sleeping and had other­wise annoyed her. The whispers apparently weren’t of the sweet nothings genre because his ex immediately called the police. Then there were some charges of tak­ing things from a car, an allegation of possession of a controlled substance. And since Grunwald had accumu­lated these charges while on bail for the flag burning his bail had been increased to $100,000.

“I’d like to get OR’d,” Grunwald told Judge Moor­man. “I need to pay rent and I have animals to take care of. I’ve made all my court appearances, and I’ve lived here over 20 years.”

DDA Rosenfeld said Grunwald represented a threat to both the community and his ex-wife and bail should remain at $100,000.

Judge Moorman agreed, at which point Grunwald went all the way off.

“Do you know how many times these cops have arrested me on little bullshit charges?” Grunwald yelled at the judge. “Just because I turned in their little dope dealer who was selling drugs down at the high school? And I don’t feel safe with these cops, they’re out to get me. Look! [holding up his shackled leg] — Look at this! There, now I’ve said it: it’s out there, in open court. But this court isn’t worth a shit, and neither are you. You need to fix your hair, your hair’s a mess!”

Dude, you just went so far over the line you’ll need a compass to find your way back.

The deputy was hustling Grunwald out as fast as he could, but we could hear the defendant loud and clear all the way downstairs.

The guy probably ought to get a sanity hearing. If he isn’t nuts he’s doing a great job faking it.

(*The case against former DA Meredith Lintott is a libel suit brought by Robert Forest of Fort Bragg, as described by Tim Stelloh in these pages back in 2009 and re-printed here. Recently, a state appellate court rejected Ms. Lintott’s claim that Mr. Forest’s suit was a SLAPP suit, thus allowing it to go forward. But it’s not scheduled for trial until next year, at the earliest.)

Fort Bragg’s Smoking Police Report

by Tim Stelloh

A cigarette.

That’s what caused the argument between Robert For­est and Stanley Douglass one November afternoon three years ago, in 2006. They were in downtown Fort Bragg, and Forest was walking from a coffee shop back toward the bar where, earlier, he’d had a couple drinks and where he’d parked his motorcycle. Douglass was walking along Franklin Street. They met. They scuffled. And that’s when Forest, then 54, removed a .32 pistol from his pocket and aimed at Douglass, then 26.

That much is clear.

How that scuffle lead to a federal lawsuit filed two months ago claiming a former Fort Bragg cop had altered police documents, thus causing Forest’s “wrong­ful” and “malicious” prosecution in the same case, is another story.

Which we’ll get to.

First, a bit more on that cigarette. How the argument happened is still up for debate: According to police reports, Forest said he was walking back from Headlands Cafe when Douglass, who’s black, approached him, grabbed him, demanded a cigarette. Forest told police that Douglass had said he was a gangbanger and that he’d rough Forest up. Forest also said he felt threatened, so he got his pistol — for which he had a concealed weapons permit (that would later be suspended).

Douglass put it differently. He told the cops that as he was walking past the bar, saw Forest and asked him for a cigarette. An argument followed, so Douglass started walking away — which is when Forest grabbed him and pulled out the gun. A witness provided police — and later the DA — with a version of events that more or less matched Douglass’s. The police arrested Forest (who, it turned out, had been convicted 20 years earlier for carrying a concealed, loaded weapon), charged him with assault with a deadly weapon and forwarded the case to the DA’s office.

Which is when things got weird.

About a month after the incident, Forest’s arresting officer sent an email to recently hired Police Chief Mark Puthuff. The report had apparently been changed: Words had been rephrased. Conversations the officer never had had been inserted. Paragraphs where Forest described his side of the scuffle had been deleted.

“I was working on the supplement you had requested on this case, and when I began to re-read my (4 page) supplement to refresh my memory, I realized that it had been altered. No, I’m not kidding, it has literally been changed,” wrote the officer, Sgt. Brandon Lee. “I found some paragraphs inserted that I never put in there, and then found some missing as well. This is pretty typical fro [sic] FBPD. Anyway, I am sending you this email to let you know that I printed a copy of my supplement, with highlighted sections where the narrative had been changed or deleted. I find this very disturbing, because if I had not taken the time to review it, I never would have known it was like that.”

In the margins of the report, Lee scrawled comments noting which sections had been altered. “This is gar­bage,” he wrote at the top of the report, “and I would not testify to this under oath that I wrote this!”

Meanwhile, the DA’s office was proceeding with the case — though shortly after Lee sent that email, prose­cutor Tim Stoen learned of the problems at the police department. He learned that Lee had accused a veteran supervising officer, Lt. Floyd Higdon, of altering the report, according to court documents.

Forest, who once worked with Higdon as a reserve officer, had “professional and personal disagreements” with the lieutenant. The day Forest was arrested and booked, those differences were apparently on full dis­play: Forest promptly asked if Higdon was the officer who’d ordered his arrest. (He was). “I should’ve known,” he told the arresting officer, Brandon Lee. When Lee asked if Forest could post bail in Fort Bragg, Higdon “insisted” that he be moved to Ukiah instead.

Shortly after these problems began, Higdon retired. He’d been on the force 25 years. He then left Mendo altogether for Merced in the Central Valley, where he’s now a police commander; he’d been “recruited” by for­mer Fort Bragg police chief Russ Thomas, he said. Hig­don declined to comment on the charges, except to say he’d deny them and that he didn’t alter anything.

Problems dogged the DA’s case against Forest, how­ever, and in January 2008, District Attorney Meredith Lintott dropped the charges against him. Nowhere in her decision did she mention the problems with Higdon and Lee; she simply said a conviction was not probable.

Tim Stoen, the prosecutor, still maintains that he would have gotten a guilty verdict if his boss had stuck it out. At the time, he made sure Fort Bragg PD knew how he felt.

“It seemed obvious to me that this conflict within the department was causing it to reverse position on the desirability of prosecuting Robert Forest despite the ‘firearm seriousness’ of the charge’,” he said, according to court documents. “At the preliminary hearing the defendant’s first attorney stated in open court that the new chief of police [Mark Puthuff] himself had gone so far as to tell him — the defense attorney! — that Lieu­tenant Higdon had poisoned the reports in this case,” Stoen said. “After working for seven different elected District Attorneys, I cannot recall a single instance where the internal quarrels within a law enforcement depart­ment created a similar attempt to impugn the integrity of an ongoing prosecution.”

That “poison” is one of the central claims in Forest’s federal case. So are the “disagreements.”

Nevertheless, the attorney representing Higdon — along with the city of Fort Bragg and the Fort Bragg Police Department, which are also named in the suit — said she’s confident they’ll win. “We believe the com­plaint to be unfounded and expect that will be the ulti­mate outcome,” said the lawyer, Nancy Delaney.

Donald Kilmer, Forest’s attorney, said a tentative agreement has been in reached in the case, although details are yet to be worked out.

To see the documents behind this story, visit TheAVA.com. ¥¥

(Jonah Owen-Lamb contributed to this story.)

BACK IN 2011, the Mendo Board of Supervisors discussed logging the 57 County-owned acres 
of timber near the Little River Airport. It was a long discussion, a very long discussion, centered around whether the timber market would produce
 enough revenue to justify doing the paperwork and associated planning.
 Supervisor John Pinches specifically said that if the paperwork was going
 to cost over $30k, and the expected revenue from the job was only about $100k, it wasn’t
 worth it; Pinches thought maybe the timber market would improve in a year or 
two. Pinches has experience in the timber business, and the board in 2011 deferred to his expertise and voted unanimously to postpone the logging.

ALSO DURING that 2011 discussion John Sakowicz read into the record a 
letter from Fort Bragg forester Tom Kisliuk who complained that the forester the County had selected,
 a Mr. Roger Sternberg, wasn’t experienced in 
actual logging administration and was charging the County too much for the 
paperwork. Kisliuk had written that the County had selected a forester who 
had never written an approved NTMP (non-industrial timber management plan) 
or administered a Notice of Timber Operations or a Harvest Plan. “The 
forester is not experienced nor the most economical choice,” concluded
 Sakowicz in 2011. “Perhaps the competition was not to hire the most 
experienced or most economical forester, but to hire a colleague of the
 County’s extension forester who, like the winning candidate, has never
 written an approved timber harvest plan or administered an NTO. … I wonder 
if more valuable contracts are awarded based on personal relationships 
rather than producing the best result for the client, the Mendocino County 
taxpayers.”

IN 2011 THE BOARD didn’t address the specific merits of Mr. Kisliuk’s
 complaint, but they did vote unanimously to postpone the logging until the 
timber market improved.

NOW, two years later, the Little River logging job has come back on the
 Board’s radar. But the last round of paperwork is no longer
 current and, at a minimum, another round of bird surveys will have to be
 done, which will involve additional time and cost. Other plan updates are
 also required, such as an estimate of the value of the merchantable timber
 that might result.

ACCORDING to Mr. Kisliuk the problems he described in 2011 are still
 unaddressed. Mr. Sternberg has apparently been hired on a “time and
 materials” basis to update the paperwork but, says Kisliuk, Sternberg was
not the low bidder — Mr. Kisliuk was. Mr. Kisliuk insists that he has more
 experience with NTMPs and the other logging experience that Mr. Sternberg 
doesn’t have. So why didn’t he get the job?

AS FAR AS WE CAN TELL, Mr. Sternberg’s specialty is conservation
 easements. He’s a registered professional forester but available on-line 
references show that he’s closely associated with local land trusts and
with County Forest Advisor Greg Giusti.

MR. KISLIUK has complained about the recent awarding of the contract to
 Mr. Sternberg to both General Services Director Kristin McMenomey and
 Deputy County Counsel Doug Losak, both of whom offered only perfunctory
responses, saying there was nothing amiss in the bidding process. Mr. Losak confirmed that the contract award process included the two men Kisliuk says are friends or colleagues of Sternberg: “Mendocino County 
General Services Agency (GSA) enlisted the assistance of Steve Smith,
Registered Professional Forester to be a member of the evaluation
 panel. GSA also requested the presence of Greg Guisti, Registered
Professional Forester to be in attendance while the panel reviewed
 the responses. Mr. Guisti did not participate in the ranking of the
 responses received, he was in attendance to answer any questions.”

MR. KISLIUK says his recent bid was a “not-to-exceed” bid of $10,000 which 
would be substantially lower than Mr. Sternberg’s, especially considering 
that a good portion of the paperwork has already been done. In
 addition, back in 2011 when the Board last discussed the logging project, Supervisor Pinches, the Board’s go-to guy when the subject is 
logging, said, “If we’re going to spend 30% of our estimated value [$100k]
 on this I think we ought to just drop this whole proposal. That’s way
 outtaline. I was thinking around maybe $8-10k.” By “30%” Pinches was 
referring to the estimated $30k that Giusti et al had mentioned based on
 the work being performed by Sternberg. That number will now increase
 because additional planning and paperwork must be prepared because of 
the two years having elapsed.

IT SEEMS to us that Mr. Kisliuk has again raised legitimate questions about the bidding 
process and the amount of money being spent on the logging plan preparation, not to mention the implication of a palsy-walsy hiring process. Certainly, it’s not Mr. Sternberg’s fault that the job was 
postponed so long that the bird surveys have to be re-done — the postponement was a
 Board decision. At the time they hoped to re-submit a plan early enough 
that the surveys would still be current. But that didn’t happen and now the County is going through the process again with some of the same
 questions about how it’s done and who’s doing it.

A COUPLE WEEKS ago, during a brief discussion of the Little River Logging
 project status, the Board directed CEO Carmel Angelo to report back to 
them about the scheduling of the project in light of the expired bird
surveys and the current value of the timber. No date was given for when
Ms. Angelo would report back, but presumably it will be soon.

THERE ARE OTHER QUESTIONS, TOO. In 2011 there was some suspicion that some 
of the trees were diseased. If 
that wasn’t addressed, the timber value may be even less now, two years 
later. Mr. Kisliuk says there’s some old growth in the vicinity that is 
probably important bird habitat which should be specifically excluded from 
logging but which has not been discussed so far. And in the past Kisliuk 
has said that Mr. Sternberg doesn’t have enough actual logging experience 
to properly assess the current commercial value of the available timber.

AT A MINIMUM, there would appear to be several good reasons for the Board
 to revisit the Little River Logging project, including a close look at all
 the latest bids to make sure the best interests of the County are met.

========================================================

COUPLA WEEKS AGO we bought some chicks, having fed 11 of 20 of our adult hens to the larger predators which, we think now, is probably a fox. Something has been getting in the pen occasionally for going on two years now. Soon as we think we’ve got it critter-proof, there goes another chicken.

WE PUT the new chicks in what we thought was a secure enclosure and, overnight, several of the popcorn-size chicks and another hen were murdered in their sleep. And not eaten. The creature that did it was a thrill killer.

WE INITIALLY suspected a rehabbed feral cat, Newman, that we adopted two years ago from a Ukiah rescue center. Maybe Newman wasn’t fully rehabbed. Maybe he wanted to see if his old survival skills were still viable, and had somehow heaved his great bulk over the fence and into the pen. But Newman’s general sloth, his odd fear of adult chickens in the daytime, and his regular meals seemed to exclude Newman as the culprit. One afternoon, as a gopher dug a hole literally in front of his face, Newman took one look and dozed off. Any other cat would have immediately launched into full pounce mode. I can’t believe he’d go to all the trouble to knock off a bunch of two week-old chickens just for the thrill of it.

I’VE HAD chickens before, and I’ve lived in Boonville for a long time. In all my rural years I’d never heard of a chicken-killing cat, but it isn’t often a topic of conversation even in the outback. Most rural people simply build their chicken coops as invincible as they can and hope for the best. A civit cat wiped out three successive flocks of mine once. That was years ago, but I finally caught him in the act.

IF A FOX, even a proverbial one, got into the henhouse, wouldn’t he chow down once he was in? All our other chicken fatalities had been consumed, or at least partially consumed. Until last week, when a rat dog drove a fox out of his well-hidden little lair across the fence, the only known chicken killers on the place were possums and skunks, and neither of them or any of their relatives had been seen in months.

SO I WROTE to Petite Teton, the thriving little farm out Yorkville way. Of farming necessity, Petite Teton battles everything from the elements, to wild critters, to the Mendocino County Health Department. Nikki said she thought a feral cat or a reformed feral cat could not be eliminated from the suspect pool. She said she’d heard of bears, foxes and weasels supposedly killing for fun but had no experience with these creatures. Petite Teton’s problem, she said, is “more mundane: bobcats. We’ve live-trapped and deported five of them this month, but only after they killed ten of our chickens. They work both at night and in the daytime, and since we interrupted the killings each time (two chickens per kill), they didn’t get to eat their victims. But it meant we had fresh killed chicken to butcher five different times right at our dinnertime. Very upsetting and exhausting. The cats are beautiful and were every age from baby to grandpa/ma.”

OUR PLACE is more of a neighborhood. Bobcats might wander through, but we’ve never seen any signs of them. There’s fox scat all over the place, all over Anderson Valley, in fact. You can hear them everywhere if you’re up at 3am.

PETITE TETON has the heaviest concentration of bobcats I’ve heard of in The Valley, but I’ve seldom seen them except deep in the hills, and on those occasions only once did I get a good look at one before he shot off into the underbrush. I think the fox has been getting our chickens, which he sometimes eats, sometimes doesn’t eat. We’ve beefed up the pen. Again. And hope for the best.

========================================================

CHP ARRESTS JOURNALIST TO STOP NEWS OF PROTEST

(San Jose Mercury-News Editorial)

There’s a battle of wills taking place in Willits, where Caltrans has begun construction on a highway bypass around this small Mendocino County town. The bypass diverting Highway 101 has its supporters and its detractors, including a small group of protesters who have made it their mission to disrupt the construction at every opportunity.

On Tuesday, the protesters snuck onto the construction site early in the morning once again — but the only person arrested was the photographer for The Willits News, the twice-weekly local newspaper, who was there to document the latest protest.

This is clearly a tactic to discourage protesters by keeping them out of the news. It’s actually an acknowledgment of Caltrans’ and California Highway Patrol incompetence at controlling what happens at the site. It’s wrong and it’s got to stop.

The protesters cite the environmental damage they believe the construction is wreaking on the valley, its wetlands and natural beauty. They also say $200 million is too high a price for the relatively small amount of traffic that will be diverted. But Caltrans has been planning this bypass for two decades to relieve the backups on Willits streets, which the locals generally acknowledge is a serious problem.

The protests began in January to stop the initial tree clearing. They have included tree sitters, crane sitters and people chaining themselves to construction equipment. A few have been arrested. Others disperse when told to, but they always come back. The CHP has spent at least $1 million trying to keep protesters off the construction site. It has failed miserably, so it has apparently decided to try arresting or harassing members of the media who show up to cover the protests.

Steve Eberhard, a longtime freelance photographer for the Willits News, was arrested early Tuesday as he approached the area where some protesters had chained themselves to construction equipment and others stood nearby. None of the protesters had been arrested, but as soon as Eberhard showed up he was cuffed and led away, his camera equipment taken from him.

The media has been told that unless members have a Caltrans escort, they are trespassing on the site. But Caltrans only provides escorts during “regular business hours” and sometimes not even then — especially if there’s something worth photographing. The CHP, meanwhile, has told protesters that when a journalist shows up, the first arrest will be the media, presumably so that the protests will go undocumented — as if anyone with a smart phone isn’t a photographer these days. The CHP has harassed journalists even when they have a Caltrans escort and even when they’re in in a public right of way near the site.

And just for the record, Eberhard is a senior citizen, a retiree and a veteran. He has press credentials, including one from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. And because Willits is in a rural and isolated area, Eberhard is just about the only visual journalist chronicling the project. Appearances by TV crews or metro area print photographers are rare.

Eberhard has been cited for trespassing. We are glad to hear the district attorney will likely dismiss the charge, as he’s done for other first-time offenders in the protests — but this dismissal is necessary: The trespass law exempts people who “are engaging in activities protected by the California or United States Constitution,” which Eberhard clearly was as a journalist covering a protest.

The protests are going to continue. Trying to keep the media away is pointless and self-defeating. .

The CHP is normally more professional than this. When did arresting the messenger become a good way to stop crime? Let’s try ending the incompetence, and the news won’t look so bad.

========================================================

THE GOVERNMENT has poured unprecedented amounts of money into the economy in an attempt to get it moving. It’s done that through “quantitative easing,” which involves buying back its own bonds using money that doesn’t actually exist. It’s like borrowing money from somebody and then paying them back with a piece of paper on which you’ve written the word “Money” — and then, magically, it turns out that the piece of paper with “Money” on it is real money.

(Note: don’t try this.) Another way of describing quantitative easing would be that it is as if, when you look up your bank balance online, you had the additional ability to add to it just by typing numbers on your keyboard. Ordinary people can’t do this, obviously, but governments can; they can use this newly created magic money to buy back their own debt. That’s what quantitative easing is. — John Lanchester

========================================================

AVA RULES!

(Yadira Mendoza updates us on the success of the AVA-sponsored women’s softball team!)

Good Morning. Here’s a team picture from last night’s playoff games. We won third place and had a fun season. Thank you for your sponsorship; our team appreciates being able to play every summer, thanks to your donation. Pictured from left to right: Jenna Walker, Aimee Summit-Yates, Ruby Peña, Ana Carrillo, Rebekah Toohey, Yadira Mendoza, Mimi Mendoza, Amanda Hiatt, Kayla Garcia, Tiffany Gibson, Marika Martinez. Jeremy Yates and Jamie Silva are our base coaches. (Not pictured: Maia Leon-Guerrero)

========================================================

JIMMY CARTER has revealed that he received the most assassination threats since leaving office of any former president. The one-term Democrat said that he has been the subject of up to three legitimate assassination attempts since he left the White House in January 1981. The details of the assassination plots were not released, but Mr. Carter described them as being domestic in nature, meaning that the would-be killers were American. Adding to security concerns about the former president, he has been particularly active since leaving office and regularly travels abroad, to North Korea, Africa, and the Middle East. “When I go on an overseas trip almost invariably, I get a report from the Secret Service that where I’m going is very dangerous,” the former President told author Larry Sabato, according to The Washington Examiner. “Sometimes they [the Secret Service] ask me not to go, and I go anyway. They and I both just laugh about it. So I have been more concerned about my safety in doing the Carter Center’s business overseas than I ever was in the White House.” No information was released about any known threats against former President Clinton’s life or that of either former Bush presidents. President Obama made history in 2007 when as a Senator he was the first presidential candidate to receive Secret Service protection before formally becoming his party’s nominee because there were a number of threats against him based on race. Carter, 89, made the revelation about his safety procedures while meeting with Mr. Sabato as part of his research for a book on the legacy of President John F. Kennedy. As for his own legacy, Carter’s public image has largely been shaped in recent years by the work he did since leaving the White House. He founded the eponymous Carter Center to address human rights issues across the globe, working to help eradicate diseases like trachoma and Guinea worm disease globally. Carter even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for the effort he put into finding ‘peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advancing democracy and human rights. He is the first and only American president to receive the distinguished award after his term in office.

========================================================

LEAST HONEST PLACE IN AMERICA: WASHINGTON DC.

People in Washington DC are by far the most dishonest in America, according to a new study, while their cousins in Hawaii and Alabama are basically saints. Beverage company Honest Tea went to every US state earlier this month and set up 61 unmanned kiosks offering tea for $1. Tea drinkers were instructed to place their buck in a box nearby. But only eight in 10 beverage guzzlers in the nation’s capital paid for their tea, while the other 20% of people skipped out on the minimal amount. The other states where you should hold on to your purse were West Virginia where only 85% of participants paid for their tea, followed by Texas and Kentucky at 87%. In comparison, everyone in Hawaii and Alabama paid up without exception. Indiana and Maine followed closely behind, with some 99% proving to be honest, according to the company’s fifth annual test. This year, however, was the first year every state has been represented. Unlike the city that shares its name, Washington state seemed to honor it’s Founding Father’s sentiment, scoring 96% — considerably higher than the national average of 92%. ‘Even though my bicycle was stolen the same day as our DC experiment, it’s reassuring to know that 92% of Americans will do the right thing even when it seems no one is watching,’ Honest Tea co-founder Seth Goldman said. New York ranked in the middle of the pack at 91%, which was better than people expected. California tied with New Jersey, with a score of 96%. The results also determined which sex was more honest than the other and women slightly edged out men with a score of 95% compared to 91%.

(Courtesy, the London Daily Mail)

========================================================

I MUST GET HOME

I am breathless with fear somewhere deep

though I am not fearful to where you can see.

I am perhaps in that state we parse as sleep

but not sleep. Divine but not as such divinity.

Don’t listen. I won’t speak. We’re even. Feel

your way with that soft sense you can’t name.

It’s a lost art or a lost world or maybe not real.

It’s the flag you plant on land you’ll never claim.

You were saying but I wasn’t listening oh hell

and I should have been I am so terribly me.

I must get home to set table, ring dinner bell,

eat alone, be courageous, for a small infinity.

— Lawrence Bullock

========================================================

THE 31ST ANNUAL ROUND VALLEY BLACKBERRY FESTIVAL will be held this year on August 17^th and 18^th at the festival grounds in downtown Covelo. Mickey the Clown will be back as Master of Ceremonies and will kick off the festivities at noon on Saturday with various musical groups playing throughout the entire weekend. Enjoy a blackberry slush while strolling around the surrounding arbor which will be full of numerous arts and craft vendors and community organizations. Saturday night join the community for a fun square dance. There will be a 5/10K run/walk on Sunday morning (http://www.roundvalley.org/library/race.pdf) followed by a country style breakfast. Later in the day enjoy the motorcycle and antique car show featuring local, and out of town, vehicles worth seeing. The festival runs from noon to 7pm on Saturday and 10am to 5pm on Sunday. Admission is free. Further information can be found at www.roundvalleyblackberryfestival.com.

— Sharon Durall

A 15-YEAR-OLD runaway from a Los Angeles group home was apparently kidnapped and kept as a sex slave on a Lake County marijuana farm. The Los Angeles Police Department says the girl was taken by Ryan Balletto, 30, and Patrick Pearmain, 25, and held at their large-scale pot grow near Clearlake where the girl was secured in a four-foot by two foot tool box with breathing holes cut into it. Her abductors, she said, would periodically hose her down in lieu of regular bathing. When they weren’t engaging her in sex, she said she was forced to work on the marijuana garden. She said she voluntarily engaged in sexual relations with Pearmain but was forced to have sex with Balletto, a married man whose wife has also been arrested. Christa McConnell and Balletto have five children, one of whom, an infant, was found asleep dangerously close to a loaded handgun earlier in the month at a home in Lakeport shared by McConnell and Balletto.

Ballato, McConnell, Pearmain

BALLETTO’S grow operation was located on 681 acres off Zeno Road in Ogulin Canyon. The feds, of course, have claimed that the farm generated upwards of $20 million over the past year. About a thousand plants were uprooted during the task force raid on the place last week and a small arsenal of guns confiscated — all this plus the lurid details alleged by the young sex slave.

THE SORDID ALLEGATIONS briefly included rape charges against one Eric Edgar, 45, but were soon dropped. Edgar had been held on bail of a million dollars.

THE CHARGES against Edgar were dismissed so quickly it suggests that when this sordidly titillating story is sorted out it will probably be merely sordid. The DEA’s press releases always make it seem like the agency has just uncovered the crime of the century.

THERE ARE RECURRENT rumors of women being held at pot grows — “potstitutes” — who function as trimmers and sex toys for the criminals drawn to the enterprise by visions of quick cash, quick big cash. But the young woman recovered in Lake County is the first we know of where allegations of forced sex have been made by an identifiable person.

ACCORDING to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department there are more than 4,000 known grows just in HumCo. Factor in X-number of unknown grows and, what? Well, for one thing, the business isn’t the one begun by Ma and Pa Peace and Love back in ’72 for a little cash to pay the mortgage on Back To The Land Acres.

========================================================

IS THIS A WASTE OF MONEY?

(Spoiler Alert! Yes.)

AGENDA SUMMARY (Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, July 30, 2013):

“On June 14, 2013, the Employment Development Department, Workforce Services Division awarded Mendocino County/Workforce Investment Board (WIB) $402,714 of the WIA Governor Discretionary funds to be used for dislocated worker employment services, county-wide, per the Workforce Investment Act. The term of the funds is retroactive to April 1, 2013, through June 30, 2014. The HHSA/WIA unit retains $40,271 for administrative oversight. MPIC has delivered dislocated worker employment services since May of 2000.”

FROM THE ATTACHED DESCRIPTION OF SERVICES—

Contractor shall provide the following services for 78 Dislocated Workers:

• WIA Title IB Dislocated Workers: Provide Core Non-Registered and Core Registered Services to customers as follows:  Outreach, intake profiling, information on services available;  Initial assessment, including support needs;  Provision of employment statistics for the labor market area;  Job vacancy listings;  Information in skills requirements for occupations;  Local occupations in demand, earnings and skill requirements for jobs;  Performance and cost information on training providers in the area;  Labor Market Information;  Access to EDD’s Wagner-Peyser services;  Internet access, including career and job search;  Access to computers with resume-writing programs; Eligibility determination for additional services through WIA

• Provide Intensive Services to customers as follows:  Comprehensive assessment;  Specialized assessment;  In-depth interviewing and evaluation to identify employment barriers;  Career Planning and the development of the Individual Employment Plan (IEP);  Customer-centered case management;  Job and career counseling;  Life skills and Job Club;  Access to support services through the One-Stop or under WIA;  Work Experience Contracts

•  Provide Training Services to customers as follows:;  Issue Individual Training Accounts for:;  Vocational and Occupational Skills Training;  Skill upgrading;  GED and Basic Skills Training;  Negotiate and write On-the-Job Training contracts;  Provide Contract Education classes as appropriate.

ED NOTE UNO: $402,714/78 = $5163 per “dislocated worker.” However, all the money goes to the non-dislocated WIB Counselors for their “services.”

ED NOTE DOS: Nowhere in all of the contract’s associated “reporting requirements” is there any requirement to report how many of the 78 “dislocated workers” are located.

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BACK OFF, UKIAH; WE WANT COSTCO!

Draft of Letter to the suits at the Ohio-based mall development company which owns the abandoned Masonite site north of Ukiah proposed for discussion at the July 30, 2013 Board of Supervisors meeting:

To: Mr. Michael N. Dobrota, Vice President, Northwest Atlantic (Real Estate Services), 9 Corporate Park, Suite 230, Irvine, CA 92606; and to: Mr. Jeffrey J. Martin, Vice President of Development, DDR Corp., 3300 Enterprise Parkway, Beachwood, OH 44122.

RE: DDR Corp. Site Development

Dear Mr. Dobrota and Mr. Martin,

We write this letter signifying our strong resolve and commitment to the revitalization of the DDR site (the former “Masonite Site”). We see this property as a potential key economic driver for the County and our citizens. We welcome and encourage Costco or any other large retailer to come back to the table on this prime location. We believe this is in the best interest of our citizens.

In our past relationship, DDR Corp. has shown an impressive vision for future development of the DDR property that included the potential realization of retail and commercial facilities built in a modern multi-use configuration. Of all the future development sites across Mendocino County, the DDR site clearly has the most potential for growth and ease of access. Sadly, these efforts have not come to fruition, yet it is only a matter of time before this site is brought to the forefront as the next center of economic growth and development in Mendocino County. We believe that time is now.

The County is now ready to take action on any impediment to infill development on this site and is supportive of rezoning the DDR property for Costco or any other retail outlets or housing developments that could be located at this site. Mendocino County is committed to working with its service districts to assure that critical utilities, such as water, transportation and energy, are available to development projects occurring on the DDR property.

Mendocino County has a renewed interest in developing the DDR property. During the July 16, 2013 Board of Supervisors meeting, direction was given to the Executive Office to schedule a meeting with Costco Corp., DDR Corp. and the County. The purpose of this meeting would be to discuss revisiting the use of the DDR property, currently owned by DDR Corp., for the location of a new Costco retail store.

The Board of Supervisors is in unanimous support of promoting greater economic development that is in harmony with regional planning efforts. The County has adopted its Ukiah Valley Area Plan (UVAP) and is in the process of implementing this all-important planning document to facilitate jobs and housing opportunities within the County’s borders. Another prime reason for the adoption and implementation of the UVAP was to preserve open space and agricultural lands within the County. These are goals that can cohabitate with development on the DDR site.

We know the DDR site continues to be the preferred site for business development. There are lingering long-term access deficiencies at the City’s proposed site for a Costco retail store in the southern part of the City of Ukiah. The DDR site is simply more flexible and with the County’s unwavering support, development projects can happen quickly and be better tailored for the needs of those who will eventually occupy these sites for the next several decades. Mendocino County is prepared to devote staff resources to develop this property and to accommodate businesses and housing at this site.

Thank you for your time and consideration, and please do not hesitate to contact the Board of Supervisor’s liaison to the Executive Office, Brandon Merritt, at merrittb@co.mendocino.ca.us or by calling him at 707-463-7236 if you would like to proceed with a meeting.

ED NOTE UNO: The City of Ukiah is rushing headlong into finishing their “redevelopment” project involving the placement of a Costco bigbox in Ukiah city limits at the Airport Business Park (never mind the traffic jam it’ll create at the Highway 101 off ramp) so they can cash in on the sales tax increment to pay back the redevelopment, theoretically. But now, here’s the County of Mendocino proposing to invite Costco to the old Masonite site property outside the City of Ukiah. No wonder there’s no tax sharing agreement between the City of the Ukiah and the County after more than a decade of trying.

ED NOTE DOS: “DDR Corp. has shown an impressive vision for future development of the DDR…” A plain vanilla mall which would take business away from other local businesses, assuming that malls are even viable enterprises anymore is “an impressive vision”? What’s next: A fracking plant on Low Gap Road?

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“BUT THE WORST kind of two-faced justice happens when there is a killing. When White Hawk, an Indian boy, killed a white jeweler he was sentenced to death. This sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, and yet we know White Hawk wasn’t in his right mind when he did this. That’s the sentence for killing a white man — death.

“The sentence for killing a red man is different. When a 17-year-old white boy shot an Indian father in his 50s, shooting him seven times with a German Luger, he got away with two years. When a white man from White River killed an Indian boy from Murdo he got 30 days in jail and and a $100 fine for assault and battery. They said they couldn’t convict him for murder because he simply married the main witness to the killing, an Indian girl who had seen the crime.

“And a rich white rancher shot and killed a young Indian, a very quiet and shy churchgoer. The white man was armed, the Indian was not. There were no witnesses, but the rancher admitted having shot that boy. The white man wasn’t even arrested for two weeks. When the trial came up he was acquitted. Justifiable homicide, that’s what they called it. These things stay in our memory.”

— Lame Deer, Lakota medicine man, 1972

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THIS SMALL ITEM on the Board of Supervisors closed session agenda next Tuesday indicates that Supervisor Dan Hamburg is going ahead with his lawsuit against the very County he currently “supervises” to get retroactive permission to bury his late wife Carrie where she is already buried, and to recoup his substantial legal costs, estimated previously at well north of $10,000. Last month his colleagues voted 4-0 to more or less automatically reject his claim. Now that Hamburg has filed suit, his legal costs will be even further north. It must be awkward for his colleagues to have to meet in closed session to discuss the County’s defense to this clearly avoidable and possibly costly lawsuit.

Pursuant to Government Code Section 54956.9(d)(1) — Conference with Legal Counsel — Existing Litigation: Daniel E. Hamburg v. County of Mendocino; Superior Court Case No. SCUK-CVPB-13-26080.

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FOX TALK, A MENDO READER WRITES: ”We were just saying that if and when we decide to get chickens, we will have to build a seriously hermetic coop and pen knowing these woods are full of foxes. A longtime local said he’s noticed that in a drought year when the foxes eat most of the bunny rabbits, they then become much more aggressive about harvesting fruit and chickens and cat and dog food. I trust you will find a solution. Eggs make the world go round.”

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POINT CABRILLO LIGHTHOUSE: UPCOMING EVENTS

On August 3^rd there will be a lively concert with Scottish fiddle, pipes, bodhran, and whistles. Rebecca Lomnicky and David Brewer will begin at 7:30, and parking in front of the Keepers houses. Contact GiftShop@PointCabrillo.org or leave message: 707/937-6123

A week later on August 10th, a chance to tour the lens room at the top of the lighthouse on National Light House Day. The Point Cabrillo Light Station Historic State Park will open its lantern room to see its beautifully restored Third Order Fresnel Lens in operation. www.pointcabrillo.org.

THE RECENT WILLITS NEWS editorial about last week’s arrest of the paper’s photographer, Mr. Eberhard, at the Willits Bypass construction site, says the Bypass is needed to relieve the overload on Willits streets from Highway 101 traffic — “traffic which keeps downtown Willits backed up so badly that locals all generally acknowledge it’s a serious problem.”

BUT THE OVERLOAD is mostly local traffic that backs up at “the bottleneck,” which few people would describe as “downtown” Willits; downtown Willits is north of the bottleneck. People who think the Bypass will significantly reduce traffic in Willits itself are in for a surprise. They talk about how wonderful Willits is going to be, “just like Cloverdale” when Cloverdale was bypassed 30 years ago. Cloverdale lost 80% of its traffic, but Willits is likely to keep 80% of its traffic because, for one major reason, there are no off and on ramps at the always busy Highway 20 junction to and from Fort Bragg, and the unchecked Willits sprawl north and south of the bottleneck will continue to back up much of the day every day.

ANOTHER MINOR POINT: “The only person arrested was the photographer for The Willits News.” The protesters, except for the two locked to equipment, left the site when the police told them to leave. Eberhard lingered. The video shows the demonstrators with the banner backing up, and when they slowed down or went the wrong way, the cop says: “If you stop again I’ll arrest you,” and they left. And, of course the two who were locked-down were in fact arrested later in the day.

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THE MASONITE CORP’S attempt to reverse the County of Mendocino’s approval of a proposed gravel mine north of Ukiah has been successful. The California Court of Appeals has found in favor of Masonite, which still owns land north of Ukiah adjacent to its old manufacturing site.

MASONITE had appealed a local ruling denying the corporation’s petition to set aside the County’s approval of a 65-acre terrace mining operation Granite Construction had proposed to build on Kunzler Ranch Road. Masonite claimed that the County should have “recirculated” the EIR because the approved mine project “had significantly greater impacts than the one originally proposed,” according to the Appellate Court’s decision.

MASONITE, suddenly a defender of the natural world, also claimed that the County “erroneously determined that conservation easements and in-lieu fees were not feasible ways to mitigate the loss of prime farmland due to the project”; that the EIR didn’t correctly assess the project’s “cumulative impacts on agricultural resources”; that the County’s mitigation measures for truck traffic on a private road were inadequate; and that the EIR didn’t adequately evaluate alternatives.

THE COURT said that a reconsidered EIR would provide for comment “on possible mitigation measures” to protect a rare frog (a mutant created by years of formaldahyde baths?) and also found in favor of Masonite on agricultural easements, cumulative impacts on farmland and traffic mitigation.

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THE OLD MASONITE site is owned by Developers Diversified Realty. DDR had hoped to build an 800,000-square-foot shopping mall and housing development on those now vacant and forlorn acres.

Abandoned Masonite Site, looking south toward Ukiah

AN ODD DISPUTE has lately arisen between the County and the City of Ukiah over where to place a proposed CostCo outlet. Supervisor Pinches would like to see a CostCo on the DDR-Masonite site, which is north of the Ukiah city limits. Ukiah wants CostCo and its big sales taxes to be placed inside the city limits in an area already given over to big box stores.

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MENDOCINO COUNTY will hand another $325,000 to the Mendocino County 
Promotional Alliance next week like they’ve done every year since the early 90s. In spite of the County’s self-described (and really) 
precarious financial situation based on flat revenue projections and 
steadily increasing costs of operations, healthcare, and pensions, County staff has put
 two related spendthrift items on Tuesday’s agenda:

1. “Pursuant to Mendocino County Code Section 5.140.250 ‘The County and 
Mendocino County Lodging Association (MCLA) shall enter into a contract 
(agreement) prior to the expenditure of Business Improvement District
 (BID) funds by the MCLA for the services, activities, and programs 
authorized by this Chapter.’ This contract also designates the Mendocino
 County Promotional Alliance (MCPA) as the recipient of the County’s 50% 
match to the BID Assessment funds. As recommended by the BID Advisory
 Board in its Annual Report to the Board, this Agreement requires an annual
 financial review of MCLA, with a full audit triggered by any noted 
irregularity. This Agreement also stipulates that Visit Mendocino County 
(as a subcontractor of MCLA and MCPA that is now receiving most of the
 promotional funding for actual implementation of the marketing workplan) 
is to receive an annual financial audit. A copy of this Agreement is
 available for review at the Executive Office.”

2. “Section 5.140.250 of the Mendocino County Code states, in part, ‘The
 County and MCLA (Mendocino County Lodging Association) shall enter into a 
contract prior to the expenditure of… (BID assessment funds) … by the MCLA 
for the services, activities, and programs authorized by this Chapter…
 This contract shall provide for a fifty percent (50%) County match of the
 assessment collected… for the purpose of countywide promotion. This 50%
 match shall be directed to the Mendocino County Promotional Alliance 
(MCPA) and/or MCLA…’ As required, the agreement with MCLA (also before the
 Board today) provides clarity with regard to the County match by
 specifying that it be received by MCPA for Countywide promotion and 
marketing. As recommended by the BID Advisory Board in its Annual Report 
to the Board, this Agreement requires an annual financial review of MCPA,
 with a full audit triggered by any noted irregularity. This Agreement also 
stipulates that Visit Mendocino County (as a subcontractor of MCPA and 
MCLA that is now receiving most of the promotional funding for actual 
implementation of the marketing workplan) is to receive an annual 
financial audit. A copy of this Agreement is available for review at the
 Executive Office.

”

YIKES! TALK ABOUT TOP HEAVY! MCLA is its own organization. MCPA is its own 
organization. Another organization, the “Business Improvement District” 
takes in $325k from its members with its own “advisory board.” The County 
and its staff and officials takes in $325k more from local taxpayers. Then 
it’s all mushed together and handed over to Visit Mendocino County as a 
“subcontractor” to both organizations. By their own budget, about 40% of their “expenses” are for “personnel” (i.e., themselves), and “operations” (i.e. office space, lunch with wine, desks, computers and internet hookups, etc. for themselves)

IT’S SO RIDICULOUSLY COMPLEX that
 the County then has to insert separate fig-leaf “annual financial reviews”
 of both the Promotional Alliance and the Lodging Association (who are all
 the same people), and a “full audit” if any of these palsy-walsys “note” any “irregularity” in their own operations.

VISIT MENDOCINO COUNTY (also more of the same people) will also get its own “annual financial audit.”

THE PROMOTIONAL ALLIANCE receives the County’s half of the $650k “promotional” budget.
 With that $325k plus some other donated funds the Promotional Alliance is supposed to “cooperate with 
the Mendocino County Lodging Association, Chambers of Commerce visitor
 services locations — a laughably over-engineered kiosk in Boonville is one — the Arts Council of Mendocino County, Visit Mendocino 
County, Inc., restaurants and to provide the services, activities and programs to pimp Mendo to the great unwashed. The great cooperative effort to lure tourists “shall include, but is not limited to, assisting Visit 
Mendocino County, Inc (VMC) in the development of their annual marketing
 plan and the implementation of activities as outlined in the Marketing 
Plan…”

ADDITIONALLY, the Promotional Alliance “shall be solely responsible for the 
timely maintenance of any and all visit Mendocino County ‘Gateway Signs’ 
to be erected along major highways in the County. Maintenance shall 
include, but not be limited to, repair, graffiti removal, clearing brush
 which impedes visibility, and removal or restoration as appropriate.”

TRANSLATION: Maintain the signs and go ahead and give away the rest of the money 
to whomever you want so long as you call it “marketing” to satisfy the auditor.

TO GET A FEEL for what these people are about, take this one sentence from their “marketing plan”: “Baby boomers are interested in exotic places, but they don’t want to ‘rough it,’ they expect some luxury.” (So Mendo taxpayers have to subsidize it.)

THE LODGING ASSOCIATION takes in $325k from local restaurants,
 tasting rooms and B&Bs from their BID, then mixes in a few more hundred thou from the “North Coast Tourism Council,” the “Mendocino Winegrowers Inc. Sublease,” and “other income” totaling just over $1 mil. They then do pretty much the same (no)thing, plus
 “cooperate” with the Mendocino Wine Grape and Wine Commission to do more 
of the same (no)thing.

THE LODGING ASSOCIATION doesn’t have to 
bother with the road signs, but they do have to pay for the wine and cheese at the grin and grope meetings these people enjoy, and prepare the 
reports about which of their friends they plan to give the money to.

THERE’S ALSO this odd requirement: “this Report shall include any information regarding the board activities of MCLA, MCPA, and VMC that were deemed by its members to be positive or negative outcomes of actions taken by those boards in the preceding year.”

DEEMED, kemo sabe? Positive or negative outcomes…? Huh? The Lodging Association is supposed to report on what its members “deem” to be “negative”? Why? Could there possibly be a prob? (Hint: Yes. Lots of tourist-based businesses don’t like paying for pricey wine and cheese events in San Francisco.)

BY THE TIME ALL THESE top heavy agencies which have somehow inserted their hustling selves into this “promotional” mumbo-jumbo, and the auditors and bookkeepers all get their cut, how much money will be left to bribe wine and food writers to come up to Mendo to eat and drink for free at Mendo’s fine dining establishments? (John? John Bonné? Time for your annual Mendo freebie-weebies.)

THIS WHOLE “PROMOTIONAL” IDEA was a bad idea to begin with, especially given the County’s fragile budget. Now it’s been taken over by self-serving, ever-expanding bureaucracies who do nothing but pay themselves to tell the Board they’re doing a great job at producing no tangible results whatsoever.

THEREFORE, expect the Board of Supervisors to rubberstamp the $325k on Tuesday with minimal discussion.

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THE JUDGE said to a double-homicide defendant, “You’re charged with beating your wife to death with a hammer.”
 A voice at the back of the courtroom yelled out, “You bastard!”
 The judge said, “You’re also charged with beating your mother-in-law to death with a hammer.” 
The voice in the back of the courtroom yelled out, “You rotten bastard!” 
The judge stopped and said to Paddy in the back of the courtroom, “Sir, I can understand your anger and frustration at these crimes, but no more outbursts from you, or I’ll charge you with contempt. Is that understood?” 
Paddy stood up and said, “I’m sorry, Your Honor, but for 15 years I’ve lived next door to that arsehole, and every time I asked to borrow a hammer, he said he didn’t have one.”

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OUCH! The Atlantic Magazine Talks Humboldt Pot—Badly

by Kym Kemp

“While those hippie outlaws are still around the Emerald Triangle, come harvest time you’re just as likely to see a new breed of grower around town, standing on the side of the road holding cardboard signs looking for work ‘clipping and bagging’ marijuana plants,” writes Jesse Hyde in an article about the environmental impact of marijuana grows for the well respected Atlantic Magazine. He is seemingly unaware that the trimmers who stand alongside roads asking for jobs are not the growers. Trimmers, whether transients or locals, have little to do with the practices — such as water depletion, grading inappropriately, and putting chemicals on the crops— that are concerning environmentalists about the burgeoning marijuana industry.

The article also warns that “Today, at least one third of the marijuana grown in the state is produced indoors, which accounts for 9% of California’s annual electricity use.” But, Evan Mills study, the only one this reporter is aware of, says “In California, the top-producing state, indoor cultivation is responsible for about 3% of all electricity use or 8% of household use.” This is a relatively easy mistake to make but still painful. Californians do expend a lot of electricity on indoor grows but there is a difference between 8% of household use and 9% of all electricity consumed including industrial use.

The photograph of “marijuanahumboldt,” may be the most unforgivable of all. That isn’t Humboldt marijuana anymore than an image of crushed grape skins is a picture of a fine Napa wine. It’s as if someone posted a picture of Angelina Jolie’s toenail clippings instead of her face. If only our local growers could sue for defamation and misrepresentation…

The article begins with a compelling tale from Scott Bauer, a local Dept. of Fish and Wildlife staff environmentalist. Bauer’s first encounter with the impact of marijuana grown insensitively on public land is told in heartbreaking detail — “Towering pines and Douglas firs, some over a century old, had been leveled, and a bulldozer had dumped several tons of sediment into a nearby creek, choking it off.”

The article ends with Bauer returning to the site of his first encounter to find “sacks of pesticides that hadn’t been there more than a few weeks. The growers were back, expanding their operation.” The story could have been compelling… but, the egregious mistakes took credibility from the entire piece.

(Courtesy, LostCoastOutpost.com)

ACCORDING to an AP report that claims AP has “exclusive survey data,” (data they paid for) four out of five American adults “struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives,” a fact of American life obvious to anybody outside bubble neighborhoods — Westside Ukiah, much of San Francisco, the Oakland-Berkeley hills, the hill muffin areas of Anderson Valley, the ridges and ocean view lots from Gualala to Mendocino, most of Lake County, and almost everywhere in the country east of I-5.

ECONOMIC INSECURITY among whites has grown to include more than 76% of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press. “The gauge defines economic insecurity as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150% of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79%.

MARRIAGE RATES are in decline among all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.

46.2 MILLION, or 15% of the population, are poor by any measurement. More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41% of the nation’s destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

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THAT HEAVY SMOKE up and down the Mendocino Coast on Sunday is, according to the National Weather Service, drifting south from Southern Oregon. The Douglas Complex Fires as in Douglas County, Oregon, is the source of most of the smoke in Mendocino County. There were no fires reported in Mendocino County on Sunday. The Mendocino Air Quality Control Board issues air quality alerts but the office seems to be on auto-pilot on weekends. According to their website the air is as clear as the morning God first breathed it.

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LINDA WILLIAMS of the Willits News writes:

“Bruce, I take a small exception to your characterization that The Willits News photojournalist was ‘lingering’ which is why he was arrested on Tuesday. The video shows him approaching and shaking the hand of one CHP officer. They appear to be having a professional conversation and Mango was so unconcerned with it he was panning his camera to video stationary equipment. The entire time from the handshake to people shouting he was being arrested was 39 seconds. We did not post the full 36 minutes of tape shot by Mango because we did not have his permission to do so, but the officer took longer than 39 seconds to warn the original protesters carrying the banner earlier that morning. The protesters moved slowly when exiting, stopping from time to time, then moving on as they were told they would be arrested if they didn’t keep moving. This looked a lot closer to lingering to me. Contrast that with the quick arrest of our journalist. On the whole 36 minute long video you can see Eberhard arrived a minimum of half an hour after the banner-carrying protest group was told to leave. I’m not sure the actual time between the protesters leaving the site as Mango kept saying his batteries were getting low. The actual time may have been longer as it looks like the video was shutdown and started up a few times when nothing was happening with the chainees before Eberhard arrived. The two chainees were cited and released, and yes, technically, this is an arrest. But they, unlike my photojournalist, were not handcuffed, placed in a squad car, taken to Ukiah, then transferred to a Mendocino County Jail holding cell before being booked, then released. If you really think the two are the same, please post the booking photos of the two protesters as you have the one of Steve Eberhard, because you can’t. I don’t know about you but I would much prefer being cited and released.”

I TAKE YOUR point, Ms. Williams. Why the CHP arrested Eberhard remains a mystery. It was silly.

BUT THE WILLITS NEWS’s “stop the hate” editorial, you could say, is an exercise in false equivalence because the protesters have not hurled “vile rhetoric” indiscriminately at their fellow citizens. A few nutballs peppered the CHP with “vile rhetoric” during the early April extraction of that character who threw a bucket of his waste on the cops. After that, though, the Bypass protesters seemed to grasp that acting like a bunch of backward acid casualties was losing them support, which was thin to begin with.

YOUR EDITORIAL says that anti-Bypass people have been so rude to pro-Bypass people that the pro-Bypass people have “boycotted” the community meetings for fear of being yelled at. Doubt it. Both “community meetings” were put on by the anti-Bypass organized by Save Our Little Lake Valley. As a lure to get people who, ah, are unaffiliated with, ah, er, I dunno, drum circles, to show up, the one-way discussions were moderated by Sheriff Allman. (Did the Sheriff use his gun as the gavel?)

BUT THE PANELISTS were all anti-Bypass. You would probably agree that pro-Bypass people had zero incentive to show up simply to listen to a lot of lock-step opinion. A real discussion, not to say a much more interesting one, would involve pro and anti. As someone said on-line, “Why should we go to a forum about wick drains when there’s nobody with any expertise on wick drains on the panel; just some anti-Bypassers who did some research on the Internet?”

SOME PRO-BYPASS people have been told — online — that they’re “ignorant” or “rednecks” and generally insulted as uninformed about how crazy, not to mention costly, this project is. The Pros are about to be hugely disillusioned by their beloved CalTrans; the Bypass will not, as the pro-Bypass brigades claim, make Willits as serene and pedestrian-groovy as the Cloverdale bypass made Cloverdale because, as we argued yesterday, the Willits Bypass will divert very little traffic from Willits.

AS PER ANCIENT Mendo practice, local controversies inevitably divide along Hippie-Redneck lines, especially among hippies and ‘necks, although there are few hippies around anymore and Bill Clinton exported what was left of the redneck job base.

PRO-BYPASSERS drive by the demo site all the time yelling retro stuff like, “Kill the treesitters” and “Fucking dirty pot-growing hippies don’t even have a job; get the fuck out of our town.” And versions thereof.

IF THERE were any way of tabulating the insult count, the pro-Bypass people are ahead of the dirty fucking hippies.

I ALWAYS laugh whenever I read or hear the fanciful phrase, as you repeated it in your editorial: “tearing apart our community.” What community? Where? America hasn’t enjoyed anything resembling community for 60 years, at least. Willits, like every other village and town in this country is simply a wildly disparate collection of isolates mostly, some of whom occasionally gather in groups of the likeminded. The internet has facilitated the fragmentation.

I AGREE with you, though — jailing the messenger is never a good idea, but The Willits News signed off on the escort arrangement with the cops and Caltrans. Why? Reporters and news photographers should be allowed to work. If reporters and photographers had to wait for officially sanctioned escorts, this country’s media would be even more pathetic than they are.

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SALMON APOCALYPSE LOOMING IN CALIFORNIA

Poor Government Policy Could Doom Record Runs

by Dan Bacher

Recent reports of a pending salmon die-off on the Klamath River don’t address the full measure of this rapidly evolving and potentially catastrophic story.

“A record run of salmon are at risk on the Klamath unless anticipated flows from Trinity Reservoir are provided to cool the Lower Klamath River,” said Tom Stokely, an analyst for the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN), a statewide water advocacy group. “But we have another disaster unfolding on the Sacramento River. We had a dry winter, the reservoirs are low, and federal and state officials are draining them rapidly to pump water to the corporate farms of the western San Joaquin Valley. If the current releases continue, we’re not going to have enough cold water in the Sacramento system to keep fall-run Chinook salmon eggs alive in the gravel this fall.”

Like the Klamath, the Sacramento River system is expected to post a very good year for Chinook salmon, with several hundred thousand fish returning to the river and its tributaries.

“And these are big magnificent fish, some of the fattest I’ve ever seen,” said Dan Bacher, editor of the Fish Sniffer Magazine. “But I was just out on the river, and it was running extremely high – and that’s heartbreaking. High water now means the cold water pools in Shasta, Folsom and Oroville reservoirs could be exhausted by the time the returning fish spawn. The mature fish, their eggs and any fry that manage to emerge could cook in the low, warm flows we’ll probably see in the American, Feather and Sacramento rivers by late summer and fall.”

The Sacramento River is the workhorse of the salmon-bearing streams south of the Columbia River. In good years, almost a million fish used to return to the Sacramento system. The river is unique in that it supports four distinct runs of Chinook salmon. The winter-run and spring-run are both listed under the US Endangered Species Act, while the fall-run and late fall-run are sufficiently numerous in most years to accommodate the commercial and sport fisheries.

All four runs are now in dire jeopardy. The spring-run Chinook is facing an especially tough summer, particularly in Butte Creek, its primary stronghold. There was a major die-off of Butte Creek salmon in 2003 due to low flows.

“We desperately hope that there isn’t a repeat of the 2003 spring-run salmon deaths on Butte Creek,” said Jim Brobeck, a water policy analyst at AquAlliance, an organization dedicated to protecting the waters and fisheries of northern California. “At this time, the fish agencies are managing to keep thousands of spring-run alive with flows from PG&E’s reservoir, although another concentrated heat wave could radically change conditions for this iconic salmon run.”

Brobeck noted Butte Creek’s spring-run is a genetic rarity, and the source for re-stocking efforts on the San Joaquin River. It is thus essential, he said, to preserve the unique strains of salmon native to the Sacramento watershed.

“The potential fish deaths due to lack of water and warm temperatures on Butte Creek combined with the demand for Klamath, Trinity, Feather and Sacramento River irrigation deliveries threatens the existence of what remains of native fish runs in the Central Valley,” Brobeck says. “State and Federal agencies must redefine the ‘”surplus water”’ that is being pumped to industrial agriculture south of the Delta.”

Low flows could also prove the death-knell for the winter-run Chinook, said Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance.

“We’re only in a second dry year, not even a declared drought, and the system is fundamentally broken,” said Jennings. “The State Water Board has assured the Department of Water Resources and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that it won’t enforce Delta water quality and flow standards. The temperature compliance point on the Sacramento has been moved upstream, eliminating crucial spawning habitat for endangered Winter-run Chinook salmon.”

But the Sacramento’s “bread-and-butter” runs – the fall-run and late fall-run – are also at risk. Their status is so imperiled by anticipated low summer flows that future salmon seasons could be curtailed, said Stokely. Like Jennings, Stokely says agency mismanagement of water resources is the major reason for the crisis.

“What’s particularly disturbing is the determination of state and federal agencies to violate their own mandates and regulations so they can maintain deliveries of subsidized water to a handful of huge corporate farms in the western San Joaquin Valley,” said Stokely.

Stokely notes various laws and regulations require sufficient cold water flows down the Sacramento system to maintain fisheries in good health.

“But in May, the US Bureau of Reclamation and the state Department of Water Resources asked the Water Board to allow lower Delta outflows so more water could be sent south of the Delta,” said Stokely. “The Water Board agreed without due process, in violation of its own rules water right decisions – and with full knowledge of the impacts to the fish. “

Jennings observes the crisis could have been avoided if the cold water behind California’s reservoirs had been properly conserved.

“Water is only legally available for south-of-Delta export after Delta flow and water quality standards are met,” Jennings said. “But the state and federal projects are still exporting more than 8,500 cfs from the South Delta”

Stokely concluded that the situations on the Klamath and the Sacramento are culminating in a potential apocalypse for California salmon.

“We had a huge salmon kill on the Klamath in 2002 due to low flows, but that could be minor compared to what we’re facing today,” he said. “It is a terrible irony. We’re seeing some of the biggest runs on record, and we could lose them all — and lose future runs — because of compromised government policy. If we’re going to avoid a repeat of 2002, we need to start conserving cold water now for release later in the summer and fall.”

Contacts:

• Tom Stokely, California Water Impact Network 530-926-9727 cell 524-0315 http://www.c-win.org

• Bill Jennings, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance 209-464-5067 cell 938-9053 www.calsport.org

• Jim Brobeck, AquAlliance 530-521-4880 www.aqualliance.net

• Dan Bacher, Fish Sniffer Magazine 916-725-0728 www.fishsniffer.com

THAT LETHAL FIVE-CAR pile-up on Highway 20 near the Potter Valley turn-off? Captain Randy Johnson of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department kicked it off when he stopped to make a left turn into his private, unmarked driveway across a double yellow line when an oncoming driver rear-ended him, thus setting off a series of collisions resulting in the death of the driver of one of the vehicles involved. It will be interesting to see how the CHP assesses this one. Some lawyer is likely to get rich off the inevitable wrongful death claim.

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A READER CLAIMS that the novelist Paul Theroux once said that the New York Times would never print the words “stink” and “maricon.” But, the reader exults, “Now they went and did it,” citing the story in a last week’s Times called “Manhood Challenged, Boxer Unleashed Fatal Barrage, and Lived With Regret,” a kind of obituary for Emile Griffith.

AS A KID, I never missed the televised fights on Wednesday and Saturday nights brought to us by Gillette Blue Blades. I think the fights were among the most popular shows on early television. Carmen Basilio! Jersey Joe Walcott! Sugar Ray Robinson! Jake LaMotta! Rocky Marciano! That was the Golden Age of the sport. I certainly remember the Griffith-Paret fight. Everyone who saw it probably remembers it because Griffith had Paret helpless on the ropes and, as I recall the awful scene, by the time the referee pulled him off Paret, Paret was probably dead. The Times said that Griffith hit Paret 17 times in five seconds, 24 times without a single counterpunch from Paret. Norman Mailer had it perfectly: “The right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.” It seemed to take forever for the ref to react, and by the time he did, Benny “The Kid” Paret was gone; he died a few days later. Paret, during the weigh-in, had called Griffith a “maricon,” the Spanish equivalent of fag, a fatal insult as it developed. Griffith was gay, and always denied he was out to kill Paret, but if you ever see the film of that terrible event (or the excellent documentary from a few years ago which includes the film and the dramatic aftermath, “Ring of Fire”), Griffith, you’ll see, was out for permanent revenge.

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DEAR BRUCE, “As you may know, the State of California is in the process of moving all 875,000 Healthy Families children to Medi-Cal in phases. All 1,796 Mendocino children in the Healthy Families Program are scheduled to move this Thursday, August 1. Because their current health plan (Anthem Blue Cross) does not participate in Medi-Cal, children will be enrolled in a new health plan, Partnership Health Plan…” And so on. (Michele Stillwell-Parvensky, “Mendocino County Healthy Families Children Move To Medi-Cal This Thursday”)

DEAR MICHELE, As a senior citizen unknown to you, nor you to me, I’d prefer that you call me Mr. Anderson. It’s only seemly since I’m at least three times your age. As for the 1,796 doomed children of Mendocino County being shunted from one marginal and mostly non-existent healthcare program to another, and with the largest healthcare fraud in human history coming up with ObamaCare, well, what we really need at this point is a revolution if millions of American children are going to have even a longshot chance at a decent life.

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THE ART COLLECTOR. Twice last week, a forlorn sixty-ish woman appeared at my Frisco door, suitcases in hand. “Is Mr. Anderson the art collector in?” she asked in a British accent. My wife, suppressing a laugh, said that there was indeed a man by that name living at this address, but he could hardly be described as an “art collector.” The English woman shuffled off into the summer fog. But showed up again the next day to ask my wife, “Do you know of a place I might stay?” She was an apparently respectable person, not, in any obvious way, one of the small army of roving mental cases loose in San Francisco. My wife offered the usual menu of unappealing options: city-run shelters, Glide, and so on, none of them suitable for a person unlikely to do well in tough places with tough people. I would have liked to have known what disaster, or series of disasters, had made the English woman homeless, but with that kind of curiosity also come the existential bogeymen: “If I ask what happened the next step is an obligation to help somehow.” Then come the excuses: “I’m a person of ordinary means. My place is barely big enough for me and the little woman. We couldn’t possibly take on another person. The government’s supposed to help out. Where is it?” The government, of course, has abdicated, and charity is stretched to the limit. There’s not only no room at the inn, there’s no inn.

ANYBODY who walks around the city can’t help but see that there are lots of people living as they can, often in their vehicles, ashamed of their circumstances but still trying to lift themselves up and out. And every day we’re told by the television hairdoos that the “Economy has turned the corner. The recovery is weak but we’re headed in the right direction.” If a downward plummet is the right direction, we’re on the way. No doubt about it.

THE ENGLISH WOMAN hasn’t returned. I have no idea how she got onto me, but we’re still thinking about her a week later. That kind of thing is unsettling, isn’t it? Her odd visit got me wondering if my art collection added up to anything grand enough to be called a collection. I’ve got a few paintings by friends, a Crumb miniature of Devil Girl, some old commie prints, and a World War Two artifact I bought years ago at a Ukiah garage sale. In a time of dire need a few years ago, one of many over a long, impecunious life, I took this object to an appraiser. He offered an on-the-spot grand for it. “A one-of-a-kinder,” the appraiser said, “and very nicely done.” Which caused me to keep it. My aesthetic had been officially validated!

YOU’D HAVE TO SEE this thing to appreciate it, but the instant I spotted it in that Ukiah backyard with a twenty dollar price tag on it I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I pounced. The garage saler was an elderly woman who explained that her late husband had served in the occupation of Japan immediately after World War Two. He’d brought it home with him from Yokohama. Judging from the other art she had on sale, she was heavy into unicorns and chipmunk paintings which, come to think of it, do seem ubiquitous art forms in our County seat. I remember her saying, “I never liked the thing. I made him hang it out in the garage.” I look at it all the time, and it endlessly rewards my attention because it’s so intricately done, so sad in its desperate tribute to Japan’s conquerors. I imagine the old Ukiah guy making a special trip out to his garage to gaze at his prize, geisha memories warming him all the years after the biggest events of his life.

SO, BIG BOY, what are we talking about here? We’re talking about a tableau recreating the appearance of a triumphant American destroyer in Yokahama harbor set in a mahogany frame that was probably once home to some other iconic item. It’s about six inches deep, two feet long, a foot high. The frame is embossed with Japanese characters which remain untranslated. Inside the frame is a plastic mini-replica of a destroyer with gray human hair serving as smokestack smoke, behind which the artist has meticulously painted in bright colors his hillside home town and, beyond, Mount Fuji. The whole of it is vaguely reminiscent of Grandma Moses and some Haitian street art I’ve seen. The Japanese, like the Germans, eked out existences as best they could in those first grim years after the war their leaders brought on, and I’ve always assumed my prized possession was made by a man surviving however he could.

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JENNIFER POOLE WRITES: “In ‘Forest fire smoke here to stay,’ a story posted on the Klamath Falls newspaper website this afternoon, an Oregon metereologist is quoted as saying: “Smoke is not an easy thing to forecast, but you should bet that a lot of the rest of the summer will be smokey across Southern Oregon and Northern California.” Smoke from the Southern Oregon fires is heavy because it’s burning in heavily forested areas…. Thanks to Sheriff Allman and to Lake County News for their posts.”

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TAX SHARING: UKIAH VS. THE COUNTY (Only the most intrepid will dare try to make sense of all this, but here it is.)

THE DRAFT LETTER inviting DDR to develop the old Masonite site with a Costco big box store on this Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors agenda has caused quite a stir and is bouncing around Ukiah like a beach ball. Here’s a collection of comments posted on Monday concluded by Supervisor John McCowen.

Tuesday, Timed agenda item: 9:10am: Approval of Letter to Northwest Atlantic (Real Estate Services) and DDR Corp. to Facilitate a Meeting to Revisit the DDR Property as a Potential Site for a New Retail Store

6. Board of Supervisors And Miscellaneous

(a) Supervisors’ Reports Regarding Board Special Assignments, Standing and Ad Hoc Committee Meetings, and Other Items of General Interest

(b) Approval of Letter to Northwest Atlantic (Real Estate Services) and DDR Corp. to Facilitate a Meeting to Revisit the DDR Property as a Potential Site for a New Retail Store (Sponsor: Supervisor Pinches)

Recommended Action/Motion: Approve the letter to Northwest Atlantic (Real Estate Services) and DDR Corp.’s Development Division to arrange a meeting between the two parties and the County to revisit the potential use of the DDR property as a location for a new retail store.

MARY ANNE MILLER WRITES:

Does anyone understand what game is being played here? The County now wants Costco in the DDR property? What about the City Of Ukiah that has been plugging along trying to put a big box store on their property in the Airport industrial park? I thought an EIR was about to be published (August) on Costco on the property that the Council purchased for that express purpose. Looks like some kind of a “con” game that’s beyond bizarre. Or am I just too unconnected to get it? Please explain if you have a clue.

JOE LOUIS WILDMAN WRITES:

I oppose this but the city staff is screwing up a reasonable tax sharing agreement and this is fall-out.

SUPERVISOR JOHN MCCOWEN WRITES:

Hi, Everyone,

The letter in question has been placed on the agenda at the request of Supervisor Pinches, who, like any Supervisor, has a right to agendize items for discussion. I do not support sending the letter, for several reasons, but I do agree with Joe Louis Wildman, who has succinctly summed up what is really going on here: “…the city [is not moving forward with] a reasonable tax sharing agreement and this is the fallout.”

Instead of showing up at 9am Tuesday to berate the Board of Supervisors, people who are concerned with the future of land use planning in the Ukiah Valley should show up at the Ukiah City Council special meeting on Monday, July 29th at 5:30pm for the Tax Sharing Workshop and encourage the City to reach an equitable tax sharing agreement with the County. The city simply can not insist on keeping the lion’s share of future revenue to itself and also expect that the county will sit on the sidelines indefinitely and make no effort to compete for future sales tax revenue.

During the Ukiah Valley Area Plan process the Board of Supervisors made several key decisions regarding Land Use Map Changes for the Ukiah Valley. The Board voted to retain industrial zoning at the Masonite site; retain agricultural zoning at Lover’s Lane; and zone the Brush Street Triangle for mixed use. These decisions were consistent in every respect with the recommendations of the Ukiah City Council. These decisions were also predicated on the understanding that it was a necessity for the city and county to agree on an equitable tax sharing agreement.

A tax sharing agreement is necessary so that the county is not penalized for upholding the principle that urban scale development, where feasible, should take place within the city limits. The City and County have been in the process of negotiating a tax sharing agreement for several years. When it looked like Costco would go in at Masonite (which truly was their preferred location) the City was very eager to negotiate a tax sharing agreement. Now that Costco is slated to locate inside the city limits, there does not seem to be any sense of urgency by the City to reach an agreement. But reaching a tax sharing agreement is arguably the only viable way to lock in the current land use policies of the County, which are subject to change by three votes. I do not think there are three votes now, but if the City sticks to its current position on tax sharing, it is only a matter of time. And that time may come sooner rather than later.

The City and County ad hoc committees for tax sharing last met on December 17 along with legal and administrative staff. The County went into the meeting intending to resolve the one remaining sticking point, the “make whole” concept, which was intended to insure that one jurisdiction would not drop below the agreed upon “base year” revenue. At that meeting, the City backed away from four additional major points that had been under agreement for as long as six years, including:

1) that a master tax sharing agreement was preferred;

2) that the area subject to sharing would be the UVAP planning area — instead of Brush Street Triangle only, Costco only, or freeway commercial areas only, which were ideas tossed out by the City on Dec. 17;

3) that the agreement would apply to all new or increased revenue above the agreed upon base year, whether from new or existing sources;

4) that the formula for sharing would be 50-50 (with a separate agreement for Costco).

Much to the consternation of the county participants, at the end of the Dec. 17 meeting, we no longer had agreement on the geographical area to which the agreement applied; the revenue to which it applied; the formula to be applied; or even that we were negotiating a master tax sharing agreement. It was agreed that city and county staff would continue to talk and that the City would propose new scenarios and/or formulas for the County to consider. It wasn’t until after the meeting that the realization fully sank in that the draft agreement that we had been working on for so long had just been shredded. That, along with Kendall Smith’s retirement, is why the County disbanded its ad hoc committee for tax sharing when the County met the next day on Dec. 18.

Except for publishing the agenda for the July 29th Tax Sharing Workshop, city staff has not proposed new scenarios or formulas for the County to consider, nor has the City provided any financial analysis or projections.

Fortunately, based on the agenda materials for July 29th, the City is now back to supporting a master tax sharing agreement — which the full City Council has unanimously endorsed at least three times. The City is also back to supporting the UVAP planning area as the geographical basis for the agreement, something that has also been generally agreed to since at least 2006, and formally agreed to in 2010, after extensive review and discussion by the city and county ad hoc committees.

Unfortunately, the City proposes to move away from the commitment to share all increased revenue, whether from new or existing sources, which is a concept that the ad hoc committees have agreed to since at least 2006. This is important, because the day Costco opens its doors on Airport Park Blvd, there will be a boost in sales tax for every store in that area. There may also be a corresponding decline in county areas. The County must not be penalized for adopting land use policies that shift the commercial and retail center of gravity solidly in favor of the City. Therefore, equitable sharing of sales tax revenue must include net increased revenue from existing, as well as new stores.

Equally unfortunately, the City proposes to back away from the 50-50 formula for sharing which has been agreed to by the ad hocs since December of 2008. The major tentative points of agreement by the ad hoc committees, including the 50-50 formula, which the City now proposes to abandon, have been reported to the full City Council and Board of Supervisors on a number of occasions. I can tell you it is a non-starter to go to the Board of Supervisors and seek approval for a 40-60 formula when 50-50 has been on the table since 2008, especially when you consider the sweetheart nature of the “Costco Addendum.”

The Costco Addendum, as agreed to by the ad hocs, would reimburse the City for the cost of improvements needed to attract Costco, currently estimated at $6 million dollars. The County ad hoc has agreed that the City would receive 100% of the Costco sales tax revenue until the cost of improvements is repaid. The City has estimated that it will take from 9-14 years to recoup $6 million dollars. In addition, the County ad hoc has agreed that if the City is able to use non-General Fund money to pay for the improvements, that the City would be able to recover an additional 50% of the cost of improvements by retaining additional Costco sales tax revenue upfront. Therefore, assuming $6 million dollars for the cost of improvements, if the City is able to use the proceeds from the bonds that it sold, the draft agreement would guarantee that 100% of the first $9 million dollars in Costco revenue would go to the City, which could mean that it would be 13.5-21 years before the County would see a dime of Costco revenue. In addition, after the agreed upon cost of improvements is paid ($6-$9million dollars) there would be a five year phase in before the County receives a 50-50 share of Costco revenue. This is the agreement that city staff says disadvantages the city.

The “draft agreement” which is included as an attachment for the July 29th workshop is a draft prepared by the city attorney and has not been considered or agreed to by the county ad hoc committee. Also, it is not true, as stated in the agenda materials, that the draft under discussion includes sharing of existing revenue. That has never been part of the discussion, at least going back to 2005 when the current effort to reach agreement began. The discussion has always been about sharing future increases in revenue that no one is getting now. In the big picture, the City is not being asked to share its revenue, but to agree to an equitable split of future increased revenue generated in the Ukiah Valley; revenue that is now being funneled into the City based on the land use decisions of the Board of Supervisors.

In short, the Board of Supervisors has kept its part of the bargain. The message to the City Council on July 29th should be to go back to the table and negotiate an equitable tax sharing agreement. The alternative is to jeopardize the current land use zoning and priorities that have been adopted by the Board of Supervisors. — John McCowen

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SPORTS TALK PART III

To the Editor:

Paul McCarthy over here on the coast at MendocinoSportsPlus (MSP). First of all, even the most casual viewer of MSP would have to be mentally unbalanced to think we “represent” the Mendocino Unified School District in any of our posts. Any more than we “represent” the Coast Guard when we report maritime traffic, Caltrans or Calfire when we report on road conditions/wild land fires, PG&E when we report power outages or the CHP/Mendocino Sheriff’s office when we run their press releases. But, knowing this county from living here going on 19 years, we have, for everyone to see, the following disclaimer just so there can’t be the slightest confusion:

“…this site is not affiliated in any way, shape or form with the Mendocino Unified School District (MUSD) and MSP’s commentary/opinion should never be construed as having ANY connection with that of the MUSD.” I find it difficult to make the point any clearer than that. MSP was started a year and a half ago. Its success rests upon the fact we’re a fresh alternative news/sports diet to the weekly steaming bowl of boredom served up by the Mendocino Beacon. While I do most of the “heavy lifting” here, and some times dish out my opinion, MSP is a collaborative enterprise. Emailers & non-public Facebook “messages” frequently point us in interesting directions. For example MSP announced what cold homicide case was going to be announced as “solved” by the sheriff’s office — a full day before the press conference. But for sports, I’m the “boots on the ground” and I don’t think anyone in this county could come close to matching my attendance at every sport in the North Coast League III (both home & away) since MSP’s inception. I don’t have to shape my commentary, or butt-kiss athletic directors, principals & superintendents to keep my job.

With that said, it was somewhat distressing and I’m highly & rightfully incensed to see a coach I greatly admire, Jim Young, continue to pass along the outright lie MSP called the Point Arena team “pussies.” Particularly when I emailed him the post in question last December when he first brought it up.

What MSP wrote was it was “demoting” the “Pirates” to “Pussycats” for forfeiting a varsity game to Mendocino. Big difference — and it takes quite a bit of the sting away from the statement. As I told coach Young in the email, MSP has banned “people from the site for using the word ‘pussy’ in the way you infer I did” and added “ other teams in the league are used to Mendo’s ‘sensitivity’ and play on it like a piano…” So, for the record, it was substituting “Pussycats” for “Pirates” — an alliterative goof.

Now on to other matters, Coach Young states I have no connection “whatsoever” with Mendocino sports. Huh? I’ve been a proud member of “Club Cardinal” (which supports all Mendo high school sports teams) for the past six years and remain so even though my son graduated. My devotion to the football team, of which my son was a member, will never wane and while I don’t see Coach Young’s name on any championship plaque in the Mendo high school trophy case, he can view mine.

And I didn’t just accuse Laytonville of running up football scores — I declared it. Rushing for two-point conversions while leading 74-0 (eventually beating hapless Round Valley 86-12) is the height of poor sportsmanship — and don’t forget the 72-0 pasting they delivered to Anderson Valley or the 55-0 defeat of Point Arena. Hall of Fame coach (Chautauqua, NY) Young then goes on to say I attacked Anderson Valley AD Robert Pinoli twice!

Believe me, coach Young would know if I attacked him as I would have used something similar to what AA Cohen used describing railroad baron Charles Crocker: (he’s a) “living, breathing, waddling monument of the triumph of vulgarity, viciousness and dishonesty” or my favorite Charles Adams quote: he’s a “ill-mannered bully, and by all odds the most covertly and dangerously corrupt man I ever had the opportunity and occasion carefully to observe in public life.” So, no, I never attacked him. AD Pinoli arbitrarily (and illegally) started a running clock before half time in the Mendocino-AV game last fall. It can only be started after the third quarter unless the coaches are consulted. The Mendo coaches, of course, would have agreed but they were never asked.

I called AD Pinoli on it, notified the league and wrote about it. That’s NOT an attack. Those are facts. If AD Pinoli, who is supposed to be the “acting” commissioner of the NCL III, was correct why did he apologize for his faux pas after the game?

Ditto questioning “possible” illegal practices. The high school principal, it turns out, has to ok practices before the official start date. AV didn’t have an on site principal, I believe, when the soccer practices started. Was the new principal asked? Can’t tell you — thus our questioning of how they were “getting away” with it.

And since when was coach Young appointed “Chief Apologist” for the Mendo school district? That’s a knee-slapper. Laytonville High School does look like the sheriff’s lock-up at Low Gap Road — just add a couple strands of concertina wire and it’d be a clone when viewed from Branscomb Road. There was much “give-and-go” at MSP with Laytonville sports fans over my unflattering description (were they trying to keep people in or out?), but it was eventually revealed the architect’s specialty WAS designing minimum security facilities. I helpfully suggested they plant climbing ivy or vines to soften the harshness of the chain-link surrounding the lock-up, I mean campus.

And I’d like to know if coach Young has such a “thick skin from multiple years in youth sports” (his words) why is he running around Mendocino County apologizing for my opinions? Coach Young goes on about the MUSD high school administration being on “the receiving end of abuse” from MSP. How in the wide, wide world of sports can we be perceived as “representing” the MUSD if we’re attacking it all the time? You can’t have it both ways coach.

MSP is an independent voice of social media on the coast. As I explained to the coach: “The only thing I represent is my own self-interest.” The Press Democrat has referred to me (charitably) as a “Mendocino sports historian,” but I’ll be the first to admit I have a lot to learn. Like who was the Mendocino high school athletic director that allowed an ineligible player play on (two) sports teams that cost the high school the 2006 football championship and the forfeit of their season? So, in conclusion, everyone but an idiot knows MSP isn’t the voice of the Mendocino school district, MSP called Point Arena Pussycats not Pussies and MSP will continue to “call ‘em the way we see ‘em” regardless (and despite) apologies that are unnecessary, unneeded and unwanted.

Paul McCarthy, Elk

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THE DREAMTIME

by James Howard Kunstler

The idea that techno-industrial society is headed toward a collapse has become very unpopular the last couple of years. Thoughts (and fears) about it have been replaced by a kind of grand redemption fantasy that bears the same relation to economics that masturbation has to pornography. One way to sum up the current psychological state of the nation is that an awful lot of people who ought to know better don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground anymore. We’re witnessing the implosion of the American hive mind.

This is what comes of divorcing truth from reality, and that process is exactly what you get in the effort to replace authentic economic activity with accounting fraud and propaganda. For five years, the Federal Reserve has been trying to offset a permanent and necessary contraction of techno-industrialism by lobbing mortar rounds of so-called “money” into its crony “primary dealer” banks in order to fuel interest rate carry trades that produce an echo in the stock markets. An echo, let us be clear, is the ghost of something, not the thing itself — in this case: value.

The permanent contraction of techno-industrialism is necessary because the main fuel for running it has become scarcer and rather expensive, too expensive really to run the infrastructure of the United States. That infrastructure cannot be replaced now without a great deal of capital sacrifice. Paul Krugman — whom other observers unironically call Dr. Paul Krugman, conferring shamanic powers on him — wrote a supremely stupid op-ed in The New York Times today (“Stranded by Sprawl”), as though he had only noticed over the past week that the favored development pattern of our country has had adverse economic consequences. Gosh, ya think?

Meanwhile, the public has been sold a story by nervous and wishful upholders of the status quo that we have no problem with our primary resource due to the shale oil and shale gas bonanzas that would make us “energy independent” and “the world’s leading oil exporter — Saudi America!” A related story along these lines is the imminent “American industrial renaissance.” What they leave out is that, if actually true, it would be a renaissance of robots, leaving the former (and long ago) well-paid American working class to stew in its patrimony of methadrine, incest, and tattoo “art.”

To put it as simply as possible, the main task before this society is to change the way we live. The necessary changes are so severe and represent so much loss of previous investment that we can’t bring ourselves to think about it. For instance, both the suburbs and the big cities are toast. The destiny of the suburbs is to become slums, salvage yards, and ruins. The destiny of the big cities is to become Detroit — though most of America’s big cities (Atlanta, Houston) are hybrid monstrosities of suburbs and cities, and they will suffer the most. It is not recognized by economic poobahs such as Dr. Krugman and Thomas Friedman that the principal economic activity of Dixieland the past half century was the manufacture of suburban sprawl and now that the endeavor is over, the result can be seen in the millions of unemployed Ford F-110 owners drinking themselves into an incipient political fury.

Then where will the people live? They will live in smaller cities and cities that succeed in downsizing sharply and in America’s currently neglected and desolate small towns and upon a landscape drastically refitted for a post-techo-industrial life that is as far removed from a Ray Kurzweil “Singularity” fantasy as the idea of civic virtue is removed from Lawrence Summers. The people will live in places with a meaningful relationship to food production.

Many of those aforementioned swindled, misled, and debauched lumpen folk (having finally sold off their Ford-F110s) will eventually see their prospects migrate back into the realm of agriculture, or at least their surviving progeny will, as the sugar-tit of federal benefits melts away to zero, and by then the population will be much lower. These days, surely, the idea of physical labor in the sorghum rows is abhorrent to a 325-pound food-stamp recipient lounging in an air-conditioned trailer engrossed in the televised adventures of Kim Kardashian and her celebrated vagina while feasting on a KFC 10-piece bundle and a 32 oz Mountain Dew. But the hypothetical grand-kids might have to adopt a different view after the last air-conditioner sputters to extinction, and fire-ants have eaten through the particle-board floor of the trailer, and all the magical KFC products recede into the misty past where Jenny Lind rubs elbows with the Knights of the Round Table . Perhaps I wax a little hyperbolic, but you get the idea: subsistence is the real deal-to-come, and it will be literally a harder row to hoe than the current conception of “poverty.”

Somewhere beyond this mannerist picture of the current cultural depravity is the glimmer of an idea of people behaving better and spending their waking lives at things worth doing (and worthy of their human-ness), but that re-enchantment of daily life awaits a rather harsh work-out of the reigning deformations. I will go so far to predict that the recent national mood of wishful fantasy is running out of gas and that a more fatalistic view of our manifold predicaments will take its place in a few months. It would at least signal a rapprochment of truth with reality.

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ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL with Gerald Ford in 1976, Ford handed the late premier DC reporter Helen Thomas a card from a fortune-telling scale the president had obtained which said, “You are a brilliant leader.” Thomas glanced at the card and cracked, “It got your weight wrong, too.”

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MASSIVE LOSS OF ENDANGERED WINTER RUN SALMON (from: “Dan Bacher” <danielbacher@fishsniffer.com>

Good Morning

Below and attached is a CSPA press release about the massive loss of endangered Sacramento River winter run salmon in irrigation ditches this year. Now the survivors face being hammered by the mismanagement of cold water releases from Shasta Dam. Hal Bonslett, the late Fish Sniffer publisher and founder, and I spent many hours going to meetings and writing articles in the late 1980s about the urgent need to list the winter run Chinook under the Endangered Species Act. Here we are over two decades later watching the state and federal agencies imperiling the once huge run of winter run Chinook again!

* * *

Massive Loss of Endangered Winter Run Salmon

by Bill Jennings, Executive Director, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance

Perhaps half of this year’s spawning class die in irrigation ditches: survivors hammered by mismanagement of Shasta cold water reserves

During April, May and early June, large numbers of endangered winter- run Chinook salmon and other species were drawn into channels in the Yolo Bypass and Colusa Basin and died, according to reports by California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and National Marine Fisheries Service biologists (NMFS). The total number of stranded fish is unknown but agency biologists said it could be as high as half of this year’s returning population of winter-run. This tragedy is exacerbated by high temperature stress on spawning winter- run caused by mismanagement of limited cold water pools in Shasta Reservoir this year.

State and federal fish agencies have known and documented for almost two decades that up-migrating endangered and threatened fish on the Sacramento River, including winter-run, spring-run Chinook salmon, steelhead and green sturgeon are drawn into the irrigation and drainage waterways of the Yolo Bypass and Colusa Basin from which there is no exit and are trapped. Excepting sporadic rescue efforts, little has been done to address this longstanding problem.

This is an indefensible failure to protect species hovering on the brink of extinction. The fact that our fishery agencies have long been aware of this problem but done little to correct it is appalling and borders on criminal culpability, especially, when there are obvious and workable solutions.

Large numbers of salmon were identified in the maze of creeks and canals in the Colusa basin west of the Sacramento River. More than 300 fish were rescued from Hunter, North Fork Logan and Stone Corral Creeks, Colusa Trough and Delevan National Wildlife Refuge and returned to the Sacramento River. Because of their degraded condition, there was concern that these fish would not successfully spawn. Stranded salmon were also observed in other creeks, including Willow and Funks Creeks, the main stem of Logan Creek, Provident Main Canal and the North East Drain but no rescues were attempted. Members of the public reported salmon at other locations but CDFW staff were not able to get around to them.

It’s a recurring problem. For example, in 2011, NMFS biologists rescued more than 200 listed green sturgeon, spring-run Chinook salmon and steelhead trout from the Yolo and Sutter bypasses. Many others were not rescued and perished.

“Measures to address stranding in the bypass were proposed by the Anadromous Fisheries Restoration Program in 1995, by the CalFed Record of Decision in 2000 and by the NMFS OCAP Biological Opinion in 2009, among others, and all we have is yet another proposal for a band aid solution they hope might be in place by 2017,” said Jennings, adding “winter-run salmon may be cavorting with passenger pigeons by then.”

Winter-run salmon have been hard hit with a double whammy this year. The State Water Resource Control Board recently gave the Bureau of Reclamation permission to move the temperature compliance point for Shasta cold-water releases on the Sacramento River from Red Bluff upstream to Anderson, eliminating 10 miles of the 20 miles of available spawning habitat for winter-run salmon. Beginning in September and October, Spawning fall-run and threatened spring-run salmon will also be hammered by high temperatures. The cold-water pool behind Shasta Dam has been seriously depleted by demands to export water to south-of-Delta farmers. Water exports are averaging more than 17,400 AF daily.

Historically, more than 200,000 adult winter-run salmon returned up the Sacramento to spawn and numbered more than 117,000 as recently as 1969. Shasta Dam eliminated the majority of historical spawning habitat and their numbers plummeted to around 200 fish by 1991. They were listed as endangered in 1994. Adult winter-run salmon numbered 1,533 fish in 2010, increasing slightly to 2,529 in 2012.

Runoff from a million acres of farmland in the west Sacramento Valley drains into the Colusa Basin Drain. Augmented by rainfall, this water either discharges into the Sacramento River at Knights Landing or it flows via the Knights Landing Ridge Cut into the Yolo Bypass and ultimately discharges into Cache Slough and the Delta. Up- migrating fish that are attracted into the Bypass and Colusa Basin are stranded and perish because there is no exit.

CSPA’s fisheries consultants believe it is necessary to establish screens or barriers that will prevent up-migrating salmon from entering the Toe Drain and/or Colusa Drain during critical migration periods. During high flow events when Sacramento water is spilling at Fremont Weir into the Yolo Bypass, a conveyance system must be constructed to enable fish to cross Fremont Weir back into the river. At all times, salmonids, sturgeon and steelhead must be prevented from entering Ridge Cut into the Colusa Basin.

Similar problems exist on the eastside of the Sacramento at the Moulton, Colusa and Tisdale weirs in the Sutter-Butte Basin where fish were also reported stranded this year but no rescues were attempted.

Further information on the problem, this year’s rescue operations and source material on the agencies’ long-existing awareness of the problem can be found at: www.calsport.org.

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CALIFORNIA PRISON HUNGER STRIKE

An Open Letter to Jerry Brown: Stop the Torture of Solitary Confinement

by Carole Travis

Monday, July 29, 2013. Today marks the first day of the 4th week of the California Prison Hunger Strike. On July 8 when the prisoners began their hunger strike to call attention to this torture, 30,000 inmates across California stopped eating. Saturday morning we learned that Billy Michael Sell housed in the Corcoran SHU (Solitary Housing Unit) died last Monday. Today over 600 men have only had water for 22 days. They protest their long-term torture. California is one of 19 states that use long term, often indefinite, solitary confinement and by far and away has the largest numbers of prisoners in solitary  —  over 10,000.

Prisoners are not sentenced to solitary for their street crime. Prison officials assign them to this crushing isolation without due process, without review of the evidence against them, without legal representation or an impartial hearing. The deciding agency is made up of prison guards who have risen in the ranks through time. At Pelican Bay, California’s super max, the men who decide the fate of the prisoners are white and have lived their lives in Crescent City with a population of around 9,000 people 15 miles south of the Oregon border. They believe they understand the culture of the prisoners, largely from major urban areas and communities of color because they have studied them in their cages for years. As a result of the July 2011 hunger strike there has been an impartial review panel deciding if those in solitary belong there. The panel found 68% of the prisoners they reviewed should be immediately transferred out of solitary into the General Prison Population.

The August (2013) issue of Scientific American highlights the ineffectiveness of solitary confinement to reduce crime in prison. It does have the capacity to induce or exacerbate mental illness. The practice is deemed cruel, inhumane, and ineffective. As the editors point out, “new research suggests that solitary confinement creates more violence both inside and outside prison walls.” (p.10). Mr. Juan Mendez, Special Rapporteur on torture defines 15 days in solitary confinement as torture.

We are compelled to write this Open Letter to Governor Brown to step in and stop the torture. We ask you to join us and sign our letter <http://www.stoptortureca.org/take-action/open-letter-to-governor-brown/> .

(Carole Travis is an Attorney, activist, and former president of United Auto Workers Local 719)

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LEARN TO PAINT, PAINT TO LEARN:

Zornes retrospective honors a century’s dedication to art and life

by Roberta Werdinger

On Saturday, August 10, from 2 to 4:30 pm, the Grace Hudson Museum will host an opening reception and lecture for the exhibit “Milford Zornes: A Painter of Influence.” This retrospective of the long-lived watercolorist and beloved teacher includes many heretofore unseen paintings. Zornes’s daughter and son-in-law, Maria and Hal Baker, curated the exhibit along with Museum Curator Marvin Schenck, and will host this presentation of the life and art of this extraordinary creative force, whose career spanned nine decades and covered the globe. The lecture begins at 2 pm.

Milford Zornes (1908-2008) was born in Oklahoma and studied art in the Los Angeles area. He began producing and exhibiting watercolors at an early age, with one of his paintings chosen to hang in the White House of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Drafted into the army during World War II, he traveled to Asia and worked as an official war artist. After the war, he settled in Southern California and resumed a vigorous schedule of traveling, teaching, painting, and exhibiting. He eventually combined these interests by teaching a series of international watercolor workshops that brought him to almost every continent in the world and put him in touch with thousands of art students, many of whom he influenced profoundly.

Zornes is a case study on how art and life are intimately fused. Launching his career during the Great Depression, he used watercolors due to their inexpensive cost, practicality, and wide appeal. Although his career included many honors and successes, including membership in the National Academy, he never failed to give his many students his complete attention. Artist and author Carolyn Wing Greenlee, who first studied with Zornes as a teenager in 1966 and credits him with helping to launch her own career, remembers: “First Milford pointed out the strengths of the work, then explained how it could be improved, speaking truth with great kindness.” She adds, “Since Milford wanted everyone to be able to afford a piece of original art, he kept his prices low, and painted prodigiously. It was not a chore for him, because he was always striving to paint the perfect picture.” He once commented, “You learn to paint and then you paint to learn.” In his later life, he suffered from macular degeneration, an eye condition, but kept on working, employing techniques that enabled him to make out outlines and fill them in. The day after his 100^th birthday, he gave a demonstration and lecture at an art museum. He died less than a month later.

The exhibit, which includes video clips and quotations, gives us a sense of just how vast this painter’s influence is. Zornes’s travels provided him with an endless variety of subject matter, both human and natural, which were transformed by a bold yet lyrical technique. Curator Marvin Schenck comments, “His rhythmic, direct, simplified style of brushwork remains an important influence on watercolorists,” and also helped promote the California Style watercolor movement. Rather than outlining a figure in pencil and then filling in the color, Zornes laid transparent washes of watercolor directly onto large sheets of paper, allowing the white spaces to show through. The paintings have the brilliant colors and blocky shapes of early Expressionist paintings, but with none of the sometimes harsh social criticism of those of that era. Instead, they betray a gentleness and regard for both people and landscapes, while still portraying them honestly. The result is a feast for the eyes as well as the soul, energetic and celebratory, with a democratic view of life worthy of Walt Whitman. As Carolyn Greenlee again puts it, “Milford preferred no limitations of classification or expectation in style, subject or medium. He wanted to be remembered as Milford Zornes, the painter, and he relentlessly traveled the world, filling his eyes and paintings with whatever he found.”

“Milford Zornes: A Painter of Influence” will be on display until October 13, 2013. The opening reception and lecture is free after Museum admission. Several other activities will be featured, including a docent and member tour with Curator Marvin Schenck on August 20, a watercolor workshop for kids on August 24 and Sept. 28, and a watercolor workshop with Sacramento painter Woody Hansen on Sept. 7 and 8. Funding of this exhibition was made possible by the Sun House Guild.

The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah and is a part of the City of Ukiah’s Community Services Department. General admission to the Museum is $4, $10 per family, $3 for students and seniors, and free to members or on the first Friday of the month. For more information please go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org or call 467-2836.

THIS JUST IN: Coast fishermen report lots of big salmon but ominously few little salmon. No babies would seem to mean that good as this salmon season is, next year’s probably won’t be very good at all.

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THE ANDERSON VALLEY Community Services District will host a budget presentation by the County’s CEO, Carmel Angelo, and deputy CEO, Kyle Knopp, at the Boonville Fairgrounds Dining Hall, Wednesday, August 21, from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The presentation is the fourth in a series of five presentations that will be delivered in each supervisorial district before the County’s Final Budget hearings, which begin on September 9th.

IN FULL PRESS RELEASE MODE, the County CEO’s office elicited this orphic statement from 5th District Supervisor Hamburg: “We appreciate the Fifth District holding the budget presentation in Anderson Valley and encourage everyone to attend so they can ask about Anderson Valley issues.” (Huh?)

“THE PRESENTATION will include highlights of the County’s 2013/2014 Recommended Budget, a State of the County update, and items of interest to the Fifth District. The intent of these presentations is to inform the audience of the workings of County government and to provide a high level of transparency and accountability to all Mendocino County residents. It is hoped that those interested in performing their civic duty will continue to stay engaged in the workings of local government.”

OH, PLEASE. The true state of County finances can be summed up in one word — precarious. Like municipalities everywhere, our local government has, over the years, obligated itself to much more than it can now pay for and, of course, its budgets are written in a way impenetrable by mere citizens, hence these occasional traveling propaganda shows. The current crop of supervisors, the best overall in many years, has kept the SS Mendo afloat mostly by lopping off line workers and not filling job vacancies. In our opinion, however, there remain a series of indefensible expenditures and positions — beginning with for instance, now that they bring it up, the Assistant CEO position. Then there’s the Wellness office, the entire travel and conference budget, the Promotional Alliance, most of the lawyers in the County Counsel’s office, administrators paid far above what is rational, and on and on.

SUPERVISOR HAMBURG himself has added to the County’s debt burden by suing the County he serves. He thinks the taxpayers should fund the lawsuit he caused by failing to bury his late wife in accordance with existing law. He won’t win the suit but the County will have to spend lots of money defending itself.

COINCIDENTALLY, this presentation by the County’s leadership occurs on the same day and at the same time as the next CSD meeting, so the sponsors will be able to do no more than make perfunctory introductions and then return to their own meeting across the street. We predict the CEO’s Boonville appearance will draw exactly two people — Gene Herr and Barbara Goodell. The only other likely attendee, Major Mark Scaramella, USAF ret., will be across the street at the CSD meeting. Mail it in, Carmel.

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HANKS SIMS writes: “You guys have the Humboldt Bay Harbor District all backwards. They didn’t spend $250,000 to rally for east-west rail. They spent $20,000 — less than a tenth of the figure you reported — in the hope that a very cursory look at what such a thing might actually cost would dampen the spirits of the people who lobby them incessantly to hop about the crazy train.Their small report showed just that — that you could expect a new east-west rail line to cost one billion minimum, before you even get to the necessary harbor improvements, and that the market the rail would serve would be very small. But of course, the train evangelists are barely slowed by such things as facts or numbers. They simply say that the Harbor District has been captured by the forces of evil, and therefore their consultant is not to be trusted. In any case: The district is on the other side of the issue. The sane side.”

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CENSORSHIP BEYOND WALGREENS

Letter to the Editor:

While your criticism of Walgreens for refusing to carry the “bomber” issue of the Rolling Stones Magazine is accurate and justified, it doesn’t even scratch the surface of how insidious the problem is. In fact, one cannot buy a copy of that issue of the magazine ANYWHERE in the entire city of San Francisco! City Lights doesn’t carry it, Green Apple doesn’t carry it — it has been banned from distribution throughout SF. From now on, bookstores and magazine distribution centers should obtain a rubber stamp that reads “Approved by Homeland Security” before allowing a gullible public access to “unpatriotic” literature. I expect that there will be broad bipartisan support for such censorship from the charlatans who inhabit Congress.

— Luke Hiken, Berkeley

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THE CITY OF UKIAH’S TAX SHARING WORKSHOP on Monday night, as predicted, was an exercise in mind numbing trivia and ritual finger pointing between city and County officials who, along with a long list of their predecessors, have made second careers out of meeting and talking about a tax sharing agreement without ever actually coming to an agreement. The meeting opened with a lengthy presentation by city staff, complete with Power Point, that was intended to show that the County already gets too much money and that the draft agreement negotiated over the last several years was really a bad deal for the city. Why? Because the city needs money to pay for services for its residents. The County isn’t under comparable pressure to provide services in a tough economic environment? In fact, the County has done a lot better job in recent years of providing services and balanced budgets while building up reserves. The City Council is unable to control its budget and is burning through its reserves by running annual million dollar deficits.

DURING DISCUSSION by the City Council, Mari Rodin and Phil Baldwin declared that the current City-County draft agreement, which provided for a 50-50 split of future sales tax was a bad deal for the city and that 60% city and 40% county would be much fairer. Mayor Doug Crane pointed out that the 50-50 split had been agreed to years ago when he served on the ad hoc committee that had agreed to it. Crane suggested the deal still had merit. There was very little discussion of the so-called Costco Addendum which seemingly guarantees that the City of Ukiah will get all of the Costco sales tax revenue for the next generation. This is apparently necessary to pay back the city general fund for the cost of infrastructure improvements extorted by Costco as its price for deigning to do business with the Ukiah city limits. (Ukiah also seems to think a Costco alongside 101 won’t present major traffic problems; the present big box array in the neighborhood often causes mini-jams. Costco will add immeasurably to the current traffic.)

MARI RODIN was the unintended scene stealer of the evening when she denied having any memory of attending a joint meeting of the ad hoc committees on December 17. Phil “Red Phil” Baldwin also was overcome by a sudden amnesia. He also had no memory of attending a meeting on December 17, but said it didn’t really matter because ad hocs are not able to reach agreements anyway. The City Attorney and City Manger also did not seem to remember a meeting on December 17. The city staff report for the meeting said the last meeting was on December 6. Shades of Rosemary Woods and the Nixon Tapes.

COUNTY CEO CARMEL ANGELO was first up to the podium when the meeting was opened for public comment. Angelo confirmed that the last meeting of the ad hoc committees and staff was indeed held on December 17, and then read a confirming letter into the record. Angelo said it was unfortunate that the City was changing its position on the 50-50 split, which she described as a major shift and said the 50-50 split had been agreed to in 2008. Angelo also said the financial analysis provided by the City of Ukiah was not based on real numbers but the County was ready to come back to the table anyway.

COUNTY COUNSEL TOM PARKER read a memo describing the outline of the agreement as it existed at the December 6 meeting and the outcome of the infamous December 17 meeting now the subject of collective amnesia by the city participants. Parker said the December 6 meeting had been held at the County offices and the December 17 meeting had been held at City Hall — home and home as exchanges of home fields are called in the sports world. Parker also attached to his memo what he said was a transcript of his notes from the December 6 and December 17 meetings. By now it was looking like there really had been a meeting on December 17.

SUPERVISOR JOHN MCCOWEN was next up to say that he also had attended the December 17 meeting. McCowen referred to his long history of serving on the city and County ad hoc committees, and emphasized that it was important to refocus on the public interest in order to reach agreement. Not surprisingly, McCowen also came down in favor of a 50-50 split. By now the audience was probably wondering how none of the city participants could remember attending a meeting that the County participants were sure had taken place.

SUPERVISOR PINCHES spoke up later in the meeting to say that he supported a tax sharing agreement as long as it was fair. He questioned why it was taking so long and said he thought he and Phil Baldwin could easily reach agreement. Pinches, doing an on-the-spot rewrite of local history, also said the County had turned Costco away, which provoked Baldwin to say that the voters had slam dunked Costco and the whole DDR mega mall by defeating Measure A by a 70%-30% margin. Unspoken was the draft letter put on the County agenda for Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting where Pinches is asking his colleagues to sign off on a letter to Costco saying that the County “is supportive of rezoning the DDR property [Masonite] for Costco or any other retail outlets or housing developments that could be located at this site.”

FOLLOWING PUBLIC COMMENT, and additional rhetorical flailing around by the City Council — councilperson Rodin seems to suffer a pronounced case of attention deficit disorder — as the meeting slowly spiraled down to an inconclusive ending. Score one for the County, at least in terms of credibility. Despite not relying on a Powerpoint (a sure sign the speaker is about to try and put one over on the rubes) the County CEO and County Counsel were well prepared with remarks that were to the point and delivered without the kind of circular and self-canceling rhetoric often practiced by the City Council. And no one in Mendo public life can match Supervisor Pinches for getting straight to the point. But as of today, Costco is apparently in line to be plunked down within the Ukiah city limits. But if Pinches has his way, Costco will soon be getting a letter from the County with an updated version of “Let’s Make A Deal.”

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FROM THIS WEEK’S CEO REPORT presented to the Board of Supervisors from County CEO Carmel Angelo.

• Selection of Forester for the Little River Timber Harvest: The County’s contractor is now working with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and CalFire on compliance with state and federal laws. At this point in time, the County is on track to harvest timber in August of 2014.

Date: July 17, 2013

To: Honorable Board of Supervisors

From: Kristin McMenomey, GSA Director

Subject: Little River Timber Harvest

Background

The Board of Supervisors directed the Little River Timber Harvest be referred to the CEO’s office for a potential harvest in 2013. The direction from the Board was to have the CEO bring back the item to the full Board to hear Mr. Greg Guisti give his expertise on the subject. Due to Mr. Guisti’s availability (he was out of the Country for three months) to make such a presentation as well as the availability of the Board’s calendar at the end of the year, the decision was made to move forward with an RFQ to get the process started and the CEO would utilize her CEO Report to keep the Board of Supervisors updated.

The General Services Agency (GSA) received this project on November 7, 2012 and immediately met with Greg Guisti and Steve Dunnicliff (previous project coordinator) to obtain an update on the status of the Harvest. GSA began work with Greg Guisti to create a Request for Qualifications for a Forester so as to hopefully begin a harvest in 2013. GSA issued the RFQ on April 5, 2013 and a contract was executed on June 24, 2013. Timber Harvest Status Subsequent to the contract being executed, the forester immediately began contacting the Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, (USFWS) and CalFire to determine whether or not these agencies would accept the following previous studies completed on the site:

• Marbled Murrelet (MAMU) surveys completed in 2008 and 2009

• Northern Spotted Owl surveys completed by MRC in 2010- 013

On July 10th, the forester and a consulting wildlife biologist met with DFW to make the case that no additional Marbled Murrelet surveys were necessary. DFW was willing to not require additional surveys, however they wanted the County to designate 5 to 6 acres as a no-cut area and establish a 300-foot buffer, constituting a total of 8 acres, in which harvesting would need to be approved by DFW. (This position was based on a site visit conducted by DFW staff in 2007.)

A total of 14 acres of the property would likely be impacted, representing 25% of the NTMP area and 30% of the Redwood-Douglas-Fir stand. This could potentially result in a major impact on the amount of timber that could be harvested and the income that could be generated for the County. The decision was made to conduct two years of surveys (this year and next year) which should enable the County to harvest greater levels of timber in 2014 or potentially sell the rights to this timber to an organization like Save-The-Redwoods League — something that Linda Perkins from the Sierra Club has proposed. One survey has been completed to date and the other three will be completed by the end of this month.

The USFWS and CalFire also require nonindustrial landowners to conduct six Northern Spotted Owl surveys for two years in a row. However, MRC conducted three surveys this year on its property adjacent to the airport. The Forester was able to get the USFWS to agree to another three surveys this year, plus three surveys next year, assuming that MRC conducts three surveys next year as well. One survey was completed on July 15th, and two others are scheduled to occur by the end of the month.

The Forester also met on July 15th with CalFire staff to review the Nonindustrial Timber Management Plan and discuss required amendments to the NTMP. As a result of this meeting, the Forester has a clear idea of how to expeditiously amend the NTMP. On the same day, he also met with Tom Peters of the Department of Transportation (DOT) to discuss FAA requirements for clearing, the potential conflict of selling timber rights relative to FAA requirements, and the availability of bridge and culvert material that might be used on the truck road in the NTMP harvest area.

Taking all of the above into consideration, the County is aggressively pursuing its option to harvest as soon as possible given the constraints of the various State and Federal agencies.

Depending on upon the results of the surveys, it is anticipated that the County would have the ability to harvest timber in August of 2014. This would require GSA to embark upon the process of obtaining bids from loggers with a potential bid launch sometime in February/March of 2014.

It should also be noted that deferring of the timber harvest until 2014 makes sense for two important reasons: 1) The mill price for Redwood will likely be better next year, as the current market is close to saturation; and 2) The County will be able to solicit bids from the best loggers in the area, many of whom are now committed to other jobs.

* * *

• County of Mendocino and City of Ukiah Tax Sharing: The County of Mendocino is waiting to hear from the City of Ukiah regarding tax sharing between the two government entities. The County has provided the City with potential dates in the months of July, August, and September of 2013 for a public meeting between the two elected bodies to pick up tax sharing discussions where they left off back in December of 2012. The Ukiah City Council is holding a special workshop on Monday, July 29 to review the information presented by City Attorney David Rapport on this topic, and is expected to follow up with the County from that meeting for dates that are workable to meet with the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors;

• Project Update: Feasibility Study for Ambulance Service Exclusive Operating Area: The consultant’s report will be uploaded to the project website for Board and public review this week at:

http://www.co.mendocino.ca.us/administration/EMS.htm

• Following release of the report, the project team will conduct a conference call to determine the next steps in consideration of the report findings and recommendations. Based on the depth and breadth of the project analysis, and the corresponding findings and recommendations, the Project Team has three preliminary options for Board consideration/facilitation of report presentation: 1) Activate the Board Standing Committee (HHS, Supervisors McCowen and Gjerde); 2) Form a Board Ad Hoc Committee (Comprising two Supervisors); or 3) Direct staff to coordinate a Board Workshop to facilitate presentation of the report to the full Board and determination of next steps;

• Off-Site Board Meeting on August 13: On August 13, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors will meet at the Fort Bragg Town Hall to discuss, among other items of business, two high-profile items. The first item is the Westport Municipal Advisory Council appeal to the Board of Supervisors of a County Permit Administrator decision to allow California State Parks to create new sand dunes from a portion of 10-Mile Beach Trail, known as Haul Road. The second major topic of discussion is the location for a new commercial transfer station in the coastal area of the County. The Board of Supervisors will be presented with two options for a location, the first being the Caspar landfill site, and the second being a portion of the Jackson State Demonstration Forest off of Highway 20. The public is encouraged to attend this meeting on August 13 if they would like to learn more about these two items;

• 2013-14 Budget Report: The Recommended Budget has been published and is available on the County website. Staff request that each Department review their section and advise the Executive Office of any errors in their narrative or other information. All adjustments or corrections identified after the Recommended Budget was approved will be reflected in the Final Budget. The Auditor is working on the year-end closeout process for FY 2012-2013. Executive Office staff are monitoring the process and gathering information that may affect the 2013-2014 Final Budget.

• Draft RFP Released for $500M in State Assistance for Local Jail Construction: The California Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) released the final draft SB 1022 Request for Proposal (RFP). SB 1022 will provide $500 million in bond funding for adult detention facility construction and renovation. The purpose of the RFP is to establish conditional awardees and allocate financing as authorized by SB 1022 for the construction of adult local criminal justice facilities. This legislation provides up to $500,000,000 in state lease-revenue bond financing authority for acquisition, design and construction, including expansion or renovation, of adult local criminal justice facilities in California. The BSCC will hold a bidders conference on August 12 from 1:00 PM – 3:30 PM in West Sacramento at the State Department of General Services. Both CSAC and RCRC urge counties with an interest in the RFP process to attend the bidders’ conference in person. Project proposals will be due to the BSCC on October 24;

• State Responsibility Area Fee Bills Being Mailed August 22-26, 2013: CalFire and the California State Board of Equalization (BOE) have recently announced the 2013 State Responsibility Area (SRA) fee bill schedule, with the first round of bills being mailed in alphabetical order by county. Bills are scheduled to be mailed to Mendocino County residents August 22-26, 2013. The mailing schedule is available at:

http://www.boe.ca.gov/sptaxprog/pdf/FPF_Billing_Mailing_Dates.pdf;

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BRADLEY MANNING has been acquitted of aiding the enemy, but was convicted of espionage, theft and other charges Tuesday, more than three years after he dispatched alleged secrets to WikiLeaks. The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, deliberated for about 16 hours over what is essentially a whistleblower case since America is not involved in any legally declared wars. The government maintained that Manning was an anarchist computer hacker and attention-seeking traitor. He was convicted on 19 of 21 charges and now faces up to 128 years in prison. His sentencing hearing begins Wednesday.

MANNING DIVERTED TO WIKILEAKS more than 700,000 battlefield reports and diplomatic cables, and video of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed civilians in Iraq, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver. In the footage, airmen laughed and called targets “dead bastards.” He said during a pre-trial hearing in February he leaked the material to expose the US military’s “bloodlust” and disregard for human life, and what he considered American diplomatic deceit. He said he chose information he believed would not the harm the United States and he wanted to start a debate on military and foreign policy.

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US MARSHALS ADD SHANE MILLER TO MOST WANTED LIST

Today, the U.S. Marshals Service added Shane Miller, a former Humboldt County resident to its 15 Most Wanted List. (See above for the wanted poster.) Miller is a suspect in the triple slayings of his wife, Sandy, and two young daughters, Shelby and Shasta from the Shingletown area. Miller was last reported seen near Petrolia, and a massive manhunt had that community locked down for days. Miller’s truck was found on a private road but no trace of him has been seen since Wednesday, May 8th.— Kym Kemp (Courtesy, LostCoastOutpost.com)

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NO CHILDREN IN THIS GARDEN

Editor,

The Caspar Children’s Garden (CCG) is much in need of a new home for its preschool program. I sincerely hope that a suitable location is found. However, as president of the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens (MCBG) board of directors, I am concerned about Skip Taube’s characterization of discussions that CCG initiated with the Gardens about the possibility of leasing the Parrish Family Farmhouse for this purpose.

Because of the age and condition of the Farmhouse, it was made clear from the outset that CCG would have to be responsible for demonstrating that this old and largely unimproved house could and would provide a safe and wholesome environment for regular use by young children. It was understood that this would require various tests and inspections, fencing and likely other modifications. Despite prolonged discussions with a series of CCG representatives, including Mr. Taube, the MCBG Board and our Director regretfully concluded that since we could not ensure the children’s well-being, it would be unacceptable to lease the property for use as a preschool. While disappointing, the decision was neither abrupt nor driven by a “loss of interest.” It resulted from a thoughtful process driven by a clear focus on the health and safety of the children.

— Wendy Roberts, President, Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, Mendocino

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HIP SERVICE to perform fifth concert for the 22nd annual Sundays in the Park in Ukiah. On Sunday, August 11th in Todd Grove Park at 6:00pm Fowler Auto & Truck Center, The City of Ukiah, KWNE-FM and MAX 93.5 are proud to present the fifth concert of the 22nd annual 2013 Sundays in the Park concert series featuring the Electrifying Motown R & B Revue with Hip Service. Hip Service is one of Sundays in the Park’s favorite bands and are unrivaled in the entertainment industry with its unique variety of crowd pleasing, from-the-soul dance music. This accomplished group, made up of world-class performers, has become one of the most in demand live acts in Northern California. They won the Sacramento Sounds of Soul Music #1 award for Best R&B Group several times! Performing dance hits from the ’60′s through the ’90′s, Hip Service features three outstanding lead vocalists, a screaming four piece horn section, rock solid funky rhythm section and four electrifying dancers. Since their inception in 1996, the Hip Service sensation has taken Northern California by storm. It’s the music that makes you get up and shake your hips! Rhythm & Blues, Classic Soul, sounds of Motown, Classic Rock, 70′s Disco, or funky grooves: they have it all! This group’s dance-’til-you-drop performances and stellar reputation in the entertainment business has made Hip Service “The-Band-In-Demand!” Great music, dynamic choreography, endless fun and enthusiasm, and true professionalism make Hip Service a boogying good time for the 20^th annual Sundays in the Park concerts.

Several weeks after the approval of a resolution discouraging the use and sale of rodenticides, the HumCo Board of Supervisors has been updated on the state’s proposal to restrict them and ban retail sales.

The status of the state Department of Pesticide Regulation’s effort to limit the availability of rodenticides was reported by Jeff Dolf, the county’s agricultural commissioner, at the July 23 supervisors meeting.

The state is proposing to regulate products that contain the four active ingredients found in commonly-sold second generation rodenticides. That category includes highly toxic anti-coagulants that linger in body tissues, potentially harming predators that eat poisoned rodents.

Dolf said the state released its regulatory plan the previous week and a public comment period on it ends Sept. 3. Second generation rodenticides are being targeted for restriction because they’re “responsible for most of the contamination and the poisoning deaths of wildlife,” he continued.

His office would regulate rodenticides as restricted materials if the state’s plan is approved. Dolf told supervisors that under that scenario, possession and use of the rodenticides would require certification, effecting “oversight from our agency on the use of these materials.”

The rodenticides are mostly accessed at stores now but the new regulatory scenario would remove them from the retail market. “It wouldn’t entirely eliminate the problem but it would go a long ways toward reducing the misuse of these pesticides,” said Dolf.

He added, “We know what we’re talking about — we’re talking about illegal use by marijuana growers.”

What Dolf described as the “off-label” use of rodenticides in marijuana grows has been identified as a threat to a variety of wildlife. Those who use the poisons responsibly will continue to be able to do so, but will have to either hire a specialist to apply them or do it themselves after being certified.

The latter option is available to agricultural producers who would be permitted to use restricted materials through Dolf’s office. That process would require “site-specific information” and application review, he said.

“It would give us an opportunity to do a pre-site inspection and look at where these things are going to be used,” he continued.

With the added supervision of his office, use of the rodenticides in livestock operations will be allowed for the first time,” said Dolf.

Supervisor Mark Lovelace pointed out that marijuana growers won’t be able to use rodenticides legally because marijuana cultivation doesn’t count as an agricultural use under Department of Pesticide Regulation standards.

Dolf confirmed that and said, “If they were to try and represent themselves as producing a legitimate agricultural commodity, we don’t have to accept them on their word.” He reiterated that with the restricted materials category, pre-site inspections can be required.

“Through that level of oversight we will hopefully catch anybody who might be trying to improperly acquire, through our permitting process, these rodenticides,” said Dolf.

Asked what would be done about rodenticides bought out of state and used in California, Dolf said his office will be authorized to impose fines if it discovers unregulated possession and use.

Whether on silver screen or in symphony hall, it can be a curse to be type cast. So consummately did Bach play the part of a composer of learned fugues that his lighter side is too often ignored. The many operas of Haydn are forgotten because his chief role in history is as master of the symphony and the string quartet.

No one suffers from this pigeonholing more than Domenico Scarlatti, who, as a historical actor plays the part of Mr. Sonata. Yet history can be forgiven for typecasting him in that role since he wrote some 555 endlessly varied, challenging, and always-unexpected sonatas in this genre, one he virtually invented. These pieces will keep you fit of mind and finger with their tremendous humor and frequent hand-crossing razzle-dazzle.

It’s fitting that some of the easier sonatas are staples of children’s piano lessons to this day, as Scarlatti composed many of them for his royal patron and pupil, Princess Maria Barbara of Portugal, whom he began to teach when she was just eight years old. Scarlatti had left Rome in 1719 at the age of 34 to become director of music in Lisbon. He would remain in the service of the Portuguese and later — after Maria Barbara’s 1729 marriage to Ferdinand of Spain — the Spanish monarchies until his death in 1757.

Scarlatti was born in Naples, capital of opera, and his father, Alessandro, was a leading composer of theatrical music. The elder Scarlatti had great plans for his talented son to attain greatness in this most lucrative and fame-making genre. After further studies in Venice and early failures in Naples on account of his inexperience, Domenico made his way to Rome where his rising celebrity ultimately led to him being poached by the Portuguese.

Yes, the riches of Scarlatti’s sonatas will always mark his most valued contribution to the music culture of his own time and ours. But is important to remember that the father’s desire to create a master operatic composer was fulfilled, even if the son’s career soon led, literally, in another direction.

Just how good Domenico Scarlatti was at the opera game is made clear in a vibrant new recording of his intermezzo La Dirindina by Ars Lyrica Houston issued on the Sono Luminus label. One of the premier early music ensembles in this or any other country, Ars Lyrica was founded 15 years ago by the harpsichordist, organist, and musicologist Matthew Dirst, who has recently seen the publication not just of this disc but also of an important new book on the reception of J. S. Bach’s keyboard music. The range and quality of Dirst’s creations are as remarkable as the relentless ease with which he brings it all off.

While impressing musical Grand Tourists to the Eternal City as a keyboard virtuoso (visitors that included his close contemporary Handel), Scarlatti also composed more than a dozen stage works. Sadly, most are lost, but among the survivors is the wickedly funny La Dirindina. Intermezzos were the sitcoms of the operatic age, the name deriving from the insertion of their two short halves into the two intermissions separating the three acts of serious operas. Intermezzos typically lasted 30-40 minutes in total, serious operas three or four hours. Outings to the theater in Scarlatti’s day were long ones, though reports vary as to how much of the evening’s music was listened to amidst the audience’s feasting, gambling, gossiping, and all-purpose debauching — especially as indulged in by the wealthiest of the patrons eonsconed in their loges.

The intermezzo provided not only comic relief for the serious opera that surrounded it with tales of gods and heroes, but it also proved an endlessly adaptable medium for satirizing the excesses and vanities of operatic culture. The rich, powerful and bored have always been good making fun of themselves — all this fun and frivolity to be enjoyed on the assumption that their position atop society will only be strengthened by such titillating self-flagellation.

The hilarious comedy of Scarlatti’s La Dirindina targets the opera singers and their trainers first, with plenty of collateral damage being inflicted on their rich backers. Scarlatti’s intermezzo premiered along with his now-lost opera Ambleta in Rome in 1715. This stinging little farce is joyously and ingeniously self-referential, most flamboyantly so in the first of the two scenes, when the castrato cad, Liscione, makes an allusion to red scarves — “Scarlatti” in Italian — a word play squeezed for all it is worth by the score and delivered with relish by the young tenor, Joseph Gaines. This is followed by a reference to gambling, supposedly a cherished vice of the composer himself.

Liscione is trying to pry the impressionable soprano, Dirindina, from the clutches of the third member of the intermezzo’s cast, the lecherous old music master Don Carissimo. While appearing at first hearing to be an ingénue, Dirindina, is in fact clever and calculating. It’s an ambiguity captured by mezzosoprano Jamie Barton’s voice, which is buoyed by insouciant youthfulness, but is also rich, knowing, and powerful. Having a tenor sing the role of a castrato, whose voices never made it down below alto thanks to the barbaric practice of pre-pubescent castration, comically confuses expectations: there is real testosterone in Gaines’ singing, assured and mocking.

This disconnect between voice and body fuels the hilarious conclusion of the farce in which the eavesdropping Don Carissimo dupes himself into believing that his young charge, Dirindina, has been impregnated by the castrato. Having begun with a singing lesson in which Brian Shircliffe’s Don Carissimo has great fun with gender-bending falsetto, the intermezzo ends with a post-modern shotgun marriage.

The rollicking libretto by Girolamo Gigli includes is stuffed with sexual innuendo and throws in a chuckle about infanticide to boot. Not surprisingly, therefore, the text was quickly censored by the papal authorities, who harbored a conflicted attitude towards the opera typical of prelates and prudes: when it comes to degenerate music, the best approach is public censure and private consumption. Undeterred, the crafty Gigli had the script published outside of Rome beyond the reach of the censors, and the script immediately became what Hollywood would call a hot property. Scarlatti’s setting was a smash for its flair at capturing the lusts and follies of his comic characters. His composerly palette has many tints: from bright melodic shapes to glinting metrical gestures to muted and unctuous chromaticism. The unbuttoned sensuality of the intermezzo is urged to colorful life by Dirst’s brisk and incisive direction.

After the rampant, radiant charade of Dirindina, the disc closes with Scarlatti’s cantata Pur nell sonno, a text by the most famous librettist of the age, Pietro Metastasio, devoted to the theme of embittered love. The sinfonia’s first movement alternates between restive polyphony and flirting trills; the second movement is a minuet, noble and pained. The almost manic oscillations of this instrumental introduction set the stage for the despairing, love-plagued hope of opening aria:

At least in sleep my beloved comes to comfort my pains.

Love, if you are just, make my dreams come true, or don’t let me wake at all.

The object of this obsession is the mythical Phyllis and the singer of this soprano cantata would have originally been a high-voiced castrato. Céline Ricci’s voice has the texture, nuance, and power to evoke the great singers of Metastasio’s era, and she brings the emotional darkness of the piece to searing life, most dramatically in the raging coloratura of the closing aria.

On this disc Ars Lyrica gives us the operatic Scarlatti — Domenico not Alessandro — ranging from the knee slapping to the suicidal. A pair of four movement sonatas fills out these dramatic explorations. Who could or should resist the delights of Mr. Sonata?

These pieces are done not at the solo keyboard — though Dirst is a masterful Scarlatti player — but on mandolin with harpsichord continuo. The first note of Richard Savino’s mandolin blooming above the dulcet chords of the lute-stop of Dirst’s harpsichord brought a smile not just to my face, but also to my soul. Never have I heard more gracious and charming music-making, sunny even in a minor key. These mini-operas of intermezzo and cantata, and the sonatas that adorn them all demonstrate Scarlatti’s genius for finding beauty in both light and shadow.

David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Bach’s Feet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.

Oralia Maceda, an immigrant mother from Oaxaca, asked the obvious last weekend in Fresno. At a meeting, talking about the Senate immigration reform bill, she wanted to know why Senators would spend almost $50 billion on more border walls, yet show no interest in why people leave home to cross them.

This Congressional blindness will get worse as immigration reform moves to the House. It condemns US immigration policy to a kind of punitive venality, making rational political decisions virtually impossible. Yet alternatives are often proposed by migrant communities themselves, and reflect a better understanding of global economics and human rights.

Rufino Dominguez, who now works for the Oaxacan state government, describes what Maceda knows from experience: “NAFTA forced the price of corn so low it’s not economically possible to plant a crop anymore. We come to the US to work because there’s no alternative.” The reason for the fall in prices, according to Timothy Wise of the Global Development and Environment Institute, is that corn imports to Mexico from the US rose from 2,014,000 to 10,330,000 tons from 1992 to 2008.

Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year NAFTA took effect, and 811,000 tons in 2010. This primarily benefited one company, Smithfield Foods, which now sells over 25% of all the pork in Mexico. Mexico, however, lost 120,000 hog-farming jobs alone. The World Bank says extreme rural poverty jumped from 35% to 55% after NAFTA took effect due to “the sluggish performance of agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and falling real agricultural prices.”

Growing poverty fueled migration. In 1990 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the US. In 2008 12.67 million did, around 11% of all Mexicans. About 5.7 million were able to get a visa, but another seven million couldn’t, and came nevertheless. “If our families needed to eat and survive, most of us would cross borders too, despite the risks.” In fact, this is what the ancestors of many US.citizens did.

And if walls could have stopped this wave of people seeking survival, they would have already. Instead, hundreds of people die on the border very year, a number that increases with the rising number of agents and walls.

The $47 billion for border enforcement in the Senate bill will boost income for contractors and companies selling drones and helicopters. Border Patrol agents will become a familiar sight in cities far from the border. But this will not stop migration, nor is it intended to.

The Senators envision a new system in which hundreds of thousands of people will cross the border as “guest workers.” US immigration policy rejected that idea in 1965 — that it should supply vulnerable workers at low wages to employers. Replacing the old bracero guest worker program of the 1950s, we set up a system to help families reunite in the US, with labor rights and freedom of movement.

The Senators are moving backwards. In their scheme, the price of legalization for some undocumented people is programs that peg guest worker wages close to the minimum. This will impact other workers as well, including immigrants already here. They restrict family visas and give more work visas to employers. In the House, conservative Representatives would scrap legalization entirely. They only want guest worker programs, with more walls and punishment to force migrants into them.

Neither the Senators nor the Congress members will do anything to give Oaxacans a choice — to leave or to stay home. Yet that’s what Maceda and her organization, the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (F(OB), believe is a big part of the answer.

Their alternative is to renegotiate NAFTA to end the causes of displacement. They would give residence visas to the undocumented already here, and end today’s mass deportations and firings of thousands of workers. Future migration, they say, should provide visas to families, not labor recruiters for Wal-Mart or growers. “We want to be treated as more than cheap labor,” Maceda says.

FIOB is a unique organization because it’s made up both of migrants in the US and people in the towns from which they come. It held discussions in both places — among migrants here and migrant-sending communities in Mexico.

“We have to change the debate from one in which immigration is presented as a problem to a debate over rights,” concludes Gaspar Rivera Salgado, a UCLA professor and former FIOB coordinator. “We want rights for migrants in the US and at the same time development that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity — the right to not migrate. Both are part of the solution.”

But Rivera Salgado cautions that walls and contract labor are no answer, nor is making towns in Oaxaca dependent on guest worker programs to survive. “The right to stay home, to not migrate, has to mean more than the right to be poor, or the right to go hungry. Choosing whether to stay home or leave only has meaning if each choice can provide a meaningful future, in which we are all respected as human beings.”

Coming in 2013 from Beacon Press: “The Right To Stay Home: Ending Forced Migration and the Criminalization of Immigrants.” “Displaced, Unequal And Criminalized — A Report for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation on the political economy of immigration is here. For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org.

When I was growing up south of Los Angeles, anything north of, say, Santa Barbara seemed like Alaska. Or, almost. Certainly up above San Francisco was mysterious and exotic. On first visits, way up around the Mendocino Coast things appeared truly beautiful, gorgeous unto being paradisiacal. Looking out from any coastal bluff, the vast blues of sea and sky spread out, endless rolling green and brown hillsides and canyons dropping down after miles of moist redwood valleys. We’d drive around aimlessly and just camp wherever we wound up, in “real campgrounds” but more often just pulled off next to the road in any spot with a view, or down on a remote beach. It all seemed a sort of shangri-la, populated by earthy, hip happy healthy humans and vast open spaces full of other exotic species living in harmony. 

Little did I know.

That was the 1970s, when the vanguard of back-to-landers and cannabis agriculturalists found their spots and built that much-abused word “community” out of widespread hideouts. By the 1980s, though, some things were starting to tatter.

Pedestrian crime in Willits is on the rise. Two cases have come to court recently, and both the footpads were found guilty. One was Sara Grusky, the Willits Bypass protester who walked on the wrong side of the street and had to be wrestled to the ground and hogtied by a CHP tag team. 

The other criminal biped, Harlan Williams, started out on foot, but also eluded a Willits Police Department officer on a bicycle.

ROBERT TOMPKINS, 74, has died at his Philo home. Mr. Tompkins is survived by his wife, Shirley, and his son, Chris Tompkins, owner-operator of Northwest Tire and Oil, Philo.

Having gorged unsustainably on the public sector of Michigan’s largest city for decades, having left empty schools, libraries, and office buildings like gnawed bones scattered about a massacre, having erased whole city services leaving only a skeletal repressive police force, and still seeking guaranteed returns on their bonds, now Detroit’s creditors, and the remaining large corporations in the Detroit metro region are finally turning to the last source of public wealth left, the city’s pension funds.

Detroit’s creditors hope to force pensioners to give up their meager allowances so that the interest and principle due on their bonds, notes, and paper will provide maximal value. The region’s wealthy corporations want to keep their tax benefits and subsidies; tax increases on Michigan’s wealthy are the only potential source of local funds to keep Detroit afloat. The state’s affluent residents and its wealthy corporations (yes, there are plenty) tell themselves that their fortunes have nothing to do with the black metropolis around which they all orbit, inside which the region’s capital was incubated and accumulated for 100 years by several million workers. The state’s governor and legislature act as if Michigan’s 276 cities and 83 counties existed in isolation, in perfectly sealed silos having sprung mature and endowed with resources from the ether, with no economic dependencies between them. Thus no state bailout for Detroit is coming, no revenue sharing, no tax revenues from the exurbs.

No doubt the bondholders will also experience a loss when the endgame for Detroit finally arrives in federal bankruptcy court. The truth is that the city of Detroit today does simply lack the fiscal base from which to raise the funds necessary to pay its massive debt and its pension obligations while sustaining the desert-scape of municipal services that’s left. The piranha-like feast of the bondholders on the fiscal carcass of Detroit has been insanely unsustainable for over a decade, and most of the lenders realized the riskiness of their loans. Hungry still for every last morsel of social wealth, capital is maneuvering to ensure itself the best spot at the table. Mastication of Detroit’s pension obligations is one of the final rites of the ritual slaughter of a once great city, a hub of global manufacturing, and epicenter of multi-racial working class Americana. Motown is being ground down.

In this clamorous battle between Detroit’s creditors and public employees too many reporters and commentators have made the mistake of calling workers’ pension obligations a “debt” of the city. Pension obligations are not debt in the same way that bonded indebtedness is. True, both debts and pension obligations are relationships, institutions with thousands of years of history, but pensions are profoundly moral obligations between governments and their people. Debts are financial transactions between creditors and borrowers.

From the beginning of the American Republic, debts have been treated as less than sacred. Bankruptcy laws in America are among the most liberal in the world, allowing debtors to discharge these burdens in insolvency and start anew. Debt has always been understood as a potentially usurious and deforming scourge. Pension obligation, in contrast, have become more sacred over time. The opposite of a debt, the pension obligation has been thought of as the product of a virtuous savings that is liberating.

Only in the past few decades have pensions come under withering attack from fiscal conservatives with any success. Populist, radicals, and even liberal elites have succeeded multiple times in American history in attacking the morality of debt. One of the least ambiguous words of collective joy comes to us from the repudiation of debts in the ancient world — jubilee. The repudiation of pension obligations would never be associated with dancing in the streets for obvious reasons.

Partly this is due to the origins of debt and the pension. Debt emerges as a tool of the powerful to finance states and later business enterprises. Credit remains available mostly to monarchs, but some societies see the proliferation of debt among their merchant and artisan classes. Only toward the end of the 20th Century does debt become available to the common “consumer.” The pension emerges in struggle as a concession from the ruling classes to the masses, a required payment lest the subjects rebel and sever the heads of their masters.

Debt and pension obligations are intimately intertwined in one another. Early states developed the cultural mores and legal codes governing debt when emperors and monarchs raised funds for war and colonial expansion. Their warriors, indispensable in expansionary phases of conquest and colonization, and ever-dangerous after victory or defeat, had their allegiance to the king bought in part with a pension. Imperial bureaucratic states later adopted the absolutist king’s pension and applied it to their more impressive armies, but the modern states were seeking the same pre-modern loyalty of the soldiers, active and retired. From the Revolutionary War onward the citizen soldiers of the United States had their allegiance to the republic secured with pensions while the young federal government borrowed from continental Europe the funds needed to beat the British.

The pension is not a debt owed by state to its laborers. It is an obligation of a different quality founded not in a market contract, but in a social contract. Whereas states and empires might rise and fall on their ability to obtain credit and pay debts, far deeper faults threatening the existence of civilizations and cultures will quake and rupture if the moral obligations embodied in pensions are betrayed. To repudiate a debt is to upset a bank or a hedge fund, just a couple dozen men in suites in a few dozen cities who will still know where their next meal is coming from. They will be upset to learn that their profits have been cut. To repudiate a pension obligation is to upset a class, to threaten the lives of a multitude, to send thousands of workers into a struggle for survival.

The contemporary pension system in America grew out of the Great Depression and the New Deal, and it fundamentally transformed capitalism and the state. Massachusetts was the first state to offer a pension to every public employee in 1911, but even by 1923, when most states had enacted pension legislation, most public employees in the US remained uncovered, responsible for their own provisions after the end of their work life. Throughout the 1920s financial and corporate forces fought and undermined the expansion of the pension system, opposing what this naturally would accomplish — a redistribution of income and wealth from the elite to the masses. The success of the owners of capital in preventing the spread of pension obligations beyond a few privileged civil service workers was one of the factors that caused the Great Depression. Without pensions —in addition to low wages, a regressive tax regime, rights to unionize, and lacking other basic social and economic rights— America’s working class majority fell behind and lived on the precipice of disaster while the elite hoarded fortunes previously unimagined. Income and wealth inequality widened and a crisis of over-production broke the system.

In 1929 the fine print of this draconian social contract was enacted when the US economy collapsed in a deflationary spiral. Millions were thrown into poverty, and lacking a social safety net, of which pensions would have counted for a lot, this poverty led to starvation, mass homelessness, and early death for countless working class elders. More than the legitimacy of the US was at stake. The legitimacy of capitalism was questioned.

Labor insurgency during and after the Great Depression was a catalyst for change. Between 1940 and 1970 the number of pension plans, both public and private, grew rapidly in the US. And once again war and empire and the needs of the United States and the monopoly corporations closely tied to the government to obtain legitimacy and obedience led to the extension of social welfare benefits for millions of Americans during and after World War II. The era of pension fund capitalism took off.

Pensions save the wealth produced by labor in vast pools of securities, in effect giving workers claims upon the future dividends and interest generated from corporations, states, and banks. Today most public employees, federal, state, and local, are vested in pensions. Many of these retirement systems are defined benefit, providing an absolute moral commitment of the state to the security of its workers.

Certain segments of capital also found a way to profit from this democratic transformation of the social contract. Pension fund management is a vast industry today. Ironically some of the greatest villains of financial capitalism find themselves beneficiaries of the pension fund boom; private equity investors obtain the balance of their funds from contributions of “limited partners,” the largest of which are public employee pension systems. Corporations today find the the largest shares of of their stock held by pensions as long-term investments, although this trend has been reversed in the last few decades as more volatile privatized retirement schemes like 401k plans and mutual funds replace the defined benefit pension’s indexed stock portfolio as the big force in equities markets.

Regardless of what a few financial companies have gained from the pension revolution, most of the financial and corporate institutions have remained hostile to the social contract embodied in the pension obligation, particularly the public employee pensions over which they can exercise little control. Financial and corporate coalitions in virtually all cities and states seek to dismantle public employee pensions because they require contributions from the employer. In a direct sense the employer is the city, county, or state, but ultimately the employer is the society at large, of which the financial institutions and corporations are a part. Capital benefits from the services of the state, from the infrastructure and services provided by its laborers, but at the same time each corporation and every bank hopes to extract itself from any obligation to support social investments. They want their cake, and to eat it too.

In Michigan dozens of large corporations and banks, many of which are physically located in suburban towns, benefit from the physical and social infrastructure provided by the city of Detroit. But capital continually seeks to avoid paying for these services. The suburbanization of industry and the flight of the affluent workforce from Detroit into surrounding exurbs that the central city was unable to annex was itself a geographic ploy by the better-off to avoid paying for the provision of public goods. Detroit shows us what the logical end point of this neoliberal tendency looks like.

Public employee pensions have been attacked in virtually every city and state since the 1980s. That attack accelerated in the Great Recession as corporate elites and fiscal conservatives regrouped along with neoliberal democrats to plan the next set of “reforms” aimed at public employee pension systems. In most places these reforms will include increased employee contributions that will act as a wage cut by forcing more of the worker’s current income into future savings. This simple reduction of public employee labor costs will consolidate regressive tax systems and tax breaks benefiting affluent communities and corporations. Other reforms will involve scaling back pension benefits for new hires by guaranteeing fewer benefits after longer periods of vesting at higher contribution rates. These tweaks all add up to a slow withdrawal of the moral obligation of the state and capital to sustain the welfare of labor. At its extreme the agenda of the financial and corporate elite will be to completely abolish the pension obligation where they can, and to replace it with a precarious and austere new social contract. In Detroit they are approaching this extreme.

Darwin Bond-Graham, a contributing editor to CounterPunch, is a sociologist and author who lives and works in Oakland. His essay on economic inequality in the “new” California economy appears in the July issue of CounterPunch magazine. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

“Go west, young man.” — Horace Greeley

When Peg-Leg Barlow and his mule came down from his prospects up under Colorado’s Great Divide, he wasn’t old Peg-Leg anymore. “I’ve been beautified!” he cried while pushing through the swinging saloon doors like they was braided feathers. “Mine eyes have beheld the glory! Everybody drinks on me!”

“‘Men have forgotten this truth,’ said the fox. ‘But you must not forget it. You become responsible forever for what you have tamed’.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“The baby foxes are here again,” says Marcia calling to me from her studio across the hallway from my office.

We have a large old plum tree growing on the north side of our house, and in this first year of our residency the tree has gifted us with several hundred sweet red plums, which are ambrosia to deer, appealing to squirrels, and irresistible to a trio of baby foxes who visit the tree daily, scampering around in the branches like monkeys and going way out on the spindly limbs to get at the fruit. There is nothing I would rather do than stand in our living room and watch these tiny foxes, aptly called kits, climbing around in our plum tree doing their utmost to reach the sugary orbs.

Speaking of aptly named, the little canids have inspired me to read a bit about foxes, and among the many things I’ve learned about these delightful creatures is that one of the names for a group of foxes is an earth of foxes. Other expressions for gangs of foxes are a skulk of foxes, a leash of foxes, and a troop of foxes, but I much prefer an earth of foxes for the implication of what the earth once was and might be again if only humans would stop fracking and over-populating and despoiling everything.

Where did the expression an earth of foxes come from? According to my trusty Oxford English Dictionary, one of the definitions of earth is the underground lair of an animal. Since a fox den can also be called an earth, and since almost all groups of foxes are composed of family members, it would follow that a group of foxes emerging from the same earth within the earth might poetically be called an earth of foxes.

“All the intelligence and talent in the world can’t make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.” — Willa Cather

Curious about Willa Cather’s use of the word sport in the above quote, I looked up the word and found she used sport to mean a surprising mutation, an animal that deviates markedly from its parent stock.

We have been trying to think of a good name for our two-acre homestead ever since we moved here nine months ago, but nothing struck a loud and unanimous chord until the baby foxes arrived and we realized there is an earth nearby where the little cuties were born. Given that our house and land sit in something of a hollow, we have settled on the name Fox Hollow, which, if not particularly original, sounds just right to us.

Speaking of foxes in the plum tree, Marcia has now produced twenty jars of delectable plum jam from plums that the foxes, squirrels, and deer were unable to reach before I picked them. The labels on the jars read Fox Hollow Plum Jam, July 2013, Marcia & Todd. What a tree! Who knew? Well, the deer and the squirrels and the foxes knew, and now we know, too.

“It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.” — Andy Warhol

When I was a little boy and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I usually answered cowboy or dump truck driver. I pronounced cowboy gowboy and dump truck drive dump twuck dwivoo. When I was twelve-years-old I saw Jacques Cousteau’s then-amazing movie The Silent World and became so enamored of Monsieur Cousteau and his oceanic adventuring that I decided to become a marine biologist. By sixteen I knew without a doubt that I wanted to be a writer musician actor movie director, but in order to appease my parents who disapproved of such frivolity I told them and their inquiring friends that I wanted to be an anthropologist. I then dutifully majored in Anthropology during my brief stay in college, though I spent most of my time at UC Santa Cruz playing basketball, throwing the Frisbee, and writing poetry and short stories.

When I left the womb of academia and parental support, I began to write novels and practice the art of screenwriting. I was an avid moviegoer and considered seeing movies on the big screen a fundamental part of my life, not only because I was an aspiring moviemaker, but because the great movies of the 1960’s and 70’s were exciting and inspiring myths that helped fuel the counter culture in that revolutionary time. A Thousand Clowns, If, King of Hearts, Coming Home and dozens of other popular motion pictures gave us fascinating stories and compelling visions of men and women stepping away from the suffocating conventions of the old world order into much less restricted lives, an ethos that rejected militarism and stifling sameness and sexism and racism, while promising…well, we would find out!

I was determined to carry on the great tradition of humanist film artists who used this most powerful medium to show us possible ways we might live and relate to each other more lovingly and creatively as we roamed the cosmos on spaceship earth. Movies, the ones I loved and the ones I aspired to make, were heart-opening visions of personal change and resurrection starring all kinds of different kinds of people shaking off the powerful controls of their selfish lizard brains to escape the clutches of our violent greedy lizard-brained society and become emotionally, psychically and sexually liberated lovers with great senses of humor who walked lightly and tenderly upon the blessed earth.

As you undoubtedly have noticed, the lizard-brained humanoids who now control mainstream media as well as most of the side streams, no longer allow movies modeling social revolution and sharing the wealth and living lightly on the earth and rejecting materialism and embracing gender and racial equality into your nearby multiplex or onto your television screen or computer screen or phone screen. No, the movies we are allowed to see today are the quantum opposite of those movies we went to in the 1960’s and 70’s and inspired many of us to break away from the deadly gray sameness and stultifying hierarchies that ruled America in the 1950’s.

When my first novel Inside Moves was published in 1978 and was subsequently made into a film, I made the erroneous assumption that more of my novels and screenplays would soon become movies, too. But while two other works of mine, Forgotten Impulses and Louie & Women came tantalizingly close to being filmed, nothing more of mine has ever (yet) reached the silver screen or any other sort of screen.

However, despite the twenty-year delay in selling my growing stack of novels and screenplays, I have continued to write scripts and books I think will make fabulous movies. Indeed, just last week, hungering as I often do for a good new movie, and finding nothing of the kind to eat, I put on a little film festival and read five of my screenplays in three days, watching those movies on my mind screen as I turned the pages. Wow! They were exactly the kinds of movies I long to see. No wonder I wrote them.

Having made a multi-year study of the current movie scene by watching movie trailers on my computer, while skipping hundreds of trailers for horror movies, I know perfectly well why none of my scripts and stories have yet to attract anyone with sufficient clout and cash to make them. My movies are not about super heroes, vampires, zombies, murderers, gangsters, morons, aliens, bimbos, or materialistic narcissists and amoral sociopaths and their hapless victims. They do not feature painfully shallow dialogue, car chases, massive gunfire and explosions, the constant objectification of women, gratuitous violence, or toilet jokes. Instead, they model challenging funny sad dangerous transits through and away from the emptiness of self-serving separateness into the emotional and spiritual fullness that manifests when we share our wealth, whatever our wealth may consist of.

Our plum tree would make a perfect recurring symbol in a movie I long to see. The leafless branches in winter giving way to the nascent buds of early spring leading to the fabulous eruption of blooms followed by the coming of the leaves, the fruit, the green orbs turning yellow and finally red, the myriad creatures sharing the fabulous bounty of the earth—a little fox balanced on the branches at the very top of the tree and dropping plums down to his runty sibling—thunder sounding in the distance on this fabulous earth of foxes.

Todd Walton’s novel Inside Moves is now available in a beautiful new paperback edition at Gallery Books in Mendocino and at Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah. Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

On July 31, 1703 Daniel Dafoe (nee Foe) was placed in the punishment stocks in front of London’s Temple Bar for satirically defending Dissenters in his writing. In the early 20th century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes proudly wore the moniker “The Great Dissenter.” We’ve slid down a long, slippery slope since the days of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and mainstream reporters like Dan Rather turning President Nixon’s own words around to sarcastically imply that the leader of the free world was running from grand jury and congressional investigations.

Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. So there is a new Royal Baby! An event that was part historical “happening,” part nativity play, part soap opera, and one that was greeted with hearty congratulations from leading politicians and dignitaries the world over, including Iran, Russia, Scottish nationalists, and royal-watching Valley folks. With all of the hullabaloo surrounding the birth of Prince George Alexander Louis, third in line to the British throne, as someone with “special connections” to The Palace, I feel the need to actually put into perspective what this means.

With the exception of a few heat waves in mid July that never lasted more than a couple days in the mid nineties, the unusually cool summer continues in the Ohio valley. Sterile clouds sail overhead in the afternoons, followed by starry nights with low humidity and temperatures down in the fifties, weather more typical of summer on the Northwest Coast. No complaints from me or most of the other vendors at the Saturday Farmers’ Market in Bloomington. In a typical July the night time lows might never have dropped below 75° the whole month, with a thick, muggy atmosphere that renders showers and baths impotent.

The breezy, Boonville-like days have allowed the luxury of sleeping in until nine or ten, not exactly what most people picture as the life of farmers. Jetta wears a sweatshirt with a hood dangling between her shoulder blades, pulling her knees under the front while smoking a cigarette on the sofa in the mornings, six days a week, though on Saturday we have to awaken before dawn in order to make the hour drive up the slalom of Hoosier uplands and pull in the market parking lot by 7:30, after which point enterprising farmers are allowed to claim our spot if we haven’t called to say an emergency came up and we would be late. This past Saturday morning we were unable to make the phone call, and we had no idea what time it was because we had no standard clocks in the house except the unplugged old school one on the wall that is forever pointing to 4:20. We were unable to telephone the market master because Jetta or her toddler of less than two years had misplaced the cell phone, our only source of information as to what time it was.

Sixty years ago this week the “forgotten war” came to an inconclusive end. 

The Korean war was perfectly mistimed for me. On 25 June 1950, the day I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles as a GI Bill student, North Korean troops in their Soviet-made tanks smashed across the 38th Parallel that was born as the bastard child of the political division of Korea between Russia and the US at the end of second world war.

This artificial boundary, splitting the Korean peninsula in two, was meant to keep the Russians from taking the whole country after Japan surrendered. The line had been hastily drawn with pencil using a National Geographic map by two junior American officers in President Truman’s White House. But five years later, supported by Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, the North Koreans under Kim Il-sung had decided the time was ripe to force the reunification of Korea under communist rule. And within days communist troops overran the surprised ROK (Republic of Korea) soldiers and entered the capital, Seoul.

A genocidal three-year war followed.

Almost all of the ex-second world war soldiers I knew were, like me, scared to death of being called back to fight in a war nobody but psychopaths wanted. Most of us were vague even about where Korea was located in the Pacific. We certainly didn’t know the ins and outs of Korean history or that fighting between North and South was just another violent chapter a long-brewing civil war whose roots lay in Japan’s brutal 19th century occupation of a country that geographically seemed a mere appendix to China. But what was obvious even to the most ignorant ex-GI was that this new war in the Pacific came out of a cold war realpolitik that pitted Stalin’s Soviet Union against the United States in a constant game of Armageddon chicken.  Only the year, before Stalin and Truman had gone eyeball to eyeball when the Soviets blockaded Berlin, a near-act of war.

General Omar Bradley, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, called Korea “the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy”. Nevertheless, once the North invaded, the world was brought to the very precipice of all-out nuclear war.

President Truman called it a UN-sponsored “police action” even though 90% of the troops on our side were American (with a smaller but real participation by Britain, Canada, Turkey, Australia and New Zealand.) In three years (1950-53) of frustrating trench combat reminiscent of Flanders and the Somme, fought on a miserable barren lunar landscape of hills forever taken and retaken, refugees and prisoners-of-war were machine-gunned indiscriminately. Roughly 43,000 Americans (counting MIAs) died in theater, with Korean casualties on both sides well into the millions.

The savagery was unphotogenic, unromantic and uncivilized. General Curtis LeMay, boss of the strategic air command, boasted that his bombers may have killed 20% of the population of Korea. Ground commander Matthew Ridgeway, who liked having his photo taken wearing primed hand grenades, said he wanted to “‘wipe out all life’” in enemy territory. In effect, this meant that all of Korea, North and South, friend or foe, became a free fire zone.

It predicted Vietnam.

The overall Pacific commander was the half-mad General Douglas MacArthur whose intelligence aide, General Charles Willoughby, had quite open Nazi sympathies. (MacArthur jovially called him “my pet fascist”.) MacArthur and some of President Truman’s generals urged that atomic bombs be used against the communists, especially when MacArthur’s prediction that the Chinese would never enter the war proved fatally stupid. In fact, in “Operation Hudson Harbor“, USAF B-29 bombers, using dummy nuclear or conventional bombs, seriously practiced raining nuclear death on North Korea before saner heads prevailed especially when Ike Eisenhower succeeded Truman.

Today it’s hard to imagine the hysteria that infected the nation, especially after the North crossed the 38th parallel. Americans went temporarily nuts. Senator Joe McCarthy told us that gay traitors in the US state department had deliberately “lost” China to Mao’s Reds. Ordinary dissent, like signing a petition or reading The Nation, was a KGB plot organized in the Kremlin. Liberals met behind drawn curtains, and friends stopped seeing friends. The mounting hysteria, interlaced with out-of-control homophobia and undercurrents of anti-Semitism, was a wet dream for the American right and a nightmare for the rest of us. Of course the “atomic spies” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had to be executed comme un exemple pour les autres.

The maverick journalist IF Stone claimed that the war began when Secretary of State Dean Acheson clumsily signaled to the North Koreans that the country was “not in our sphere of influence” thus implying the Reds could do as they damn well pleased. Perhaps more urgent, and threatening, to the North Koreans and their Chinese and Soviet backers, was the “Sunday punch” proposed by General Le May to drop 133 A-bombs on 70 Russian cities in a single massive first strike. (Le May is portrayed by George C Scott as the demented General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.)

Korea didn’t create America’s nationwide craziness for blacklisting, but it made blacklists more respectable and patriotic. All across the country as a direct result of Korean war fever thousands of teachers, factory workers, doctors, screenwriters and, God help them, genuine radicals were blackballed. My own pet fascists, door-stopping FBI agents I nicknamed Mutt and Jeff, after 30 June got more aggressive.

“Come on in, Clancy, and give us some names. Everybody’s doing it. Don’t be such a party-pooper – not while our boys are dying for freedom overseas.”

Hollywood was not slow to exploit the frenzy by churning out propaganda films like Retreat, Hell!, Steel Helmet and One Minute to Zero.  Around then I was fired and blacklisted from a movie studio where the boss cited the Korean War as one of the reasons.

And all through that last war year of 1953, as men and women died in massive numbers on both sides, US and North Korean armistice negotiators, neither willing to surrender an inch of bloody worthless frozen ground, took their own sweet time dawdling in the comfort of a heated “peace tent” at the abandoned village of Panmunjom.

In America, surviving soldiers came home to an embarrassed welcome or none at all. South Korea recovered to become a successful capitalist economy. North Korea paid for its war in a coin we’re all too familiar with.

Clancy Sigal is a screenwriter and novelist. His latest book is Hemingway Lives.