Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

The Warm Wonderfuls

by Bruce Anderson

ANNOTATING MITCH: The following letter appeared in a recent Ukiah Daily Journal. "To The Editor: On behalf of our Board of Directors, I would like to thank everyone involved in the recent clean up of debris and garbage from a former homeless encampment on railroad property near the new Ford Street Shelter. A big thank you goes out to Mendocino County Supervisor Richard Shoemaker, who jumped right in and helped with the clean-up. I would also like to thank Margie Storms, director of the Ford Street Project who organized the client/volunteers. Thanks to Mike Sweeney of Ukiah Solid Waste for donating the gloves, bags and pickup tools. And finally, thank you very much to the City of Ukiah who graciously sponsored the use of a large dumpster. The North Coast Railroad authority is proud to have its administrative offices located in such a great community like Ukiah. Thanks again to everyone involved. Mitch Stogner, Executive Director, NCRA, Ukiah."

MR. STOGNER, professional Democrat, is a former aide to former Congressman, Doug Bosco. He's also "served" comparably dynamic statesmen, including former State Senator Barry Keene. What Stogner's love letter doesn't say is that he and the people he's blowing kisses at are also professional Democrats and/or the dependents of professional Democrats. These folks tend to be emotionally needy, hence their constant praise of each other in the letter's columns.

THE DEMOCRATS have made the railroad their very own little employment program. Some of us will recall that former Assembly-cipher Dan Hauser was also in charge of the line for a brief but catastrophic interlude. Because the Democrats are running the railroad, we'll never see a train on the tracks north of Cloverdale, and we're unlikely to see one in motion north of Santa Rosa, and we're unlikely to see one chugging back and forth to Santa Rosa from points south in our life times. (If the Republicans were in charge of the old Northwestern Pacific, the abandoned tracks would be a pay-as-you-go commuter lane set aside for Hummer caravans.)

SUPERVISOR SHOEMAKER is also a Democratic Party creation who's peaked out as a Mendocino County supervisor. He could do a lot more damage if he were to achieve higher office but the Democrats are pleased with the destruction presently wrought by Wes Chesbro, Mrs. Berg and Mike White Wine Thompson. Politically, Shoemaker is much like his pals — walking statements that we're doomed.

MIKE SWEENEY, former Maoist, and bomb maker, has been rehabbed as a Democrat by Shoemaker and State Senator Wes Chesbro. They got Sweeney his first state recycling grants just before Sweeney recycled his former wife, Judi Bari, into an early eternity via a bomb Sweeney made and placed in her car in 1990. Shoemaker then helped Sweeney create the second of two Mendocino County garbage agencies, the fact that Mendocino County maintained a pre-existing garbage agency notwithstanding. (The late Bari had shopped around for someone to kill Sweeney, so persons inclined to a Hobbsian world view might excuse Sweeney for what they might see merely as Sweeney's pre-emptive self-defense.) Sweeney, like his former wife, Cynthia Denenholtz of Santa Rosa, also a former Maoist who, having freed herself from Sweeney and the people's vanguard (Stanford branch) and their pipe bombs, re-invented herself as a Democrat and became a family court magistrate in media-free Santa Rosa, pulling down a cool $128,000 a year from the system she and hubbykins once tried to destroy a pipe bomb at a time. (There isn't enough room in all the closets of the Northcoast for all the skeletons that need their bones mothballed. Funny place, Ecotopia, where history starts all over again every day and people are whatever they say they are. It's America's largest open air witness protection program.)

SWEENEY, as a neo-respectable and Shoemaker's special little rehab project, is paid some $70,000 a year as Mendocino County recycler and, thanks to Shoemaker, Chesbro and the rest of the dreary Clintonians dominant in Mendocino County government will be exempt from the budget pruning now underway at the County's Mutual Protection Society headquartered at the Admin Center on Low Gap Road, Ukiah. It works this way: Raises for the supervisors, department heads, all their girl and boy friends, dope buddies, relatives, and their butt polishers. All other County workers will either have their pay and perks radically reduced or will be shoved out onto State Street with a Safeway cart. Supervisor Patti Campbell will feel your pain so intensely she'll cry while supervisor Wagenet says, "Patti, you express in tears what we all feel. You're a warm, wonderful human being." Then the supervisors will vote 5-0 for their $4,000-a-year raises because it's the law and we have no choice, as Shoemaker put it the other day.

PERSONNEL FILES: Jere Melo, mayor of Fort Bragg, formerly of Georgia-Pacific, was not appointed to the Coastal Commission. Instead, the Governor gave the nod to Bonnie Neely, a Humboldt County supervisor and Melo's reactionary co-equivalent. The Governor's other two appointments were a Stanford law professor, Meg Caldwell, and Steven Kram, a show biz guy.

IN OTHER PERSONNEL NEWS, Mike Matheson, principal of Mendocino High School, will become the principal of Weed High School at the northern tip of I-5 on the California-Oregon border. Young Matheson was a victim of berserk family values, having been inserted into the Mendocino job by a cabal led by his father, Ken Matheson, a semi-retired, former superintendent of the Mendocino schools. A Big Nurse personality type by the name of Rhoades will function as interim principal at Mendocino High School.

ISRAELI NATIONALIST BOB TRUPIN, Comptche, has apologized for his, ah, intemperate remarks issued at the first news of the torture of Iraqi prisoners. Trupin isn't a bad guy, really, but unhinged to the point of monomania on the subject of Israeli fascism, never more aggressive than under General Sharon, an Old Testament-inspired fanatic and American-funded ethnic cleanser.

RALPH FREEDMAN, former director of Mendocino County's Child Support Services, aka Deadbeat Dad's Collection Agency, has been acquitted on two charges of misdemeanor disturbing the peace. Freedman suffered several psychotic episodes during his controversial tenure at the agency. His psycho-breaks so alarmed co-workers that two of them filed charges against him after Mendocino County's notoriously nonchalant grievance system failed to act to protect them against Freedman who, not so incidentally, was subsequently fired by the County's inept Board of Supervisors, the agency that hired him and spent thousands of public dollars on private attorneys to defend him. Freedman had been sacked at his two previous public places of employment before he arrived in Mendocino County but, as an obvious nut case, he was immediately hired for big pay by the Supervisors, candidate Joe WiYou can't be too crazy or too incompetent for Mendocino County, national home of The Ten Percenters.