Opinion / Local Spin
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Delivery services: the big new target in pot skirmishes?
On Feb. 13, the Monterey County District Attorney’s office quietly dropped its case against Joshua Mount, a driver for the medical marijuana delivery service 831 Delivers. Mount, along with 831 Delivers owners Ash Hewitt and ...
Fort Ord’s mother of all signature-gathering battles.
How many of you were approached over the weekend of May 4 by someone bearing a clipboard and asking for your signature to support Fort Ord? How many of you signed? More importantly, did you ...
Monterey examines the serious issue of homelessness.
Somewhere in the middle. There has to be somewhere in the middle. The city of Monterey is on the verge of making serious decisions on how to handle what local businesses and some residents describe ...
What happens when terrorists use drones on us?
Suppose someday an unmanned aerial vehicle, aka “drone,” arrives over Monterey. It fires a guided missile targeted to kill a single person or blow up, let’s say, the Defense Language Institute or Naval Postgraduate School ...
The races are linked. So too are we all.
It’s something of a dare: “You try to find some meaningful words or thoughts about this tragedy,” one of my pals posted Tuesday morning on Facebook. And I’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing smart to ...
NPS security is confused about the First Amendment.
We were striving for a metaphor. What we got instead was an object lesson in the First Amendment and the power of bullies with badges. On April 2, I sent Weekly photographer Nic Coury to ...
Seaside homeowners are looking for elusive peace.
Rudy and Terry Canchola readily admit it: When it came to doing renovations at their Seaside home, they didn’t exactly do everything by the book. They didn’t seek out and obtain all the proper permits ...
Marketers say they need to retell Salinas’ story.
At most any time of the day, save for an afternoon shift change when the number doubles for a brief time, there are only 11 police officers patrolling the streets of Salinas. It’s the largest ...
The U.S. Department of Justice looks at Salinas council.
Carol Russo isn’t allowed to talk about what she’s doing in Salinas. The work she does as a senior conciliation specialist – her actual title – for the U.S. Department of Justice is meant to ...
Women gather in Monterey to champion each other.
The victims came to Ashley Nemiro in a flood of pain, some of their wounds visible, and many others not. Nemiro, a Denver-based doctoral student, was running a women’s empowerment program called “We Made This,” ...
Monterey City Council’s lesson in the political pull of money.
Much like the cultural anthropologist who spoke at the beginning of the nearly four-hour Monterey City Council meeting March 5 – and said she had studied the ways of consumer spending – I have studied ...
Salinas City Council distracts itself over Jose Castañeda.
It was a Salinas City Council meeting so contentious that at one point, police had to keep two attendees (he a grumpy old German man, she a ticked-off 40-something Latina) from throwing down over who ...
Memories of growing up black in Monterey County.
Growing up in mid-Carmel Valley, I was an obvious member of a tiny minority. I grew up a child of mixed race, black and white, in a home with two white parents in a small, ...
Downs backers need educating on the real Monterey County.
Of the many great moments in this week’s cover story by Assistant Editor Kera Abraham on the Monterey Downs proposal, I’m having a tough time determining my favorite. The Downs-produced video she describes in the ...
Starbucks CEO forces workers to schmooze for the right.
The billionaires peddling austerity have always insisted they’re in it for the common man. A recent TV ad for Fix the Debt – the well-heeled group demanding we cut tax rates and Social Security benefits ...
A carb-fueled meeting on mortgages.
So riddle me this. If a city holds a community meeting but forgets the part about inviting the community, should they actually call it a community meeting? Should they call it something else, like, “that ...
A city this grand deserves a lasting vision.
I can remember the first time I visited Monterey. It was 1976, and I was an undergraduate at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. There was something about the city that immediately captured me – I ...
That would be one way to read Republican actions.
Lost in the morass of partisan bickering over the fiscal cliff – Will they or won’t they? They will! With three minutes left to the deadline! – an important little fact for women, or anyone ...
Racial tensions inspire new Alisal newspaper.
How many pissed-off Chicano activists does it take to start a newspaper? No seriously, how many pissed-off Chicano activists does it take, especially when the end goal is smacking Salinas’ Gannett-owned daily straight where it ...
A newspaper hires armed guards over a lame story.
Here’s a question: Just because you can do something, should you? It’s been on my mind for days, and at the base of it is the mass killing of 6 – and 7-year-old children in ...
No world-ending event means one final column for 2012.
Iwas half-hoping the Mayans were right, because if they had been, it would have meant I didn’t have to write a column this week. It also would mean the Weekly could cease a holiday schedule ...
If we don’t heed the warnings, we’ll doom ourselves.
Of all of the terribly sad, chilling news since Friday, when a deranged man barely out of his teens took weapons owned by his mother and – after shooting her four times in the face ...
Salinas council slows plan for underwater homeowners.
I’m told that buried in the footnotes of a recent report from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is this little factoid: Sixty percent of all mortgages backed by private-label securities are going to default. There ...
Analyzing the nastiest detail of a brutal Salinas beating.
He was walking away. That’s the thing people don’t yet realize because nobody has yet put it out there. So here it is, in all its grim and ugly reality: Police say the homeless man ...
Reminder: There’s a lot left to do to conquer this disease.
In 1981, a new unknown illness started to sweep across the nation and no community was spared, including our own in Monterey County. From its first discovery until the mid-1990s, an HIV diagnosis carried with ...
One turkey gets cooked; Marina Coast turkeys go out kicking.
Two columns for the price of one, both on the subject of turkeys – the bird, and the human variety. One: It’s the week, of course, when we speak of gratitude. I had planned on ...
Sexy time with the nation’s military elite.
A friend of mine has, for the past few weeks, spent almost every waking moment at a Natividad Medical Center rehab facility, where her mother is recuperating from a stroke. She hasn’t had much time ...
Battling youth-voter apathy and elder-voter ego.
I was fetching my eldest from Monterey Peninsula College the other day – don’t ask why an 18-year-old doesn’t have a license, as that’s another column altogether – and he told me his friend/study partner/classmate ...
Six days left in the longest and craziest election season ever.
I started writing this column at 3pm on Tuesday as the Weekly is in full production mode, with the end goal of getting the paper to the printer by 10:30am Wednesday. And as I started ...
Osio Cinemas faces down its own extinction.
At the Osio Cinemas in downtown Monterey, co-owner Mark Borde had a decision to make this summer, one of the “change or die” variety. The change (as it so often is) was inevitable and going ...
Romney to women: Get your asses in the kitchen.
I had an almost violent verbal argument (OK, as violent as two reasonable adults can get on Facebook) with a dear old friend (my former dot-com-era writing partner) a few weeks back over the subject ...
Whether Obama has earned another term is almost moot.
When the 44th president took office in January 2009, the Bush era had left the country in nothing less than a complete mess. The country was embedded in a futile war in Iraq (started upon ...
Anti-Prop. 37 has deep pockets, but consumers are savvy.
I have a friend who’s gone a little bit nuts on the urban homesteading front this season. She posts pictures of her backyard chickens and their admittedly snazzy coop on Facebook. She fiends for the ...
Surprise: Some Silicon Valley rich guys oppose Prop. 30.
Here is what will happen on Nov. 7, the day after the election, if voters haven’t passed Prop. 30, the constitutional amendment backed by Gov. Jerry Brown and better known as the Schools and Local ...
How wannabe leaders are missing the point.
Two columns for the price of one, both on the subject of “no” and the possibility of “yes.” One: A lot has happened in the month or so since the Weekly reported on a radical ...
We can’t get an answer on SB 568.
Dart Container Corp. is a massive, multinational, multibillion-dollar corporation based in Michigan and run by a pair of brothers who in the early ’90s disavowed their U.S. citizenship and beat feet for the tax-friendly Cayman ...
KSBW’s reasons for censoring Western Stage make no sense.
In the 13 or so years that The Marketing Department (TMD) has been in operation, the Salinas-based agency has produced hundreds of commercials and purchased – in the estimation of founder and president Nick Pasculli ...
Todd Akin has secured the rapist vote, but who else’s?
It would be easier to believe the story happened this way: The national media, as it is sometimes wont to do, confused a piece from humor site The Onion with actual news, then reported it ...
Alarming Salinas dog deaths distract from the real danger.
Here’s how Sunday nights work at my house: We eat dinner around 7:30pm. Our idiot dogs – a dyspeptic Jack Russell named Oliver and an exuberant Corgi mix named Lola – stand in the window ...
Former warden says California can’t afford death penalty.
From the time a death penalty case enters the court system in California, the count begins. There’s an estimated $40 million a year spent on death penalty cases at the county court level. Then $72 ...
Salinas rallying cry: Don’t let the sun go down on V.
Set aside, just for a minute, the public relations disaster the city of Salinas has created by the way it has handled the messaging around Measure V, the half-cent sales tax measure Salinas voters passed ...
Colorado shooting should inspire stronger gun control.
A topic of discussion around the newsroom is this: What are the sure-fire ways to tick people off in print? The answer inevitably comes down to two subjects: criticize a powerful religion, or criticize the ...
An unapproved trip into the belly of Monterey Downs.
I am standing in the middle of what, in a few years, might be the parking lot of the low-income housing that Brian Boudreau and his partners have planned as part of the equestrian-themed development ...
Facts won’t do what Joe Heston wants them to.
A few months ago, veteran Chicago Tribune reporter and sometimes-columnist Rex Huppke got a bit of well-deserved national recognition for an obituary he wrote titled “Facts, 360 B.C-A.D. 2012.” Huppke wrote that while Facts’ health ...
Ugly events can be manageable with informed compassion.
Two columns for the price of one, on the theme of life or death, and how to do both with dignity. One: I frequently receive email from a regular reader, a smart man with definite ...
The final painful days bring more than suffering.
Here’s what I realized in the past week (and I swear, this will be my last dying-mother story in these pages): If Oliver, my smelly little Jack Russell mix, is suffering so badly that recovery ...
A daughter struggles with her mother’s imminent passing.
My mother is dying. Not in the philosophical way that we’re all dying, not in a general “the future is promised to no one” way. There is an expiration date – I can’t see this ...
Just when you thought it was over, meet Heritage Pacific.
While this week has been (mostly) all about the elections at the Weekly, the investigative journalism group California Watch, founded by the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, sent us back to the future, with an ...
Microenterprise abounds, and Jill Allen wants to harness it.
It’s Friday afternoon, and that means it’s payout day for the artists of the @risK Gallery on Salinas’ Soledad Street. Those artists who have sold pieces in the past week come in at the pre-appointed ...
Bad advice drives Byrl Smith’s campaign to cynical places.
On Monday morning, Rick Taylor, the Los Angeles-based operative managing Byrl Smith’s campaign in the 4th District County Supervisor’s race, called to say he understood Smith – whom the Weekly categorically did not endorse – ...
After last week, it shouldn’t be a Capital One card.
This is what a bloodbath looks like. One day after Capital One officially took ownership of the credit card business of Asia-based HSBC, one of the largest non-government employers in Monterey County, Capital One announced ...
Nonprofit printer on Soledad Street takes to social media.
Michael Scharen has an advanced degree in physics from Kent State University, credit for helping Nobel Prize-winning physicist J. Robert Schrieffer write a few papers and a work history that includes dot-com-era stints as an ...
The Fort Ord Reuse Authority sues its contractor, releases invoices to the public.
February 2012, page 6 of 8: $537,722.92. That’s the cost of non-specific “professional services” in the $1.1 million monthly bill sent to the Fort Ord Reuse Authority by Arcadis U.S., the lead contractor in the ...
Former water commish’s attorneys go document hunting.
Raise your hand if you have been employed by the county, or serve on a public board somewhere in the county. Now wiggle your fingers up if the word “desal” entered your lexicon in the ...
GOP wants to know your thoughts, and tell you what to think.
So the GOP’s National Senatorial Committee would like to know your thoughts. But first, the committee clearly wants to give you those thoughts. And after they’re done giving you your thoughts, you can then turn ...
Smart tax prep puts more dollars into the community.
Lori is a single mom with two kids in college. She works full-time at a local jewelry store and her daughters work part-time as well. With an annual salary of $20,000, her budget is very ...
Anti-methyl iodide professor says it’s time for alternatives.
On the morning the public relations team at Arysta LifeSciences was polishing a release announcing the company was yanking the strawberry fumigant methyl iodide from the U.S. market (a statement most notable for the sheer ...
A lesson in community engagement through SVMH.
Hazel Tompkins seemed bemused at the sight of all of her new-found compatriots. Until recently, I overheard her saying, she often found herself mostly alone in the audience at the regular meetings of the Salinas ...
But Carmel is lucky to have Rich Pepe in the mix.
Being the mayor of modern-day Carmel is about much more than being the mayor of Carmel. Whoever holds the office is tasked not just with leading the council of that little slice of heaven by ...
Public opinion, campaign season – we’re all really cranky.
Today’s dish: anger, two ways. One: I discovered a great way to tick people off, and for once, it’s got nothing to do with desal scandals, the Diocese of Monterey, controversial ag fumigants, or, hell, ...
LOCAL SPIN: Felony Stupid
La Coasta Nostra boys refer Shriner to Grand Jury.
Dear Members of the Marina Coast Water District Board who aren’t Jan Shriner (also known as Howard Gustafson, Ken Nishi, Dan Burns and Bill Lee): I have to admit, I was a little hurt when ...
Alleged victim in Diocese sex case says he forgives.
In 2005, a 15-year-old boy toting a heavy childhood walked through the doors of Madonna del Sasso church in North Salinas looking for a place to belong. He had lived for more than 10 years ...
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 ...
