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I love cats; share my living space with two them. But I don't think they make good auto companions. Mine only travel in the car when they go see the vet, and they stay locked inside the carrier until we arrive no matter how loudly the protest.
Federal prosecutors on Wednesday charged a Michigan charity official with setting up a junket to Iraq paid for by the regime of Saddam Hussein, six months before the U.S. invasion, for three U.S. congressman, one of whom was Mike Thompson, a Democrat who represents the North Coast.
Thompson and two other Demoratic congressmen believed the trip was sponsored by Life for Relief and Development, a charity formed after the first Gulf War to fund humanitarian work in Iraq, which the official, Muthanna Al-Hanooti, managed.
Prosecutors now claim that Sadaam's intelligence agency paid for the trio's visit, and that Al-Hanooti received two million barrels of Iraqi oil for his work. The U.S. Justice Department says that none of the congressmen knew Sadaam was involved.
"Obviously, had there been any question at all regarding the sponsor of the trip or the funding, I would not have participated," Thompson said in a statement released to the Associated Press.
Former Fortuna Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Clifford Chapman alleges in an opinion piece published Monday in the Eureka Reporter that 4th District County Supervisor Bonnie Neely is trying to manipulate the 2nd District race, in which two challengers seek to unseat incumbent Roger Rodoni.
Chapman opines that because Meghan Vogel, who managed Neely's successful 2006 re-election campaign, Eureka City Councilman Chris Kerrigan, and some other progressive campaign consultants are working on behalf of the two challengers, Clif Clendenen and Estelle Fennell, Neely is pulling the strings like she's the Humboldt incarnation of William "Boss" Tweed.
How silly. But typical of the political goofiness that seems to have gripped Fortuna lately.
If Neely were indeed working overtime behind the scenes to oust Rodoni so she can at long last clench control of the county, as Chapman alleges (yes, he really does make that claim), why would she recruit two candidates to compete for the same (progressive) votes? If "Boss" Neely is as powerful and ambitious as Chapman opines, why would Kerrigan and Vogel be working against each other in rival campaigns? Does this make sense? Doesn't this actually favor Rodoni?
The truth is that Vogel, Kerrigan and David Jervis, whom Chapman also claims is one of Neely's minions, share political philosophies with Clendenen and Fennell. All three are veteran political consultants who have worked on progressive campaigns in the past. Why would it surprise Chapman that these three would be working on behalf of progessive candidates trying to unseat the most conservative member of the Board of Supervisors?
I know all three and I understand what motivates them. They don't rely on Bonnie Neely to tell them who to work for.
Maybe Chapman is really working for Boss Neely, who is on a mission to make Rodoni look bad by manipulating his ersatz supporters into writing kooky conspiracy theory opinion pieces for the local newspapers.
Apparently the thief who stole the Mocha Motion statuary (see two entries below) had second thoughts. The 200-lb surfer-themed talisman (if you will) that greets java seekers to the coffee drive-thru on upper Fourth Street was swiped early Thursday morning by a thief who cut through the rebar that held it to its base. Mocha Motion owner Greg Young started a publicity campaign by calling local radio stations and on Friday the Eureka Reporter had a story. Sometime Sunday morning, apparently, the thief returned the mascot in what appeared at first to be a body bag, according to Young, dropping it off behind the shop. Maybe the culprit suffered from thief's remorse, or maybe he figured it was too hot to hang onto.
I have empathy for those who are losing their jobs at Eureka-based Security National Servicing Corp. The company today announced it is forced to layoff 31 employees, 21 of them here in Eureka. It is tough to suddenly be unemployed in these times, when the economy is almost certainly mired in a recession.
For months speculation has swirled in local circles that Security National, the family-owned real estate loan servicing company held by Eureka movers and shakers Rob and Cherie Arkley, has suffered financially because of the subprime loan crisis. Because it's family owned SNSC doesn't have to disclose its finances to stockholders, like publicly held companies. SNSC has always been somewhat secretive, even mysterious, given the complicated securities market the company deals in.
How I understand it is that Rob Arkley is a pioneer of sorts in the field of buying distressed real estate loans then repackaging the loans and selling them to investors. My understanding is that this type of securities trading is relatively new, developed in the past two decades or so, and Arkley was super successful at it.
But now with so many Americans who got subprime loans unable to keep their homes because property values across the country finally peaked then started to decline, the market for this particular commodity has taken a severe beating. The collapse of this market crippled the nation's fifth largest investment bank, Bear Stearns. Lenders are foreclosing on subprime loan recipients on an unprecedented pace.
SN had employed 142 people in Eureka. A layoff of 21 employees is a 15 percent reduction of the company's local staff. That is far from catastrophic (unless you're one of the 21).
But looking forward, what does this mean for Arkley's Marina Center, the megacontroversial Home Depot-anchored development proposed for the Balloon Track in Eureka, which SN bought in 2006? It seemed right after the November 2006 election that this project was going to appear before the Eureka City Council very quickly. But for a year and a half now, there has been little news about the status of this project. There have been reports that various bureaucratic flies in the ointment -- such as expensive traffic mitigation measures demanded by Caltrans -- has slowed the momentum on this project. But that does not fully explain why this project seems to be completely stalled; many in the community expected to see this project come before the City Council early last year.
Then there is the Eureka Reporter, Arkley's expensive rival to the Times-Standard which most certainly is still a major drain on Security National's capital. Recently the newspaper scaled back its publication from seven to five days per week and cut its staff. Last month a jury in San Francisco awarded a multimillion dollar verdict to a newspaper who had sued a rival paper for unfair competition. That verdict makes the Eureka Reporter even more vulnerable to a lawsuit by the Times-Standard, in my opinion, though it remains to be seen if the verdict survives an appeal.
Personally, I would hate for the Eureka Reporter to disappear. I have come full circle on how I view the Reporter, a topic I hope to blog about in the next few days.
However if recent developments mean Arkley is wavering on whether to move forward with trying to force a Home Depot onto Eureka's waterfront, I believe the community benefits. Not only is a Home Depot on the waterfront a bad idea for Eureka for many reasons, the proposal itself has proven to be exceedingly divisive for this community.
Somebody stole the Mocha Motion surfboard mascot a couple of days ago, apparently while the coffee stop on 4th Street was open and the sun was shining. The Eureka Reporter's Emily Wilson has the story in today's paper.
Mocha Motion is the first java drive-through that tempts commuters on 4th Street/Highway 101 coming into town from the north. Until Thursday, Mocha Motion boasted a nifty surfboard effigy that was the work of a local artist. Apparently someone sawed through some rebar and separated the 200-lb statuary from its 500-lb based, sometime after 8 a.m. Talk about brazen.
There is a good description of a possible suspect vehicle. Hope they find the thief. Sometimes I wonder if Eureka suffers from mass kleptomania.
I touched on this in my roundup below. In the past week, the SF Chronicle and the Sac Bee have published staff-written stories about homeowners who are walking away from their mortgages. They are turning in their keys and ceding their deeds to their lenders, rather than suffer through foreclosure. Most of these people are the borrowers who got the types of loans that is now causing a financial crisis. They speculated, as did their lenders, that their homes would rise in value. But after the bottom fell out, they are over their heads with loans they can't possibly pay off; they owe more than their homes are worth.
I wonder if this is happening in Humboldt County.
Also, does the Bear Stearns meltdown have any bearing on the financial health of Eureka-based Security National? Neither company is a bank that makes home loans (Bear Stearns is an investment bank), but both companies invest in home mortgages or securities tied to home mortgages.
TS (John Driscoll): Prognosis negative for salmon fishing this season as fishery managers grapple with dearth of salmon in the rivers of the Great Valley.
ER (Melody Stone): Eureka ghost busters looking for haunted houses in Humboldt to study. Also being discussed at Fred's Humboldt Blog.
SF Chronicle: More California homeowners are choosing to walk away from their unmanageable mortgages, ceding their houses to lenders. Similar story in the Sac Bee earlier this week. I wonder if this is happening locally.
TS (Donna Tam): Authorities seize sizeable bounty of heroin in Arcata claimed to be worth $120,000.
ER (Nathan Rushton): U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredge vessel arrives in Humboldt Bay.
The organic/natural cosmetics/housecleaning products industry today is reeling a bit after a Los Angeles Times story revealed that nearly half of 100 products tested contain a suspected carcinogen. Forty-seven of the products tested by the Organic Consumers Association had detectable levels of 1,4-dioxane, which is known to cause cancer in lab animals and which the EPA suspects is a human carcinogen.
Some of the best-selling brands in the industry, including Kiss My Face, Alba, Seventh Generation and Nature's Gate, were among the offending products. And most if not all of these brands are sold at the Co-ops in Eureka and Arcata.
The compound is created during processing, it is not added. However, apparently the manufacturers of the products found to contain 1,4-dioxane use petrochemicals during processing, which is how the compund gets made.
Using petrochemicals to make a product then calling the product natural or organic is deceiving the consumer, in my opinion.
A Canadian electrical engineer has figured out how to keep boredom at bay during the dreary winters north of the 49th parallel. He's made a hobby of fashioning simple model rockets out of emptied soda bottles. With a bicycle pump, water, and a small amout of dish detergent, he can routinely launch these bottles fitted with homemade fins 200 meters high, more than 600 feet. One more advanced model that apparently included instruments reached 379 meters.
Googling soda bottle rockets, I found that this is apparently a popular hobby. You can buy kits. The Boy Scouts have teamed up with NASA to teach soda bottle rocketry. Apparently, the record height for a water-powered soda bottle rocket is 2,000 feet.
But the Canadian geek dad, Ken Schellenberg, has ambitions. His next project is an even more sophisticated soda-bottle rocket that he believes will reach 5 kilometers: about 3 miles up. Apparently his ultimate goal is to launch a bottle into orbit.
Watching the Dems relentlessly entwine John McCain with George W. Bush promises to be one of the more amusing spectacles of this year's presidential campaign. The first of these three vids -- McSame as Bush -- is already being aired on some TV stations in the East.
As had been anticipated, the Pacific Fishery Management Council, meeting in Sacramento, has decided to close salmon fishing seasons in California and Oregon, before most of them started. The decision was expected because of severely depleted chinook salmon runs in the Central Valley. The closures affect seven zones in Oregon and California. Final decisions on these closures will come next month, according to the Sacramento Bee.
The Bee also reported that one recreational zone off the mouth of the Klamath will remain open.
This video has been around for awhile. But it still makes me chuckle, given the obsession with blogging these days in Humboldt County.
I know this is a Bay Area story. But there are a lot of cyclists in Humboldt County. This is one reason why I don't own a road bike anymore.
A 27-year-old Santa Clara County Sheriff's deputy, with just 18 months on the job, swerved over onto the wrong side of the road into the path of a trio of cyclists who were out for a morning training ride in Cupertino. Two of the cyclists were killed. Another was badly injured. One of the dead cyclists was a champion triathlete.
The victims were riding with members of a bicycle racing team training on Stevens Canyon Road in preparation for a race next week. Apparently the deputy fell asleep at the wheel -- that's what he told witnesses -- just 4-1/2 hours into a 12-1/2 hour shift. His cruiser crossed over into the oncoming lane and struck the trio of cyclists at about 40 mph, according to the SF Chronicle.
Tragic.
An Oakland medical marijuana activist has started a school to train people to work in the medical marijuana industry. For $75, students at Oaksterdam University in downtown Oakland get lessons on everything from cannabis cultivation to the history of marijuana in the United States, including the status of current laws governing medicinal use.
The federal Drug Enforcement Administration's take: "There's nothing good that comes out of this. To put this on as some type of a university where people are learning something productive is, to me, just a farce."
Clarification: I'm not a cannabis user. But I strongly the support its medicinal use and I believe if tobacco and alcohol are legal substances it's a hypocrisy to criminalize the use of marijuana. For the latest in the discussion to reform drug laws in the United States, check out this entry at the North Coast Journal's blogthing.
Set your clocks forward tonight. Sorry, you're going to lose an hour of sleep. Daylight saving begins at 2 a.m. (Thanks for the correction, Capdiamont. I had originally stated time changes at midnight.)
This is the earliest (in the year) daylight saving time change since 1974. We don't set our clocks back to standard time until Nov. 2 this year. Since we're now spending most of the year in daylight saving time, doesn't that really make it standard time?
After dining at Liu's Chinese restaurant this afternoon I jay-walked across 4th Street, as I often do, to see what was new at Little Japan. It's that small store/market on the southwest corner of 4th and D streets that sells tea, sake, rice, tempura batter, miso, teapots, sushi makings, sushi sets -- everything Japanese, from food to paper lanterns. I was saddened to learn the store is closing, as soon as the owner, whose name I regretfully don't remember (I should, I'm in there enough), can sell out his inventory.
I love this store, you find things there that you can't find anyplace else north of Sonoma County. Right now he's marking 20 percent off everything. Before I knew what happened, I had spent $50 on several items, including a cast iron green tea teapot set and several bags of loose genmiacha (green tea with toasted brown rice). If you depend on this store for provisions that cost too much elsewhere or are just not available in Eureka, I would make an effort to get there in the next day or two.
The owner said he is burned out on retail, running a small store mostly by himself. Hiring someone to work the store in his stead is not an option, because a lot of his customers depend on his knowledge for everything from how to properly brew tea to cooking specialty recipes.
I understand what he's talking about. I was always picking his brain; how long to cook tempura, how to make the best miso soup, the best brand of nori, green tea, wasabi. I think I will miss him as a resource even more than his shop. He says he might reopen in another location -- parking is difficult at the current store -- but won't handle food because of the work involved.
He is anticipating closing next week. So, again, get there quickly.
In a video posted to his campaign website, renegade Republican Ron Paul all but announces he's abandoning his quest for the White House. About 36 seconds into the video, Paul says: "Though victory in the conventional political sense is not available in the presidential race..."
That's some convoluted doublespeak for a man whose supporters touted him as a straight-talker. Why didn't he just say, "I tried, but I failed to connect with the American electorate?" That would be the truth.
The California Republican Party, whose conservative wing is among the loudest voices demanding the government take drastic measures to stem illegal immigration, is red-faced this week after it was discovered a Canadian political specialist the party hired to handle campaign operations was violating federal immigration law.
The SF Chronicle reports Christopher Matthews violated the terms of his H-1B visa by earning income from two employers. The second employer was the San Diego Republican Party.
Some in the Republican Party wanted to hire an immigration lawyer to fight for Matthews' right to continue his work for the party. But then someone asked if the GOP would be so willing to defend Matthews if his name was Mario Lopez.
It turns out that Matthews had been hired by a California Republican Party executive, Michael Kamburowski, an Australian citizen, who had worked as a conservative lobbyist for five years without a valid work permit.
One weekly newspaper in San Francisco has successfully sued another for unfair business practices and a jury today awarded the paper that filed the suit up to $15 million. The decision was just announced, below is the full text of what the SF Chronicle just posted to its website.
The Bay Guardian won the verdict by proving that the SF Weekly undercut it with below market ad rates while staying afloat with cash infusions from its corporate parent.
Wow. This is exactly what the Eureka Reporter has done to the Times-Standard for the past several years.
I have always maintained that the T-S could recover damages from Rob Arkley in an unfair business practices lawsuit. I know a Bay Area attorney, Ralph Alldredge, who could probably win millions for the Times-Standard; he won a ground-breaking case for a Manteca newspaper back in the '80s and I wouldn't be surprised if he was involved in this lawsuit.
In my opinion, the CEO of the Times-Standard's parent company, Dean Singleton, knows he has grounds for action and is probably waiting for a certain amount of time to pass before suing Arkley. In addition to floating the ER while it undercut the Times-Standard, Arkley has sent numerous emails to Times-Standard execs hinting or outright boasting he was going force the Times-Standard out of business.
Those emails could end up costing Arkley millions. Actually what I think will happen is that Arkley will pull the plug on the Reporter some time this year, before he gets sued, or as the result of Singleton threatening to sue, in the wake of this verdict.
(03-05) 14:57 PST SAN FRANCISCO - A San Francisco jury awarded up to $15 million in damages today to the Bay Guardian alternative weekly newspaper, to be paid by its competitor, SF Weekly, for unfair business practices.
The superior court jury agreed with Guardian Publisher Bruce Brugmann's claims that SF Weekly purposely undercut the Guardian with below-cost display ad rates, then used infusions from its Phoenix-based parent company, Village Voice Media, to stay afloat.
Brugmann said the competition was so unfair it could run his Guardian out of business, which he has owned and operated with his wife since 1966.
SF Weekly lawyers said they would appeal.