Opinion / Local Spin
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Supes vote to send a pointless methyl iodide message.
Just when you think you know exactly what the Monterey County Board of Supervisors is going to do, they go ahead and do the exact opposite thing. And no, I’m not talking about Tuesday’s 180-degree ...
Finding hope in the fall of Prop. 8 and the rise of Gives!
Two columns for the price of one: The first on the number eight, and the second on a much larger number. One. As much as I hated living in Berkeley, and boy did I ever, ...
Capital defenders seek to replace the death penalty.
In just a few short weeks, on Presidents’ Day weekend, more than 1,000 criminal defense attorneys, investigators and experts will gather at Monterey Conference Center, as they have for 25 years, to hone their skills ...
A community waits to see where Salinas Valley Memorial money is going.
In April 2011, healthcare industry hired gun Lowell Johnson was brought in by the board of the Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System to do a very specific job: Get the board out of the mess ...
Musings on an uninsured friend, Natividad’s Anthem issue.
A good friend of mine has, for the past few months, suffered one of the worst chronic coughs I’ve ever heard. It started with a cold, and it’s never gone away or gotten better. But ...
A public process for an invite-only crowd.
Stakeholder: [steyk-hohl-der] A person or group that has an investment, share, or interest in something, as a business or industry. You know, most days I feel pretty damn invested in Monterey County. I live in ...
LOCAL SPIN: Frankenfood Fight
Initiative on GMO labeling could change how we eat.
Food Inc.’s stranglehold over the nation’s food and farming system is about to be challenged in a food fight that will largely determine the future of American agriculture. A coalition representing a broad and unprecedented ...
What’s next in the ongoing desal drama?
Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. Wondering how, for the love of God, two taxpayer-funded public agencies and one savvy private water company could have so badly botched the formation of a plan to take ...
Names in the news, and why they matter still.
I admit it. I was jealous. Weekly arts writer/calendar editor Walter Ryce landed some astounding interviews this past year (Cheech Marin the art collector, a strange night on the town with actor Tom Sizemore) and ...
A 2-year-old girl’s death spotlights media tendencies.
Fermin Gonzales was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1967, sent to the jungles of Southeast Asia and witnessed the kinds of things that nobody, much less a boy barely old enough to be away ...
Spin: How Not to Win Friends
Occupy protesters, and their nemeses, could use a chill pill.
Occupy Wall Street – the Monterey edition – has so far been something of a non-starter. It’s lacked the jaw-dropping, please-arrest-them insanity of Occupy Santa Cruz, where a fringe group of the larger movement recently ...
Marina Coast takes a new and bizarre blood oath.
Of the following scenarios, which seems to be the most implausible?: A) The Marina Coast Water District board (or, as I affectionately refer to them, the Insane Clown Posse), citing no government code in existence, ...
Buying local can be a most radical act this holiday season.
Two columns for the price of one, both about shopping locavore style. One: Starting a business is an inherently brave act. Starting a business in a down economy is inherently an even braver act. Starting ...
Collins faces slew of felony counts, most not desal related.
Just when you thought the Regional Water Project conflict-of-interest debacle couldn’t get much weirder, former county Water Resources Agency board member Steve Collins finds himself on the receiving end of a 20-page criminal complaint, courtesy ...
Occupy is poised to affect true change.
The Occupy movement has captured the imagination of a nation and perhaps the global community. Inspired in part by the “Arab Spring” uprisings, discontent with the status quo appears to be a discontent without borders. ...
California’s elected federal reps should be ashamed.
What a bunch of (insert your favorite adjective – like ineffective, lazy, obstructionist, disdainful or interested-in-policy-failure-for-the-sake-of-political gain) cowards. I speak of the overwhelming majority of California’s Congressional delegation, which last Friday somewhat quietly let California ...
Our congressman says D.C. is even nastier than we think.
Sam Farr doesn’t strike me as a “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” kind of guy. And while he didn’t run around the Weekly’s offices like Henny Penny in the old children’s fable, ...
No medical marijuana for you – the feds are indifferent.
I had to call my 84-year-old, 90-pound, chronically ill mother in Chicago last week and share some bad news. Even if she decided to get over her abject loathing of her non-Catholic son-in-law (and general ...
Local Spin: Occupy Wal… mart
What jobs are SB 469 opponents trying to save?
My older teenager (the one with the bigger mouth and more world-weary attitude) wondered the other day when Occupy Wall Street might make a foray into Monterey County. The movement was going to our former ...
The Monterey Regional Waste Management District deserves a little respect.
Penny tears a chunk from her lunch of quail, swallows it quickly and goes in for another bite. Her eyes dart back and forth; she seems worried about someone taking her food away. After devouring ...
Local Spin: Risque Business
In the dog-eat-dog world of news, who’s wearing Milkbone underwear?
It’s hard to choose a favorite among the many comic moments from KION-TV’s parsing last week of the Weekly’s Smart Guide. There was the on-air intro, a stern Marc Cota-Robles leading with random nouns: “Hemp! ...
Valuing free and independent media, too.
Because the news is my business, I was stunned by Executive Editor Joe Livernois’ admission in Saturday’s Herald. It wasn’t the paper’s rationale to stop publishing the stock market listings that got my attention. What ...
A few days and opportunities to pay tribute to 9/11 victims.
A few local papers have been asking readers to send in their 9/11 stories for weeks now, memories and pictures that will be cobbled together into story packages to help note one of the most ...
Lessons, and a lawsuit, in Salinas’ great green hunt.
Dennis Donohue, Jim Pia, Jeff Weir and Vanessa Vallarta seem unlikely hunting partners, but this week, they threw on their cammies, grabbed their metaphorical rifles and announced they were going on a Moose hunt. Almost ...
Salinas housing prices are about to plummet again.
If you noticed the word Salinas popping up in the national news about a week and a half ago, you undoubtedly noticed it was more bad news for the nation’s lettuce capital. An outfit called ...
A veiled threat of litigation from desal partner Cal Am.
When we last left our little buddy the Desal Hydra (also known as California American Water, the Marina Coast Water District and the Monterey County Water Resources Agency – the hapless partners in the $400 ...
Congregants take accused priest’s defense to the web.
The plea on the website is simple, direct and even a little bit biblically poetic. “A thief,” the website states, “has entered our home and kidnapped a favorite relative in the middle of the night. ...
Give the Desal Hydra an inch. Just see what happens.
Starting in the 1990s, Laura Joffee Numeroff and Felicia Bond produced a series of adorable children’s books based on the premise that if you give a creature one treat, it will not only develop a ...
Through the lens of wild horses, a view on salvation.
There is a major land grab taking place on our public lands, one that is both criminal and exploitative, and it is being perpetuated by our government and with judicial approval. But there is a ...
Two looks at one subject: closure.
I ’ve had Green Vehicles Inc. on my deadpool list almost since the very first day I heard the words “Green Vehicles” put together with “incorporated.” Deadpool, for those unfamiliar, is a list of things—companies ...
Ratepayers are SOL if the current desal project proceeds.
Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote that Monterey’s Spanish landowners lost their property to unscrupulous Yankees because, unlike Americans, they had not been raised “to understand all business as a competition in fraud.” To the extent ...
Find the leak, says SVMH. Everyone else: stop wasting cash.
The hourly rate for a competent private investigator in Monterey County – the kind of guy a company might hire to run background checks – is about $125 an hour. The average hourly rate for ...
We have noble heroes, but my favorites are obnoxious.
Looking at the Weekly’s list of Local Heroes for 2011 is a humbling experience. A woman who teaches children to become micro-entrepreneurs, and in doing so, mentors them through a summer that might otherwise be ...
>Now we know: Marina Coast and Heitzman knew.
Dear Mrs. Collins, I get it. I really, really get it, that letter you wrote to the Monterey County Herald earlier this month in defense of your son, Steve Collins. I know where the urge ...
Mom wants pot. Now how do I send her some?
My 83-year-old mother in Chicago called me about a month ago with what sounded like a simple request. “I need pot,” she said. I thought I heard her correctly. “You need a pot? OK, you ...
An insider riffs on rivalries that haywire Latino influence.
We’ll call her Señorita X, or X for short. She’s an up-and-coming power player in Monterey County politics – educated, professional and forthright. You may have seen her at public meetings; if you have, you ...
Local water has disintegrated into local insanity.
On Friday, two San Francisco Bay Area attorneys who specialize in stupid public official tricks are slated to go in to a room with the Monterey County Board of Supervisors and hand over the results ...
Ted Turner can’t be contained, not even by the Packards.
Ted Turner moves in and out of the auditorium at the Monterey Bay Aquarium flanked by a bevy of security guards, a foursome of earnest, handsome young men wearing suits and earpieces, men who seem ...
Booming Business
As my Chicago Sun-Times pal and veteran columnist Neil Steinberg puts it: two columns for the price of one. One: Ten years ago or so, if you’d said a growing group of people would stop ...
Teachers call for CalSTRS to divest from methyl iodide.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency asked for it, and it’s most certainly getting it. In March, the same federal agency that in 2007 approved the controversial soil fumigant methyl iodide decided it would take public ...
Unemployment spikes, while the boss rakes in millions.
A friend who works for Monterey County government describes the atmosphere around his office these days: “Nobody’s making a lot of eye contact right now. There are a lot of whispered conversations. There’s a lot ...
Carmel’s SmartMeter plan will roll out statewide.
Imagine if Apple upgraded the iPhone so that problems would be fixed without needing to report them. Imagine the upgrade let you easily manage your usage so your bill would go down. As a special ...
Farmers to Farr and Issa: The EPA is kind of a pain in the ass.
Mark Murai is understandably irritated with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And at the most unusual hearing that took place Tuesday in the council chambers at Salinas City hall, he let that frustration fly. Murai ...
CPUC, Supes demand info on Steve Collins desal contract.
In the lexicon of great Monterey County-based financial scandals, what can be said about the Steve Collins desal consulting contract debacle is this: It’s certainly the latest. Lacking the outright public graft of the circa-2007 ...
Narrowcasting enables revolution, humor. Hop aboard.
One of the more bizarre interviews I had during my time as a tech reporter in Silicon Valley involved the co-founder of microblogging service Twitter, though it was more of an e-mail exchange than an ...
Keeping the “community” in community college.
Disclosure: I teach photography at Monterey Peninsula College. MPC is currently facing deep budget cuts to a number of programs, including my own. While the potential loss of my teaching position is certainly mournful, it ...
Cal Am wants to go back on desal ratepayer agreement.
At a time when Cal Am ratepayers deserve clarity, they’re getting a glassful of silt, and it seems they’re being asked to gulp it down all at once. Last week the Weekly reported Wedbush Securities, ...
Breaking down what makes the best, the best.
In some people, the best can bring out the worst. We’re not naming names, but consider the experience one staffer had while discussing this year’s “Best of Monterey County” with his own mother during a ...
The Diocese of Monterey mess gets messier.
Sometime soon – perhaps by the end of the month – attorneys for a 21-year-old man who says he was sexually assaulted by a Catholic priest as a teenager at Salinas’ Madonna del Sasso church ...
Killing the Workforce Investment Act budget suicidal.
The newly elected majority of the House of Representatives passed their budget bill, HR1, two weeks ago. It has been temporarily shelved while the leadership works until March 18 to avoid the government shutdown that ...
Monning floats a beverage tax as diabetes rates soar.
The “Sweet Surprise” website features a photo series of impish, multi-cultural children. There’s the adorable Asian girl, sitting in front of a short stack of pancakes drizzled with syrup and dotted with berries. The freckle-faced ...
A Catholic priest scandal in Salinas opens old wounds.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a neighborhood so Catholic that I don’t recall knowing anyone who wasn’t until I was well into my teens. My neighbors were Polish-Catholic, Irish-Catholic, Lithuanian-Catholic, ...
Medical users face persecution from local law enforcement.
As an attorney who has been defending medical marijuana patients in Monterey County for 15 years, I was extremely surprised to read the article here two weeks ago describing local law enforcement as “thoughtful, forward ...
Futurist imagines health care the way it was meant to be.
Ian Morrison speaks in a light Scottish brogue so charming that he can say just about anything and get away with it. And on Jan. 24, boy did he ever. An internationally known author, consultant ...
One friend’s experience explores weed legalities.
It’s not clear who may use marijuana legally and under what conditions. This became clear to a friend of mine who thought he was legally cultivating some marijuana in a shed. He thought he was ...
Weapons and those wielding them are ruling with fear.
What a nightmare. What a mess. Those words, unfortunately, apply to too many events right now. Close to home, Monterey County has entered its seemingly annual, beginning-of-the-year shooting fest. As of this writing on Jan. ...
One vet’s career likely ends, another hopes his will revive.
The worst 18 months of my life so far came to an end in September 1994. The movers had come, packed us out and gone. The car was loaded with everything needed for a cross-country ...
