THAT FOOKIN’ CANDLE

Mrs. Donovan was walking down O'Connell Street in Dublin when she met up with Father Flaherty.

The Father said, 'Top o' the mornin' to ye! Aren't ye Mrs. Donovan and didn't I marry ye and yer
hoosband two years ago?'

She replied, 'Aye, that ye did, Father.'

The Father asked, 'And be there any wee little ones yet?'

She replied, 'No, not yet, Father.'

The Father said, 'Well now, I'm going to Rome next week and I'll light a fertility candle for ye and yer hoosband.'

She replied, 'Oh, thank ye, Father...'

They then parted ways..

Some years later they met again. The Father asked, 'Well now, Mrs. Donovan, how are ye these days?'

She replied, 'Oh, very well, Father!'

The Father asked, 'And tell me , have ye any wee ones yet?'

She replied, 'Oh yes, Father! Two sets of twins and five singles. Nine in all!'

The Father said, 'That's wonderful! And how is yer loving hoosband doing?'

She replied, 'E's gone to Rome to blow out yer fookin' candle.'

HILLARY TRASHES HALF OF TRUMP’S SUPPORTERS

The mudslinging Hildebeast puts half of Trump’s supporters into a “basket of deplorables”

Hillary Clinton is nearing the bottom of the mud-containing barrel in what can only be described as a desperate attempt to scare all people who believe they are not bigoted into voting for her. Here is what Hillary said on Friday:

“You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”

What a filthy crock of shit! Most of Trump’s supporters are none of the above. They are simply fed up with politics as usual and politicians who are beholden to special interests, as Hillary is.

I think it would be fair to say that half of Hillary’s supporters are a basket of blacks, Latinos, feminists, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders. The other half are women who have been conned into believing that if Trump becomes president, their rights will be in jeopardy.

While some of Trump’s supporters are no doubt deplorable, so are many of the Hilsebeast’s supporters. And Hillary herself has been deplorable ever since she hooked up with Bill.

CARTEL BOSS EL MENCHO ORDERS JALISCO POLICE COMMANDER TO TELL HIS COPS TO BACK OFF

The Jaisco motherfucker police commander knows who’s the boss and obeys his orders without question

Borderland Beat
September 8, 2016

Proceso has in its possession an audio on which the leader of the Cartel de Jalisco New Generation (CJNG), Nemesio Oceguera Cervantes, alias El Mencho, recently orders a police commander of Jalisco to "relax" his subordinates in the municipality of Chapala. After threats and insults, you can clearly listen the authority give certainty to El Mencho that his instruction will be obeyed. "You know me and you know that we have respect for you," the police chief tells the drug lord. The veracity of the audio was authenticated by Semanario Proceso.

Here is a transcript of the audio as translated from Proceso. (Mencho – M, Police Comander – PC):

M - Delta 1

PC - Yes who is this?

M - Listen to me carefully you motherfucker, this is Mencho. You better tell your people to back off

PC - Say what?

M - This is Mencho and you better back off, or I will fuck you up and all those fuckers working for you, I have already identify 30 of your people. I will even kill your dogs if you don't fucking relax. So you decide.

PC - You got it Sr, I will tell them to get back.

M - Don't you fucking hung up on me mother fucker, I already know your location, and you are in Chapala.

PC - No I'm not hanging up on you, I'm just telling you I will call back my people

M - You better check yourself, is better for us to be friends. We don't fuck with you people and now you are fucking with us.

PC - No Sir, I will tell them to get back.

M - Look, you better get every motherfucker out of the way, because all of you get money from us, and you guys are a bunch of pigs when it comes to that.

PC - Yeah that's what I was told, that everyone gets paid.

M - Look you people better fall in line, or you will be the first one to get kill for them.

PC - No Sir. We don't have to get to that.

M - Get the fuck out, because the fight will be for real and you know it. We are not afraid.

PC - No Sir we don't have to get to that, I will call them back.

M - If you want me as a friend you will have a great friend in me, but if not you can go fuck yourself. I'm already fucking tired that you motherfuckers don't listen.

PC - Sir you already know me, and you know I'm at your service

M - I already know that, that's why I'm surprised by this, I know you have your people and family but you have to check yourself.

PC - I know Sir.

M - I don't want you to disconnect this phone because I will call you back, to see if you people are already out of this area.

PC - No, I'm gonna call my people back right now

M - Everyone, everyone in general, you better tell them to fucking relax please

PC - OK I will call you right back at this number

M - No, no don't call this number back, I will call you when I can

PC - OK you got it

M - But don't disconnect this phone, or I will take it as negative

PC - No Sir I will send you a message from another number right away

M - OK but you tell them to fucking relax

PC - Yes Sir, you know me and you know we have respect for you

M - OK you got it, and you know we have respect for you too, and I'm sorry for the aggression and bad language

PC - Yes Sir, right now the guys are over there but I will let them know

M - OK tell them it was me the one who call

PC - OK Sir

IT TAKES A VILLAGE IDIOT TO VOTE FOR HILLARY

by Ilana Mercer

Townhall
September 10, 2016

If you strapped Bill Clinton to a polygraph (or some lie detector that can’t be fooled by the Clintons)—I suspect he, too, might confess to a preference for Vladimir Putin over Barack Obama.

Mr. Clinton had been appropriately scathing, in 2008, about Obama’s mythical status in the media. A “fairy tale,” he called the current president.

However, his wife and her supporters on The Hill and in media have ruled that any remotely realistic utterance about the Russian president—such as that he's a strong leader who’s popular with his people and acts in their interests—puts you outside the camp of the saints.

Mrs. Clinton is making it a habit to tell Americans what to say and how to think if they want to qualify as … Americans.

In particular, Hillary’s AltRight screed, best described on Twitter as the Control-Alt-Delete speech, focused on Mrs. Clinton’s crusade against deviationists. Provided by a twitter handle called “Hillary’s PR Team,” here's a distillation of the interminable smear against Trump and his supporters, peddled as "substantive" by the moron media:

Prejudice and paranoia, hate groups, harmful stereotypes, hateful supporters, systemic racism, dark conspiracies, dark conspiracy theories, racist lies, bigotry, racist, white supremacist bigot, white nationalist leader, KKK, racially tinged rumors, Alex Jones. …

Yes, Hillary's Control-Alt-Delete harangue began with the biggest deviationist of all, Donald J. Trump. Trump “disregards the values that make our country great,” fumed the fire-and-brimstone Mrs. Clinton on that occasion.

To his great credit, Trump flunked another test of “true American principles,” established by Hillary, following the NBC’s “Commander-in-Chief” forum, on September 7.

As the media reminds us, Trump disqualifies himself for the presidency daily. This time it was for speaking the truth about Putin at the forum. The Russian people’s approval of their president stands at 82 percent. But the correct American values, as decreed by our northeastern elites, depend on disparaging Putin and his people. After all, Russians are stupid. They need Clinton and her Radical Republican counterpart, Speaker Paul Ryan (or a color-coded revolution organized by both), to induct them into the American government's ways.

Enforcer Hillary (and Speaker Ryan) was having none of it. A preference for the Russian president over our American president was plain “unpatriotic and scary,” to be stamped out and marginalized.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton,” argues historian Clyde N. Wilson, whose métier is American intellectual history, “is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee—self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing.”

Wilson uses the term Yankee “historically to designate a peculiar group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around.”

By Yankee, Dr. Wilson does not mean “everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio. The firemen who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 [commemorated this weekend] were Americans. The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees.”

In their journey from the “hyper-Calvinism of their early days,” to “their present atheism,” Yankees like Hillary have long ago replaced religious zeal with a progressive’s political fanaticism. And while they’ve “abandoned anything that might be good in their religion,” contends Wilson, bossy busybodies like Clinton have never given up the notion that “they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.”

Again, by continuously enforcing the “standard of all things American and good,” Hillary is not that different from her Republican colleagues. They, too, deploy the values cudgel as energetically, to whip the base into shape. Or, to read many of us out of the American family.

To compound his unorthodoxy, Trump failed to fall back on the American exceptionalism exemption, in judging the actions of American leaders---good by default---relative to other world leaders. At the “Commander-in-Chief” forum, Trump intimated that Mr. Putin’s transgressions were “no less troublesome than Mr. Obama’s transgressions.” Quite right. Ask the innocent victims of Obama’s energetic drone program ongoing: villagers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen.

Effortlessly, Trump continues to be faithful to the mandate the Republican base has given him: fumigate those DC snake pits. To the Aug. 17 intelligence briefing, Trump took along a pit-bull in the person of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who prodded the briefers … a lot.

Came the meme from media: How dare Donald and his general discomfit the intelligence experts of “The Deep State,” that state-within-a state, and one of the least scrutinized collection of government agencies.

Soon, proxies for the intelligence briefers were flocking to the lapdog media’s studios to badmouth The Donald and his uppity general.

The substance of retired Gen. Flynn’s interruptions at the briefing matters not at all. What counts is that Trump continues to make the sprawling political apparatus writhe like a fire-breathing mythical monster in the throes of death.

Next, the controlling Mrs. Clinton demanded the Republican base's candidate for president hush his mouth about the Federal Reserve Bank. Clinton doesn’t understand much about the Fed. Instinctively, however, she knows that it’s in her interest not to discuss its inflationary actions and interest-rates price fixing.

Trump gets that the Fed is “keeping interest rates down so that everything else doesn’t go down,” and has said that “we have a very false economy.” He doesn’t lie about it. He gets that the "stock market is bloated"; that the Stock Exchange is a laughing stock, and that soaring stock prices are a consequence of centrally planned, monetary stimulus.

Naturally, Clinton would prefer the tool that greases the operations of government, and allows the monetization of the debt accrued by her kind, to “be off-limits for U.S. presidents and presidential candidates. You should not be commenting on Fed actions when you are either running for president or you are president,” Mrs. Clinton fulminated at Trump.

Just as Hillary’s collectivist creed, “It Takes A Village,” complements Barack’s “You didn’t build it” motto—so do their economic policies jibe. Mrs. Clinton likely expects the Fed to keep interest rates low to help her make the case for the continuation of the Obama economy.

Back to Bill. Being something of a good old boy, Bill Clinton looked as if he was in purgatory at the Democratic National Convention, late June. Surrounded by shrill, power-crazed women and their domesticated men; gyno-centric soft pop blaring from the speakers—Mr. Clinton looked as if he’d rather be hanging out with … Donald Trump.

IN SECRETIVE MARIJUANA INDUSTRY, WHISPERS OF ABUSE AND TRAFFICKING

By Shoshana Walter

The Center for Investigative Reporting
September 8, 2016

The trees towered above them, limbs etched in black against the night sky. He steered his pickup down a narrow path of mud and rocks and parked in front of a trailer. He tried to kiss her. She froze.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I have to get up early,” she said.

He began groping her body.

“Don’t you have a wife?” she asked.

The woods seemed to crawl with creatures; the ground was slick with rain. As wilderness pulsed
around them, she ran through the possibilities.

If she fled, would she find her way out? If she fought back, would he hurt her?

Would anyone hear her if she screamed?

***

In the Emerald Triangle, trees are ever present. They peek over small towns and dip into valleys, sheathing this cluster of remote Northern California counties in silence.

For decades, the ancient forests here have provided cover for the nation’s largest marijuana-growing industry, shielding pot farmers from convention, outsiders and law enforcement.

But the forests also hide secrets, among them young women with stories of sexual abuse and exploitation. Some have spoken out; a handful have pressed charges. Most have confided only in private.

Students from the nearest college, Humboldt State University, return from a summer of trimming marijuana buds with tales of being forced to give their boss a blow job to get paid. Other “trimmigrants,” who typically work during the June-to-November harvest, recount offers of higher wages to trim topless.

During one harvest season, two growers began having sex with their teenage trimmer. When they feared she would run away, they locked her inside an oversized toolbox with breathing holes.

Contact with law enforcement is rare and, female trimmigrants say, rarely satisfying.

Verifying their stories is as difficult as finding your way through the forest at night, down twisty dirt roads, to one of the backwoods marijuana farms. During months of reporting in the region, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting unearthed dozens of accounts of sexual exploitation, abuse and trafficking. Victims’ advocates say the problem is far larger and, with every harvest, continues to grow.

“Women believe they are getting hired for trimming work, and then they’re drugged and raped,” said Maryann Hayes Mariani, a coordinator for the North Coast Rape Crisis Team. “Everybody looks at (the region) like it’s the Land of Oz. I’m just so tired of pretending like it’s not happening here.”

Yet law enforcement repeatedly has failed to investigate abuse and sexual violence in the industry. Instead, officers mostly focus on what they view as the root cause of the problem: the drug trade.

In the rural counties of Northern California, marijuana is still a largely underground industry, worth billions. Last year, legal California sales alone were valued at $2.7 billion, according to The ArcView Group, a marijuana market research firm. Sales are projected to balloon to $6.4 billion by 2020 if marijuana is legalized for recreational use. It’s big business, drawing busloads of job seekers.

The number of trimmigrants who go missing alone is overwhelming for law enforcement, fueling an epidemic of the lost. In 2015, Humboldt County reported 352 missing people, more per capita than any other county in the state.

When an artist from San Francisco disappeared in the Humboldt County town of Garberville last harvest season, her mother and roommate filed a missing persons report. Months later, she resurfaced to tell her family she had been held against her will on a marijuana farm, drugged and sexually abused. She never formally reported her abuse.

But at the time of her disappearance, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office had labeled her a “voluntary missing adult.” They flagged the case as a low priority.

“Many people come to Humboldt each year to work on the marijuana farms,” the deputy who took the report told her roommate in an email. “So far she is falling into the same category as many others have.”

In addition to women and girls who come of their own volition to trim, others are brought in specifically to provide sex services. Come harvest season, escorts flood these rural areas, drawn to the large population of male growers and laborers who spend months at a time alone on isolated mountain farms.

Ron Prose, an investigator for the Eureka Police Department, said sex traffickers know law enforcement agencies have little interest in cracking down on them. None of the county agencies surveyed by Reveal have investigators assigned to human trafficking. Prose himself is semi-retired; he investigates trafficking cases when he has time.

For women, the dangers are due in part to the gender dynamics in the industry. Growing is a male-dominated field, and many growers prefer to hire female trimmers. Several told Reveal that they believe women are more dexterous, making them more efficient workers. Others are looking for company.

“Some of these younger guys don’t have regular relationships because they’re out in the hills growing weed, but they still want a girl,” Prose said. “It sounds kind of crude, but they seek female companionship.”

Of course, many marijuana farms are responsible operations. Most workers describe good experiences, including excellent pay, food and shelter. Many also welcome the unusual working conditions of an industry long at odds with mainstream culture and the law. Drug use on the job, for instance, is common.

In November, California voters will decide whether to fully legalize recreational marijuana. But such use remains illegal under federal and most state laws, and the culture of silence is so embedded in the state’s industry – the nation’s top black market supplier – it seems unlikely that legalization alone will dramatically alter the landscape for women toiling deep in the Emerald Triangle.

“There’s a lot of wilderness here, and dirt roads and acres of forest,” said Amy Benitez, a victims’ advocate in Humboldt County. “There’s a lot of nooks and crannies you can hide in. You add this criminal element to it, where there’s money, and there’s just more ways that you can abuse power and control.”

***

Saturday, Oct. 18, 2014

That power imbalance is what ensnared a 22-year-old environmentalist and musician who arrived in one of the mountain towns in the middle of the 2014 harvest season looking for trimming work. In Petrolia, Terri – not her real name – found a world apart from her hometown in the Los Angeles Basin.

Petrolia sits beneath the King Range mountains at the edge of Humboldt County, hidden behind a curtain of redwoods and Douglas fir trees. With a population of about 400, it has one general store, one bar, no cellphone service and no police. It’s about two hours down crumbling cliffside roads to the nearest highway. Most locals live in the surrounding mountains, overlooking the forested valley and black sand beaches of the last undeveloped stretch of California known as the Lost Coast.

“I like to think of Petrolia as this little town hanging off the edge of the world,” said Jenoa Briar-Bonpane, a former resident who became Terri’s therapist. “At night, you’ve never seen so many stars.”

Nearly everyone in Petrolia knows each other. Most are involved in marijuana growing to some degree. But like other small towns dotting the Emerald Triangle, in the past decade, more and more people have moved in. Greenhouses have sprung up, enabling industrial-scale marijuana growing. Larger farms have drawn more workers from outside the area.

At first, Terri did not have a job. An acquaintance introduced her to Cedar McCulloch-Clow and Emily Herman, a married couple with two children, a horde of chickens and goats, and a bicycle-strewn junkyard. Terri set up a tent in the couple’s yard, plunked down her violin and camping gear and began looking for work.

She also set about working her way into the community. She went to the weekly farmers market at the community center and ran and biked in the annual Rye and Tide, a 7 1/2-mile race that begins with a swig of whiskey outside the town bar.

Terri found a couple of trimming jobs, including for Sam Epperson and his partner, Rachel Adair. Their operation was far smaller than the region’s newer marijuana fields – known as grows – and had a vegetable garden and turkey coop.

Terri and three other trimmers sat in a row of swivel office chairs in a wood-paneled trimming shack. They wore aprons to keep from tracking loose leaves into the house and carefully tallied the weight of their work – they would be paid $200 a pound – with pencil and paper.

Epperson, quiet and bespectacled with a mop of graying curls, prepared fresh food and drinks for the workers. Every day, he offered them an organic chocolate bar.

One night, on the concrete patio of the town bar – the Yellow Rose – Terri met a grower named Kailan Meserve. He was twice her age, tan and muscular, with a swagger and salt-and-pepper hair. Meserve mentioned he needed trimmers and bought her a beer. A friend of Terri’s, Katie Finnegan, went inside to buy another drink. When Finnegan returned, Terri had disappeared.

Inside, the bar is a bright, airy space with pristine off-white walls and a polished beige floor – a contrast with its often grungy clientele. One side of the bar is lined with light metal cafe tables, the other with pool tables and arcade games. The darkest part of the bar is to the left of the dartboard, a long dim hallway to the single-stall women’s restroom.

About 45 minutes after Finnegan lost track of Terri, court records show she found her unconscious in that bathroom, her pants around her ankles. Terri appeared to have fallen and hit the sink on her way down.

Terri remembered almost nothing about the night. She was concerned something had happened with Meserve. But back on the grow, Epperson and Adair put her at ease: Meserve was a captain of the volunteer fire department, the son of a prominent local environmental activist and politician. Meserve, they said, was married with toddler twins.

“He’s a good guy,” Epperson recalled telling her.

The couple still had work for Terri, but on their small-scale grow, the harvest wouldn’t last long. They encouraged her to take up Meserve on his offer of a trimming job.

That was advice Epperson now says he deeply regrets.

***

Conservative ranchers and loggers dominated the small population of the Emerald Triangle when hippies began arriving en masse in the late 1960s. They were a diverse bunch, from tree-sitting activists to disillusioned Vietnam veterans.

Kailan Meserve’s father came to Humboldt County as part of the “back to the land” movement. His first home was a teepee on the Mattole River. Later, he built a house in Petrolia, where he, his wife and children lived on wind and solar power, grew produce and raised their own goats, cows and chickens.

At first, marijuana was a recreational drug, grown mostly for personal use. It didn’t stay that way for long. Growers realized they could better support themselves and their families by selling pot on the black market. The climate was ideal, the woods and mountains isolated enough to conceal the illicit crop. The American-grown marijuana industry was born.

From the outset, the children of these growers had more difficulties than their parents. The Summer of Love was over. Across the community, alcohol and drug abuse was rampant. So was law enforcement.

The threat of raids constantly loomed over the Meserve household, threatening to pull the family apart. According to Meserve’s sister, Amy, their parents began using cocaine and alcohol and exploded into constant fights.

“It just got really crazy,” she recalled. “Kailan pretty much raised us.”

When federal Operation Green Sweep touched down in Petrolia in 1990, soldiers flew helicopters overhead and officers confronted families in their homes with M16 rifles. Children learned to lie about the reality of their lives.

“I still have PTSD,” said Sam Epperson, who grew up on a marijuana farm in eastern Humboldt County. “I can hear choppers flying from miles away.”

With law enforcement crackdowns came higher black market prices and greater risks. To protect their crops from theft, many farmers began to carry guns and booby-trap their properties. Residents dealt with crime themselves, avoiding law enforcement whenever possible.

In 1996, California became the first state in the country to legalize medical marijuana. But the law failed to limit the amount of marijuana that could be grown, and law enforcement had no way to determine which plants were cultivated for medical purposes or for profit. Crime and black market growing in the Emerald Triangle soared, including by growers with connections to organized crime, vastly eclipsing local law enforcement’s efforts to stop it.

Lt. Wayne Hanson of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office put it simply: “We lost the drug war many years ago.”

The turmoil prompted some of the children to leave. Kailan Meserve was among the many who stayed. He became a stonemason, specializing in fireplaces, and grew pot on the side.

The “green rush” hit Petrolia in 2010. With California voters considering full legalization, new growers poured into town hoping to get rich. The hippie haven was about to go mainstream.

The law did not pass, but according to friends, Meserve decided that if anyone was going to make money peddling pot, it was going to be him.

“He viewed himself as having that hometown advantage,” Cedar McCulloch-Clow said.

Locals noticed the change. At a party a few years ago, therapist Jenoa Briar-Bonpane recalls looking over the edge of a mountain ridge and spotting two new grow operations below. “Where did those come from?” she wondered. Someone said they belonged to Meserve, and he became the talk of the party.

“There was a sense of, ‘Wow, he’s really blowing things up,’ ” Briar-Bonpane said.

As a big employer in town, and a local, Meserve enjoyed a trust not afforded to outsiders, including a freedom from consequences, according to friends. He’d always had a brash demeanor and a reputation for hitting on women – even after he married in 2001. Over time, those who knew him said he seemed to sink deeper into drugs and alcohol. He was convicted three times for driving under the influence, according to court records, and got into a car crash that seriously injured him and his wife.

He “got a little big for his britches,” Amy Meserve said, “and lost his filter completely.”

None of it seemed to slow down Meserve. His business expanded, and the trimmigrants who showed up in Petrolia looking for work were thankful for it.

***

Sunday, Nov. 9, 2014

Terri saw Kailan Meserve again at a pingpong tournament. It was a fundraiser for the fire department, and staff said Meserve was one of the few entrusted with a key to the community center. He and Sam Epperson had set up the tables.

Meserve offered to buy Terri drinks several times, according to investigators – and each time, she declined. Around 10 p.m., he asked if she had to time to talk, she recalled, “to clear things up.” He offered to give her a ride home. It was rainy, and without sidewalks and streetlights, a walk home in Petrolia could be treacherous. She agreed. She figured she might also ask him about a job.

Terri was staying about 2 miles from the community center. But Meserve went the opposite direction, turning right toward a dark mass of trees.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I just want to show you where my property is,” she remembers him saying.

Terri started to get a “weird feeling,” according to court records. She told him she had to get up early. He ignored her and continued down the road, turning right again at a metal gate and entering a narrow dirt path into a thicket of towering eucalyptus. Finally, they came to a trailer and stopped. He tried to kiss her. She froze.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “Don’t you have a wife?”

Her mind spun through the possibilities. Could she find her way back if she ran? Would he chase her? Hurt her? Would anyone hear her if she screamed?

It was happening so fast and she could hardly see. Everything outside the beam of the headlights was flooded in black.

Terri declined to be interviewed for this story, but she encouraged friends and community members to open up and gave permission for her therapist, Briar-Bonpane, to speak as well.

“Taking her to a place that was dark, forested, unknown to her,” Briar-Bonpane said, “it’s the most terrifying situation for a woman who’s with a scary man.”

Meserve asked her to go inside. Terri climbed out of the truck and walked into the trailer. She remembers a small kitchen and a bedroom with a bare mattress. Over the next few hours, according to records, Meserve repeatedly penetrated her and forced her to perform oral sex until she gagged.

He held down her arms and at one point throttled her neck. When she began gasping for air, he told her she was “weak and couldn’t take it.” She didn’t scream. The more violent he was, she’d later tell the investigators, the more excited he seemed to become.

“I’m going to make you my bitch,” she recalls him saying, according to court records. He threatened to kill her, freeze her body and throw her to the animals if he ever found out she had slept with anyone else.

***

Many trimmigrants begin their journey about two hours southeast of Petrolia, in a small strip of a town at the hub of California’s outdoor growing economy. Garberville is surrounded on all sides by mountains of towering redwoods and lined with the kinds of businesses sustained by disposable income, including a spa and a motorcycle dealership. Next door, in Redway, there’s even a pet salon.

Come harvest season, trimmigrants arrive from all over the country and world – college students and artists, working professionals and tourists, homeless hippies and other wanderers. Without connections, they crowd the sidewalks as though on the floor of an auction house, jockeying for jobs with homemade signs. Others camp along the river or in the woods until they find work or try to meet potential employers by frequenting local bars or volunteering at one of the area’s many marijuana-funded nonprofits.

With marijuana fetching black market prices, they expect wages far higher than typical migrant farmworkers – as much as $300 a day, depending on how fast they work. A successful season can fund months of travel, and the experience itself can be an adventure, harkening back to the drug-infused journeys of Grateful Dead fans.

“A lot of cocaine, a lot of Ecstasy, a lot of meth, a lot of heroin,” said Terri’s former employer Rachel Adair. “It’s like a big party.”

But trimmigrants also stumble into a treacherous landscape, both on and off the job. Many locals despise their presence, the trash, the carousing on sidewalks – and the negative impact on tourism. Members of a Garberville group called Locals on Patrol take photographs, check identification and tell people to move on. Anti-trimmigrant bumper stickers have proliferated. “No Work Here, Keep Moving,” they read.

Trimmigrants also serve at the mercy of their bosses, who are themselves vulnerable to the risks of operating in the black market – ranging from robberies to law enforcement stings. As a result, some growers prefer to keep trimmers in the dark about where they are working. Workers and advocates say growers sometimes blindfold trimmers before driving to plots deep in the mountains, locations so remote that they often lack cell service and public transportation.

When conflicts arise, trimmigrants may find themselves fired without pay. Even those who complete the job might never get paid.

At 38 years old, Amy Jarose is among the most experienced trimmigrants. One time, she was working on a farm in the mountains when, she said, the grower began to pressure her for blow jobs and sex. She immediately left on foot, without pay.

“You hitchhike,” Jarose said. “You pack up your bags and hit the road and hope to God a really good person will pick you up.”

Growers often target women for trimming jobs; male trimmers told Reveal they repeatedly were passed up or let go to make room for female workers.

Some women exploit the demand. On Craigslist during the last harvest season, aspiring trimmers posted photos of themselves in bikinis or low-cut tops, accompanied by winking emoticons. One advertisement, offering “Oriental female trimmers,” included the phone number of a sensual massage parlor in Los Angeles. On a community bulletin board in downtown Garberville, a pink lace garter belt adorned one ad, while another read, “We love to cook … and much more.”

Deanna Hirschi once worked as a trimmer but said she soon realized she could earn more by offering sex for pay. She met growers at motels in Garberville or sometimes hours into the mountains.

“The guys on the hills pay $500 an hour,” she said, three or four times the amount she might get in a city. “They’re stuck up on a hill and they come down from the hill for one day, and they’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars in their pocket.”

The demand for female companionship has contributed to sex trafficking in these rural areas from all over the country and world, including from Mexico and Eastern Europe, according to social service providers and victims.

One local trafficking survivor, who goes by the name Elle Snow, started a nonprofit organization to spread awareness in Humboldt County called Game Over. To measure the demand, she posted fake escort advertisements on the classified ad website Backpage.

Within two months, Snow said, she had accumulated calls and text messages from 437 phone numbers. Many came from southern Humboldt – where Garberville and Petrolia are located – an indication to Snow that many of the potential clients were involved in the marijuana industry.

“Traffickers call Humboldt County not just green for the weed, but green for the bitches,” she said, referring to the money traffickers can make selling women and sex.

Many trimmers welcome the attention, but others do not. Women pair up, even form trimming collectives, counting on safety in numbers.

Paige Radcliff and Emma Less came last season for trimming work, hoping to make enough to fund their own future harvest. During nearly 14-hour days, the two listened to Israeli folk music and bent over plastic tubs in their laps, rotating the buds with the tips of their fingers as they clipped off the stems and curly bits of leaf. “Give it a little haircut,” Radcliff said again and again, until they had piled up 6 pounds of smooth round nuggets and their fingers were coated in potent, sticky brown resin.

“If a girl comes here on her own, I wouldn’t recommend it,” Less said. Prior to finding this job, they encountered growers who hit on them – and they simply walked away.

Radcliff agreed. “Unless you can super defend yourself, or you just give off a super-intimidating vibe where dudes are scared of you.”

“Like a truck driver.”

Or a pirate.

“Exactly, just come across as, like, super peg leg.”

“Think about it,” Less said, over the steady snip of her scissors. “None of this is monitored. No one knows you’re here, not here. It’s easy for people to go missing. It’s easy for people to take advantage.”

***

Monday, Nov. 10, 2014

Terri showed up for work in a daze the morning after she was assaulted in the forest. Bruises covered her chest and the back of her head. As she picked up her clippers, her boss remembers, she began to cry. She told Rachel Adair that “something inappropriate” had happened with Kailan Meserve and that she was scared.

Adair – an emergency room nurse and midwife – sent Terri to Jenoa Briar-Bonpane, a therapist and friend. Terri told the therapist the rest of the story.

“This is a predator,” Briar-Bonpane recalls thinking. She had treated child sex abuse and rape victims for years, but she was especially struck by how calculating Meserve sounded. “He must be stopped.”

A week later, some of Terri’s former employers called for a meeting, inviting town elders, the local doctor and friends. On a crisp November morning, about a dozen people joined Terri in the home near where she had pitched her tent. They gathered in a somber circle around a heavy oak dining table.

Cedar McCulloch-Clow, 38, with perpetual dirt under his fingernails and a baseball cap on his head, recalls feeling conflicted about the meeting. He had become friends with Terri during her many nights camping on their property. But he also had known Meserve since he was 15.

The room was tense and quiet, except for the sounds of children playing down the hall. Adair remembers wanting to ensure, first and foremost, that Terri was safe. Dr. Dick Scheinman was adamant that they call the police. Most others wanted to find an alternate solution.

Greg Smith, whose family has long grown marijuana, was among the town elders there. “There’s a lot of people who grow pot, and they have a resistance to calling the law,” he said later. “It’s kind of the Wild West in some ways.”

The ideas came in quick succession and were rejected just as quickly. Bring Meserve before a community tribunal. Send a large contingent of men to his doorstep. Gather Petrolia’s population of elderly women and have them chase after him with their shoes.

Smith decided to pay Meserve a visit at home. He urged him to admit he had a problem, show remorse and enroll in therapy and drug and alcohol treatment. Meserve refused, he said, describing the night in the trailer as consensual. Next, Smith approached Fire Chief Travis Howe about kicking Meserve out of the volunteer fire department.

That’s when the group learned this wasn’t the first time Meserve had been accused of rape. A year earlier, a young woman was visiting a friend of Meserve’s. After a night of partying at the Yellow Rose bar, the 31-year-old woman said, Meserve came into her room while she was sleeping and forced himself on her. When he couldn’t maintain an erection, he left, but soon came back and tried again.

The woman never filed a police report, and only a few people in town knew. Howe was one of them.

Howe said he had confronted Meserve, who told him it was consensual. “He messed up terribly, cheating on his wife,” Howe said. “He needed to get spanked.” When Meserve promised to do better, Howe kept him on as a fire captain.

Now the group realized Terri’s experience was not an isolated incident. It was a pattern of behavior.

One week had passed since Terri’s assault. She had expressed little interest in contacting law enforcement. But the group thought something had to be done for the safety of other women.

They asked her to take a step many rape victims dread: Would she call the police?

***

For victims of sexual assault, the answer often lies beneath layers of fear and shame. Rape usually goes unreported, but trimmigrants face particular pressure to avoid law enforcement. Calling police may rule out future jobs in the industry, especially if that contact alerts police to an illegal grow.

“Hell no, you don’t call the cops on anybody for anything if you want to work in Humboldt,” said Karen Bejcek, a trimmigrant who usually lives in a teepee in Siskiyou County when she’s not trimming.

Other conditions in pot country prevent victims from seeking any kind of help. Trimmigrants often lack the local connections or even the know-how to successfully navigate their way out of the wild, wooded terrain.

Because many work on illegal grows, they suspect law enforcement won’t do anything anyway. And because the industry attracts a young and transient workforce, victims ¬– who may come with their own troubled histories – do not always recognize they are being abused.

One teen from Humboldt County said she started working for a local grower when she was 12. He gave her methamphetamine to speed up her trimming work, she said, and passed her around to pay off his debts.

“If you’re tweaking, you’re good,” she said, touting her trimming prowess. “I did, like, a couple pounds in like one night.”

The girl eventually ran away, reaching a youth homeless shelter in the county seat of Eureka, only to discover that pimps were using it as a hunting ground. At 14, she said, she became their recruiter.

She wasn’t the only one. At least two other shelter residents said men used them to recruit other teens, according to a report later submitted to the state Department of Social Services. The shelter’s executive director, Patt Sweeney, said he was aware teens in the program had been trafficked for sex.

“We’ve made reports to law enforcement,” he said. “It’s just very hard to prosecute.”

In exchange for alcohol and marijuana, the girl brought other teens to parties at local motels, where they were given drugs and alcohol and had sex, sometimes by force. She said the parties drew growers and gang members involved in marijuana distribution. Because she brought girls, she said she was never assaulted – and the music and dancing could be fun. But she doesn’t remember much.

“I was always drunk,” she said with a shrug. “And then we’d just go buy more drugs.”

Many of the girls she met at the shelter and parties also traveled south to trim on marijuana farms. Once there, she said, some found they were expected to do more than trim.

The sales pitch to young girls is common in pot country, according to Leah Gee, the director of a group home in Eureka that housed the girl. “They’ll give you weed, alcohol and food, and all you have to do is trim.”

In 2013, federal prosecutors said two growers picked up a 15-year-old runaway in Hollywood and took her to their farm in Lake County, near Humboldt. They directed her to trim marijuana and have sex with them, sometimes while chained to a metal rack.

In interviews with police after a raid of the farm, the girl described the sex with one of the men as consensual. Sex with the other grower was “not as consensual.”

But she was not free to leave: To keep her from fleeing, the men put her inside an oversized metal toolbox with breathing holes for several days, according to court records, using a garden hose to clean out her waste. The men also shocked the girl with a cattle prod and told her she would be shot by neighbors if she attempted to leave, an employee later told police.

Local prosecutors charged the men with human trafficking, the first case of its kind in the county. But when federal authorities took over the case, the trafficking charge was dropped. The men are expected to plead guilty later this year on charges of illegal marijuana cultivation and employing a minor in a drug operation.

***

Sunday, Nov. 23, 2014

A deputy sheriff from Humboldt County, Michael Hass, had Terri recount the entire story of her assault over the phone before telling her she had to come in person to make a report – a nearly two-hour drive. The community group that had encouraged her to report made the arrangements. Jenoa Briar-Bonpane went along.

When they arrived at the county sheriff’s office in Eureka, they walked through the metal detector, down a beige cinder-block hallway to a dimly lit window in the waiting room, Briar-Bonpane recalls. They told the receptionist they were there to see Hass.

After several minutes passed, Hass swung open the door, barely making eye contact with Terri. He told her to follow him, but barred Briar-Bonpane from joining her. She told him it was common practice for an advocate to accompany a sexual assault victim to make a report. According to Briar-Bonpane, Hass refused.

Asked about the account, Hass said he did not know that Briar-Bonpane was an advocate and he objected to the many complaints the sheriff’s office later received about his work.

“There were the same complaints that we weren’t taking it seriously and the investigation wasn’t up to the people of Petrolia’s standards,” he said. “From my standpoint, it got handled very seriously.”

Terri agreed to make the report anyway. Hass took her into an empty room and pushed a typed statement based on her telephone account in front of her, Briar-Bonpane said. Terri signed it, and five minutes later, they returned to the waiting room.

“Can you tell us when you’re going to pick him up?” Briar-Bonpane remembers asking, referring to Kailan Meserve.

To file her report, Terri was told she had to come in person. It turned out the same trip was not required of Meserve, Briar-Bonpane said. To her surprise, Hass told her deputies already had interviewed Meserve in Petrolia. Meserve had told them the same story he had told others: The night in the trailer was consensual.

Reveal could not find any record that the deputies ever searched the trailer, and Meserve’s sister, Amy, confirmed that they never did.

“No one in town seems concerned about him,” Hass said, according to Briar-Bonpane. “We’re not going to arrest him. There’s no evidence.”

The news left the group back in Petrolia shocked – and Terri terrified. While she moved from home to home and finally to a motel outside of town, the group began to deluge the sheriff’s office with emails and phone calls. Terri’s friend Katie Finnegan took a day off work to file a complaint with the office about its handling of the case. Residents sent letters to the district attorney, complaining about Hass and urging that Meserve be prosecuted.

“Please do not let this go without a thorough investigation and arrest,” Dick Scheinman, the town doctor, wrote to then-District Attorney Paul Gallegos in December 2014.

A month passed, and he emailed again: “i am not a legal beagle and am not trying to tell you how to do your job, but i feel it is most important for you to try your hardest to find out what happened.”

Meanwhile, Meserve remained in Petrolia. “I am very concerned about the safety of women in the Mattole Valley while he is present there,” Briar-Bonpane wrote to newly elected District Attorney Maggie Fleming in March 2015. “Young boys/men in the valley are watching and learning about whether or not you can sexually assault women without consequences.”

Word of Terri’s allegations reached the woman who had said Meserve raped her the year before. She felt nauseous, then angry. She blamed herself for not reporting it, “because maybe she could have prevented it from happening to the other girl,” an investigator later wrote. About a month after Terri visited Hass, the second victim decided to report her rape. Records show Hass told her to call the district attorney’s office.

The case landed on the desk of Kyla Baxley, the district attorney’s investigator responsible for child abuse and sexual assault cases. She has a reputation for being thorough, going beyond the case information filed by local law enforcement. In 2014, Baxley gathered evidence that allowed the district attorney’s office to prosecute its first human trafficking case.

Time and again, Baxley had seen victims in Humboldt County “not met with the respect they deserve,” she told Reveal. In the Petrolia case, she said, both victims felt blown off by the sheriff’s office.

“It was already a big step for her to take, for her to report it,” she said of Terri. “I was really frustrated, honestly. I felt awful for the poor thing.”

Baxley immediately launched her investigation, making plans to meet Terri in person. She brought in community advocates to support Terri as she shared her story yet again.

“I tried to show her there were a lot of people who supported her and wanted to hear her truth,” Baxley said.

On April 14, 2015, prosecutors filed charges against Meserve for raping both women. Two weeks later, he surrendered.

***

As the marijuana industry has grown and the trimmigrant population with it, service providers have encountered increasing numbers of human trafficking victims. Humboldt Domestic Violence Services answered more than 2,000 crisis calls last year, an increase of about 80 percent in four years. Executive Director Brenda Bishop attributed the increase to a surge in sexual abuse and trafficking on marijuana grows.

Other organizations have noticed a problem, too, including the Eureka Police Department. In a survey of about 200 local homeless people, Police Chief Andrew Mills said his department discovered many were former trimmigrants who had been forced to work on marijuana farms without pay, including women who reported being required to perform sex acts.

Despite evidence of a growing problem, law enforcement has put few resources into investigations of trafficking and sexual exploitation. Instead, police have conducted stings targeting prostitutes and sometimes their pimps. And the Eureka police chief recently posed as a grower online to attract trimmers, only to warn them not to come.

One reason is that, in this spread-out rural region, there are not enough detectives to go around. In Humboldt County, the sheriff’s office is so overtaxed that many deputies are responsible for investigating crimes – a job typically left to detectives – in addition to responding to 911 calls.

“We have a detective bureau to handle the bad of the bad crimes, and they can’t even keep up with that. So our deputies are more like detectives,” Lt. Wayne Hanson said. “It’s triage.”

A Humboldt native with a bushy gray mustache, Hanson has raided marijuana farms for more than two decades. On the walls of his office are framed photographs and news clips, including one from the day after voters legalized medical marijuana in 1996. In the photograph, Hanson – with a dark brown mustache – stands next to towering piles of marijuana plants.

“This was a warehouse in downtown Eureka, where people were growing marijuana for money. That’s why marijuana is grown – for money, not for medical reasons,” Hanson said. “People are greedy.”

Hanson and other local law enforcement officials see the greed that has amplified California’s marijuana industry as a common denominator in violent and organized crimes. Hanson said many grows also cause environmental damage. As a result, marijuana has remained a high priority for them, even as federal and state authorities have pulled back.

Marijuana raids also have become a large source of revenue for local law enforcement agencies. During raids, officers have confiscated not just harvests, but also money, guns and even farming equipment.

Humboldt County law enforcement agencies made 100 seizures of property and funds last year, including from farmers who had legal permission to grow. The value of the assets totaled more than $2 million – more per capita than was pulled from the state’s 15 most populous counties combined, state data shows. Mendocino County’s marijuana eradication team receives a finder’s fee from a pool of seized funds for every case it initiates, in addition to a nearly 50 percent cut of any confiscated funds.

The result is tantamount to tunnel vision, said Kyla Baxley, the district attorney’s office investigator. “They’re going in to eradicate marijuana, and they would probably tell you nothing else is happening but the drugs.”

That perspective seems to pervade law enforcement agencies across the Emerald Triangle.

In 2014, the year Terri arrived in Petrolia, a young Mexican woman arrived in nearby Mendocino County, ready to start the restaurant job she was promised. Instead, a grower – Baldemar Alvarez – put her to work on several marijuana farms, she said, and forced her to cook, clean his house and have sex with him.

The woman said Alvarez, twice her age, called her a prostitute and said she belonged to him until she reimbursed him for hiring a coyote to bring her into the country illegally. He stoked her fear, telling her she’d get lost in the woods and a bear would feast on her body if she fled.

“All the time, I had fear,” said Carmen (not her real name). “Fear, thinking, ‘If the police catch me, they’re going to arrest me. They’re not going to let me explain, they’re not going to believe me.’ ”

Eventually, Carmen persuaded Alvarez to take her to the doctor for stomach pains, she said. Once there, a nurse-midwife told her she was pregnant, and Carmen shared her story of abuse. When she returned to Alvarez, she left her address behind.

Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies picked up Carmen and the grower a few days later. Carmen was relieved. But at the station, things changed. A detective asked her whether she had made the claims just to get immigration documents, she said. Victims of sexual assault are eligible for a special kind of visa, known as a U-visa. Trafficking victims are eligible for a T-visa.

Carmen’s abuse allegations are documented in police dispatch records, a restraining order and other documents, but the full extent of the investigation is unclear. The detective involved did not respond to interview requests, and the sheriff’s office declined to provide a copy of its investigation, saying it was not yet complete.

Underscoring the he-said, she-said obstacles for law enforcement, Alvarez told Reveal that Carmen fabricated the story to get immigration papers. He told detectives he had planned to marry her. Even though she hasn’t paid him back for her illegal border crossing, he said, he has sent her money on a couple of occasions for the baby.

“This was a big misunderstanding; she’s a backstabber is what I call it,” he said, denying he had abused her or anyone else.

But another woman who had a relationship with the grower and gave birth to one of his children said he repeatedly has brought women, including herself, into the United States from Mexico and abused them. Investigators never contacted her, she said.

As the sun began to rise the morning after deputies took Carmen into custody, she said the detective told her that he had one last request. He put her in a room with Alvarez and had her confront him, to get him to confess. It didn’t work.

“Unfortunately, at this time, we do not have any evidence to detain him,” she recalled the detective saying. “Everything you say, he denies.”

Deputies charged Alvarez with felony marijuana cultivation in August 2014, his third arrest for the offense in three years. Jail records show he bailed out within 20 minutes. The prosecutor never took the case to court.

***

Thursday, April 30, 2015

The case against Kailan Meserve was unprecedented – the first time a marijuana grower in Humboldt County had been charged with raping a trimmigrant. In Petrolia, it had created a rift, causing many to question the trust they had placed in the community. Yet outside Petrolia, it captured little attention.

Aside from a local blog, no media outlets covered Meserve’s arrest.

He remained in jail briefly while the prosecutor’s office argued against allowing him to post his $2 million bail. Investigator Kyla Baxley had seen large greenhouses on several of Meserve’s properties and argued that his income had been derived illegally from the cultivation of marijuana. In the end, Meserve’s family and friends pooled funds, and he was released.

Over the next year, he enrolled in treatment for alcohol abuse, according to court records. Facebook photos show he and his family also enjoyed a Disney vacation.

Sam Epperson fell into a deep depression. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was responsible for Terri climbing into Meserve’s truck that night. With harvest season over, Terri had left Petrolia.

Finally, on April 4, 2016, the trial date arrived. Meserve sat next to his lawyer in a courtroom in downtown Eureka, dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks. Terri had returned to take the stand.

“Is this your first time testifying in court? How do you feel about being here?” prosecutor Brie Bennett asked.

“OK,” Terri replied.

She described the night in detail. The feeling of panic, the sexual acts, the violence. She answered questions from the defense attorney about her sex life in Petrolia and a shoplifting conviction from years ago. At one point, her voice began to crack, and she wiped tears from behind her black-framed glasses. Her voice grew faint.

The judge leaned over. “Please speak up,” he said.

The other victim described waking up the morning after the assault, crying and sore. She told her friend she had to go, according to court records, and began the long drive back to San Francisco, making stops to throw up along the way.

On the stand, Meserve denied having a drug problem and called his encounters with Terri and the other woman consensual. Everyone was drunk, he said. No one ever told him to stop.

“Did she say she wanted to go to the trailer?” the prosecutor asked about Terri.

“She never said she didn’t,” Meserve responded.

From her seat in the courtroom, Meserve’s sister, Amy, remembers watching an image take shape that she did not recognize.

“He’s being portrayed like some monster,” she said later. “Obviously, he did not think he was raping anyone. I just don’t think he did. That’s not who he is, that’s not what he’s capable of. I just know if they would have said no or stop or anything, he would have stopped.”

While Meserve’s family attended the trial, most of the group that had supported Terri remained behind in Petrolia. It was a far distance to travel, but it also was painful to watch. Many believed it had been a mistake to contact law enforcement.

“I am friends with his sister and his dad and his mom,” said longtime local grower Greg Smith. “It feels like we’re carrying a big weight on our chest.”

The community of Petrolia was changing, but residents weren’t sure it was for the better. California Gov. Jerry Brown had signed a package of laws that would further regulate the medical marijuana industry, beginning with state-issued licenses in 2018. Many Humboldt County growers have refused to participate. They would not sign up for county permits, the first step toward legal compliance.

To complicate matters, under the new regulations, counties can ban growing altogether, and many have, preserving a highly profitable black market. Competition is increasing, and prices are likely to drop.

In this new future, it seemed, small farmers would struggle financially. Success would mean going big or continuing to sell on the black market. Before his arrest, Meserve had found that success growing marijuana, accruing land, money and power. But some wondered, at what cost?

On April 19, a jury found Meserve guilty of 15 felony counts, including rape and false imprisonment. His wife began to cry as deputies handcuffed him and took him into custody.

When the news reached Petrolia, many in the group that had supported Terri felt deflated instead of relieved. They knew the conviction meant Meserve could end up spending the rest of his life in prison. Smith and Epperson agreed to write letters to the judge urging a lenient sentence.

“I would rather have rehabilitation than punishment,” Smith said. “Some people think it’s impossible with him, but I don’t know. I just have hope that people can change.”

On July 28, the Meserve family and their supporters filed into the courtroom. Meserve’s mother, sister and wife cried as he stood motionless, awaiting the judge’s sentence. Each read from a prepared statement.

“These charges are extreme and overboard,” said his father, David. “These charges are from an enthusiasm for prosecuting people in the marijuana industry.”

“Kailan wants to start an AA group in Petrolia,” said Monica, his wife. “He wants to give back.”

Terri was not there. An advocate read a statement from the second victim.

“Every morsel of self-confidence has left me,” she read. “Humboldt is my home, and I cannot bring myself to visit my friends or family there.”

The judge sentenced Meserve to 23 years in prison.

He did not make a statement in court that day. Through his family, he declined to comment for this story. Terri has since moved out of state.

And, as the harvest season swings into full gear, a new crop of trimmigrants is streaming north, thumbs out, pointing toward the thickly forested mountains of the Emerald Triangle.

‘KUMQUAT’ ON NORTH CAROLINA LICENSE PLATE OFFENDS SOME IDIOT

Lori Ann Phillips thought her license plate was innocent enough. Then came the letter

By Katie Mettler

The Washington Post
September 8, 2016

The name game started with Lori Ann Phillips' first car, a red Toyota Camry.

A friend in high school said her first set of wheels needed an identity, a moniker to make it unique.

Phillips decided on Peaches.

Between her teens and early 20s - through high school and college in her home state of Pennsylvania - she cycled through two more vehicles, each with their own fruit-themed names.

Mango was a maroon Jeep Wrangler.

Papaya was a white Ford F-150 truck.

So when it came time to leave her hometown of Wilkes-Barre 12 years ago and venture to North Carolina, Phillips loaded her belongings into a brand new Toyota RAV4 and pondered what tropical fruit she could appropriate next.

Gwyneth Paltrow had just given birth to her daughter, so Apple was out of the question, and if she wanted to put the new name on a personalized license plate, could a fruit like strawberry even fit?

Eventually Phillips stumbled upon the "little gems" of the citrus family, a fruit she had not tasted but whose name was too quirky to pass up.

From then on, her RAV4 was known as Kumquat.

For more than a decade and 216,000 miles, Phillips drove her silver SUV with the "KUMQUAT" license plate without incident. It would solicit occasional gawks at gas stations, and sometimes people would snap photos at stoplights. But nobody ever complained.

Kumquat is, after all, just a fruit.

Then last week, Phillips got the letter.

"This correspondence is in reference to the personalized license plate KUMQUAT," Sherry Lee, a supervisor with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, wrote Aug. 25. "We are in receipt of complaints stating that the plate is offensive and in poor taste."

It gave her 30 days to craft a written statement explaining what the word Kumquat means to her.

And if she didn't, according to the letter, the DOT would revoke her plate.

Phillips was dumbfounded.

She had just returned from a two-week vacation and was in no mood to defend her license plate's honor. In a fit of frustration, she vented on Facebook.

The tone of her post, Phillips told The Washington Post, went something like this: "Is this for real?" and "I can't believe they sent this," followed by "you've got to be kidding me" and "learn your fruits."

But she started contemplating her response anyway. She printed off the kumquat Wikipedia page and tried to investigate what ulterior meanings the word might have. Phillips avoided the definitions on Urban Dictionary. At least she hadn't spelled it like the Australians.

In the meantime, a friend of hers and the editor of the Raleigh Agenda, an online news organization, asked whether he could tell her story. The Agenda called the DOT and asked about the letter. One employee, Rebecca Richards, told the publication she could recall just one complaint about Phillips's KUMQUAT plate. Lee, the woman who penned the warning letter, said she must issue notices to any North Carolina driver who receives a complaint, no matter how silly or unfounded they might be.

In her 26 years at the DOT, Lee told the Agenda she estimates sending out about 10 warning letters per year.

"In this day and time, things mean a lot of different things," she told the publication. "Some people see 'CEX,' which is part of a standard-issue plate, and issue a complaint. You can make anything bad these days."

The Agenda story published Aug. 31, and, within hours, the DOT had responded with a tweet.

"#NCDMV verified a kumquat is in fact a fruit," it said.

At home, Phillips also received a voice-mail message, telling her she need not take any more action.

"I was a little let down," she told The Post. "I was looking forward to the response."

She had even schemed to complement her defensive letter with a little care package full of kumquats - for proof, she said, that the fruit really exists, even if she admittedly thinks they're "nasty."

About a year after she named her car Kumquat, Phillips finally tasted one. She hated it.

"It's nasty," Phillips told the Agenda. "I think it's a vile little fruit."

Even so, she loves her license plate - and already has her eye on some fresh names for her new car when Kumquat needs to be replaced.

Right now, she's pondering Tangelo.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s a good thing Lori Ann did not pick ‘Horned Melon’, also known as African cucumber or jelly melon, because some busybodies would think it referred to horny breasts.

INCIDENT IN HANGZHOU

Obama’s humiliation by the Chinese is a sign … and the world is paying attention

By Charles Krauthammer

The Washington Post
September 8, 2016

The president of the United States lands with all the majesty of Air Force One, waiting to exit the front door and stride down the rolling staircase to the red-carpeted tarmac. Except that there is no rolling staircase. He is forced to exit — as one China expert put it rather undiplomatically — through “the ass” of the plane.

This happened Saturday at Hangzhou airport. Yes, in China. If the Chinese didn’t invent diplomatic protocol, they surely are its most venerable and experienced practitioners. They’ve been at it for 4,000 years. They are the masters of every tributary gesture, every nuance of hierarchical ritual. In a land so exquisitely sensitive to protocol, rolling staircases don’t just disappear at arrival ceremonies. Indeed, not one of the other G-20 world leaders was left stranded on his plane upon arrival.

Did President Xi Jinping directly order airport personnel and diplomatic functionaries to deny President Obama a proper welcome? Who knows? But the message, whether intentional or not, wasn’t very subtle. The authorities expressed no regret, no remorse and certainly no apology. On the contrary, they scolded the media for even reporting the snub.

No surprise. China’s ostentatious rudeness was perfectly reflective of the world’s general disdain for Obama. His high-minded lectures about global norms and demands that others live up to their “international obligations” are no longer amusing. They’re irritating.

Foreign leaders have reciprocated by taking this administration down a notch knowing they pay no price. In May 2013, Vladimir Putin reportedly kept the U.S. secretary of state cooling his heels for three hours outside his office before deigning to receive him. Even as Obama was hailing the nuclear deal with Iran as a great breakthrough, the ayatollah vowed “no change” in his policy, which remained diametrically opposed to “U.S. arrogant system.” The mullahs followed by openly conducting illegal ballistic missile tests — calculating, correctly, that Obama would do nothing. And when Iran took prisoner 10 American sailors in the Persian Gulf, made them kneel and broadcast the video, what was the U.S. response? Upon their release, John Kerry publicly thanked Iran for its good conduct.

Why should Xi treat Obama with any greater deference? Beijing illegally expands into the South China Sea, meeting only the most perfunctory pushback from the U.S. Obama told CNN that he warned Xi to desist or “there will be consequences.” Is there a threat less credible?

Putin annexes Crimea and Obama crows about the isolation he has imposed on Russia. Look around. Moscow has become Grand Central Station for Middle East leaders seeking outside help in their various conflicts. As for Ukraine, both the French president and the German chancellor have hastened to Moscow to plead with Putin to make peace. Some isolation.

Iran regularly harasses our vessels in the Persian Gulf. Russian fighters buzzed a U.S. destroyer in the Baltic Sea. And just Wednesday, a Russian fighter flew within 10 feet of an American military jet. The price they paid? Being admonished that such provocations are unsafe and unprofessional. An OSHA citation is more ominous.

Add to that American acquiescence not just to ransoming hostages held by Iran, but to delivering the loot by unmarked plane filled with stacks of cold (untraceable) cash, like a desert drug deal. Why the stealth? Obviously to conceal the manner of the transaction from Congress and the American public. Some humiliations are so grotesque that even the Obama team can’t miss it.

Now the latest. At the G-20, Obama said he spoke to Putin about cyberwarfare, amid revelations that Russian hackers have been interfering in our political campaigns. We are more technologically advanced, both offensively and defensively, in this arena than any of our adversaries, said Obama, but we really don’t want another Cold War-style arms race.

Instead, we must all adhere to norms of international behavior.

It makes you want to weep. This KGB thug adhering to norms? He invades Ukraine, annexes Crimea, bombs hospitals in Aleppo — and we expect him to observe cyber-code etiquette? Rather than exploit our technological lead — with countermeasures and deterrent threats — to ensure our own cyber-safety?

We’re back to 1929 when Secretary of State Henry Stimson shut down a U.S. code-breaking operation after it gave him decoded Japanese telegrams. He famously explained that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

Well, comrade, Putin is no gentleman. And he’s reading our mail.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hillary and the Democrats are lucky that most Americans are unaware that having Obama leave Air Force One through “the ass” of the plane was a deliberate humiliation of our President by the Chinese to show the world there's a new sheriff in town.

“China’s ostentatious rudeness was perfectly reflective of the world’s general disdain for Obama.” That’s why the president of the Philippines called Obama a “son of a whore” - that tiny island nation's equivalent of son of a bitch - after our president scolded him for the harsh way he was conducting the war on drugs.

IS A COP A ‘PUBLIC OFFICIAL’? - IT IS NOT AN INSIGNIFICANT QUESTION

By Bob Walsh

A really interesting case MAY come before SCOTUS next year. It could have far-reaching effects on people employed within the criminal justice system as peace officers.

The current landmark case in the defamation arena is New York Times vs. Sullivan. This landmark decision sets a VERY HIGH BAR, almost impossibly high, with regards to defamation cases filed against journalists and others by “public officials.” This is important as persons described as “public officials” must establish “actual malice” on the part of someone who makes what is claimed to be a defamatory statement against them. Essentially this means that the statement must be false, the person making the statement KNEW it to be false and went
ahead and made it anyway with the specific intent to harm.

The case under review is Armstrong vs. Thompson. Ten years ago Harry Armstrong was a criminal investigator with a federal agency known as TIGTA. (Tax Inspector General for Tax Administration.) Armstrong carried a badge and a gun, supervised people who did so, and made presentations to prosecutors and presented evidence in court. He was by any reasonable definition a supervising level peace officer.

Armstrong came under investigation for accessing government databases without authorization. He admitted to do so and prosecutors declined to charge him. TIGTA made a deal with him by which he resigned without admitting any liability or fault.

Armstrong subsequently applied for a similar position with the USDA. They made him an offer which he accepted, but the USDA then pulled back its offer. They got a rat-o-gram on him, asserting that he left under threat of being fired and offered the opinion that hiring him would be a “grave error.”

In the course of things Armstrong found out that Karen Thompson, one of his subordinate employees, authored the rat-o-gram. He sued, alleging defamation, negligent infliction of emotional distress, etc. etc.

The case went thru the D.C. Court of Appeals for years. Finally Thompson was upheld, with one important exception, that being the claim of intentional interference with prospective contractual relationships. For that issue the court applied the Sullivan ruling, stating that Armstrong was in fact a “public official” and as such had to show actual malice as well as falsity of the statements.

Strangely enough SCOTUS has never said definitively whether or not a peace officer who is not elected to his position is in fact a “public official.”

SCOTUS may in fact not accept the case. If they do they could very easily, on its merits, rule against Armstrong. Nevertheless it is an interesting angle.

EDITOR’S NOTE: According to Black's Law Dictionary a "public official" is "[o]ne who holds or is invested with a public office; a person elected or appointed to carry out some portion of a government's sovereign powers." "Public officer" is defined in a similar way.

PRIVATEER SUED OVER PRISON HOMICIDE

By Bob Walsh

The private operator of the Cimarron Correctional Facility at Cushing, OK, is being sued over the murder of a criminal at their facility. An unspecified inmate is also being sued.

Kyle Tiffee, 23, was one of four prisoners murdered in a large disturbance at that facility one year ago. Various prison staffers assert that the fight was between two gangs of white inmates. The Corrections Corporation of America, the operator of the facility, has not commented on any suspected motivation for the murders.

The lawsuit asserts that the operator was negligent and that various prison employees were complicity in allowing a buildup of contraband in inmate cells.

No charges have been filed in the four deaths. The Oklahoma DOC has thus far refused to release video of the riot, citing security concerns.

SUSPENDED MISSISSIPPI POLICE CHIEF COMMITS SUICIDE IN COP SHOP PARKING LOT.

By Bob Walsh

Mike De Nardo was the Chief of Police of Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi. Thursday he was suspended from duty pending investigation of an “ongoing personnel issue.” He promptly turned in his department issued equipment, walked into the parking lot accompanied by two Hancock County Sheriff’s Deputies and shot himself in the chest. He died shortly after at a nearby hospital.

The mayor, Les Fillingame, confirmed that the chief was suspended and was under investigation, but also stated that it was his personal belief that the chief would be cleared of the charges against him. The mayor did not elaborate on what those charges were.

De Nardo had been chief since 2010, and was appointed by Mayor Fillingame.

The Sheriff’s Department will assume operational command of the police department until a new chief can be named.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Accompanied by two deputies? De Nardo must have been the fastest draw in the South.

I would guess that because he shot himself immediately after exiting the station, there was a woman involved in the personnel issue. He probably did not want to stick around and see his family embarrassed.

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE ESCORT HILLARY OUT BEFORE SHE HURTS HERSELF … AND US?

Hillary started the nuke deal with Iran, hit the reset button with the Russians and planned Israel's demise with the help of self-hating Jews Sid Blumenthal and George Soros

By Dave Weinbaum

Jewish World Review
September 9, 2016

Where is Captain Obvious when you need him?

What is clear to the world and a growing number of Americans is how desperate the USA looks to their friends and allies. Obama is called "son of a whore" by the Prime Minister of the Philippines. This island country depends on the gravitas of the west to protect their vulnerable arses against the likes of the Chinese and North Koreans.

Just days before the Chinese intentionally left Obama without the proper steps that are to be put in the front exit of AF1. He had to exit from the maintenance steps in the back. It reminded me about Obama kicking Israeli PM Netanyahu to a dungeon in the corner basement whilst Bibi's masters, the royal first family dined in the main house.

When the Chinese insulted our president it was known by all people as a well-planned slight. When an Obama spokesperson tried to intercede a Chinese official touted that the Obama sycophant was in HIS country.

Maybe the Chinese were killing two birds with one stone. They were punishing an anti-Semite while backing the representative of the long-loyal Chinese-food-feasting Jewish populace all over the world.

To top it off, a hidden $1.7 billion stash of taxpayer cash was delivered to the Iranians as ransom and/or bribery. Even this sudden windfall couldn't stop the Mullahs from buzzing our ships or supplying Hezbollah and Hamas.

It wasn't long after Obama and Putin partook in a glaring match that a Russian fighter jet came within ten feet of a USAF jet.

Hillary Clinton had an integral part in all this.

She started the nuke deal with Iran, hit the reset button with the Russians and planned Israel's demise with the help of self-hating Jews Sid Blumenthal and George Soros. Because of her "extreme carelessness" with her emails Clinton was probably the main provider of information to all our friends and allies.

Hillary Clinton is a woman so clueless that when her inevitable coughing fits hit her on stage, she holds the mike close to her mouth so everyone in the country can hear. Has anyone considered telling her to hold the mike behind her until it passes?

Of course one has to consider that the sounds from the backside of Hillary may be a little more damaging to her campaign than her public hacking.

Hillary has discounted a friendly media. After Dr. Drew brought up some of her already publicly known injuries CNN abruptly fired him from his radio show. Drew was wrong about one thing. He said her cognition was probably okay.

The FBI released details of Clinton's interview just six days ago.

Hillary claimed she couldn't remember being trained on classified information and other things a normal person would know, 39 times. I can't wait for her explanation of how 11 of her 13 devices were destroyed by her staff--with a hammer--or how many of her emails were erased with bleach bit.

Hillary, not Donald Trump claimed a concussion and her cerebral venous thrombosis AKA a brain injury prevented her from working and remembering.

Congressman Jason Chaffetz is set to reopen hearings regarding her newly found emails that were supposed to be destroyed. These will further connect pay-for-play Clinton Foundation and her selling of State Department contracts to anyone, including enemies of the USA.

There's no way out of this. The noose is tightening.

Lying, evil, felonious and her own self-acclaimed health calamities disqualify Hillary Rodham Clinton from being President of the United States. Hopefully, the voters will be convinced of that on November 8th.

It would be in her best interest and the United States of America.

THIS SMALL INDIANA COUNTY SENDS MORE PEOPLE TO PRISON THAN SAN FRANCISCO AND DURHAM, N.C. COMBINED. WHY?

By Josh Keller and Adam Pearce

The New York Times
September 2, 2016

LAWRENCEBURG, Ind. — Donnie Gaddis picked the wrong county to sell 15 oxycodone pills to an undercover officer.

If Mr. Gaddis had been caught 20 miles to the east, in Cincinnati, he would have received a maximum of six months in prison, court records show. In San Francisco or Brooklyn, he would probably have received drug treatment or probation, lawyers say.

But Mr. Gaddis lived in Dearborn County, Ind., which sends more people to prison per capita than nearly any other county in the United States. After agreeing to a plea deal, he was sentenced to serve 16 years in prison.

“Years? Holy Toledo — I’ve settled murders for a lot less than that,” said Philip Stephens, a public defender in Cincinnati.

Dearborn County represents the new boom in American prisons: mostly white, rural and politically conservative.

A bipartisan campaign to reduce mass incarceration has led to enormous declines in new inmates from big cities, cutting America’s prison population for the first time since the 1970s. From 2006 to 2014, annual prison admissions dropped 36 percent in Indianapolis; 37 percent in Brooklyn; 69 percent in Los Angeles County; and 93 percent in San Francisco.

But large parts of rural and suburban America — overwhelmed by the heroin epidemic and concerned about the safety of diverting people from prison — have gone the opposite direction. Prison admissions in counties with fewer than 100,000 people have risen even as crime has fallen, according to a New York Times analysis, which offers a newly detailed look at the geography of American incarceration.

Just a decade ago, people in rural, suburban and urban areas were all about equally likely to go to prison. But now people in small counties are about 50 percent more likely to go to prison than people in populous counties.

The stark disparities in how counties punish crime show the limits of recent state and federal changes to reduce the number of inmates. Far from Washington and state capitals, county prosecutors and judges continue to wield great power over who goes to prison and for how long. And many of them have no interest in reducing the prison population.

“I am proud of the fact that we send more people to jail than other counties,” Aaron Negangard, the elected prosecutor in Dearborn County, said last year. “That’s how we keep it safe here.”

He added in an interview: “My constituents are the people who decide whether I keep doing my job. The governor can’t make me. The legislature can’t make me.”

But many criminal justice experts say that the size of the disparities undercuts the basic promise of equal protection under the law.

“Letting local prosecutors enforce state laws differently throws all notions of equality under the law out the window,” said Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, which advocates reducing incarceration rates. “This data puts governors and legislative leaders on notice that if they want to put criminal justice reforms into effect, they need to look at how prosecutors use and abuse their discretion.”

The analysis is based on previously unpublished data from the Department of Justice on state prisons, which hold the vast majority of American inmates sentenced to a year or more.

The divide does not appear to be driven by changes in crime, which fell in rural and urban areas at roughly equal rates, according to the F.B.I. Instead, it reflects growing disagreement about how harshly crime should be punished, especially drivers of the criminal justice system like theft, drugs, weapons and drunken driving.

Cities have adopted a more lenient approach to drug offenses in particular, diverting many low-level drug offenders to probation or treatment rather than to jail.

Those choices have started to reverse — if only modestly — longstanding racial disparities in American prisons, where blacks and Hispanics are incarcerated at drastically higher rates than whites. The annual number of new black prison inmates fell by about 25 percent from 2006 to 2013, and the number of Hispanic inmates fell by about 30 percent, while the number of new white inmates fell by only about 8 percent, according to the most complete federal data.

The number of black prisoners is still “shockingly high,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project. “Nonetheless, these numbers are encouraging. It suggests that this is not necessarily an intractable problem.”

But rural, mostly white and politically conservative counties have continued to send more drug offenders to prison, reflecting the changing geography of addiction. While crack cocaine addiction was centered in cities, opioid and meth addiction are ravaging small communities like those in Dearborn County, where 97 percent of the population is white.

A collection of small, quiet towns near the Ohio River, Dearborn County does not look like a prison capital. Violent crime is rare. There are few empty storefronts. And local officials, flush with money brought in by a popular local casino, have built a convention center and a high school football field fit for a movie set.

But the extraordinarily high incarceration rate here — about one in 10 adults is in prison, jail or probation — is driven less by crime and poverty than by a powerful prosecutor, hard-line judges and a growing heroin epidemic.

Opioid addiction spread early here. Mr. Negangard, the prosecutor, has fought the heroin crisis by aggressively going after drug crimes.

“If you’re not prosecuting, then you’re de facto legalizing it,” Mr. Negangard said.

Mr. Negangard has faced few obstacles to getting more convictions. He supervises his own police force, an unusual arrangement that allows him to investigate and prosecute most of the county’s serious crime. The police go after even minor drug cases, often offering to dismiss drug possession charges in exchange for information on friends or family members who sell drugs.

Probation officials are just as strict. Offenders released on probation are tested for drugs frequently, and hundreds of people who violate the terms of their probation have been sent to state prison in the past few years.

By 2014, Dearborn County sentenced more people to prison than San Francisco or Westchester County, N.Y., which each have at least 13 times as many people.

“It’s government run amok,” said Douglas A. Garner, a local criminal defense attorney.

Lawmakers in Indiana, concerned about the rising cost of incarceration, enacted a law that reduced criminal penalties starting in 2014 — one of at least 40 states to approve measures to reduce incarceration in the past few years. The bill was signed into law by Gov. Mike Pence, now the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

But the new rules, which Mr. Negangard fought, have done little to curb incarceration rates in Dearborn County.

Mr. Negangard said the long sentences here are the envy of police officers in Cincinnati. If a suspect is willing to sell drugs in Dearborn County, the Cincinnati police will help steer the case here, where greater punishment is almost assured, he said.

One Cincinnati man, Scott Huy, drove from Cincinnati to Dearborn County in 2013, enticed by a heroin deal set up by a police informer. Mr. Huy had already been convicted of drug trafficking twice in Ohio, for which he had served a total of five years in prison.

After Mr. Huy sold seven grams of heroin to an undercover officer, he was sentenced to serve 35 years.

Lawyers here have a term for when defendants like Mr. Huy realize the geographic disparity: “sticker shock.”

Defense lawyers outside Dearborn County respond with disbelief as well.

“That is so far out of line with the crime itself and any common notion of decency,” Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s public defender, said of Mr. Huy’s sentence.

The rural resistance to lighter penalties goes beyond Indiana.

Prosecutors in New York City have sharply cut incarceration rates in part by diverting drug offenders from prison after state changes encouraged paths to treatment. But in the rest of the state, prosecutors and judges continue to put drug offenders in prison at a steady flow.

In Texas, a series of changes intended to cut the prison population led to large reductions in new prisoners from Houston and Austin. But the rest of the state has had only modest declines.

Court systems and jails in many populated areas are overcrowded, putting pressure on judges to offer probation. A federal court ordered California to reduce chronic prison overcrowding in 2009, leading to the largest declines in admissions in the country. Low-level offenders are now released on probation or diverted to local jails.

At the same time, cities tend to have more resources to fight addiction outside of jail and prison. In Cincinnati, most people who are caught with small quantities of drugs are charged with a crime but are diverted to drug court, where they are placed in an outpatient treatment program, said Mr. Stephens, the public defender. If the offender completes the program, the charge is dismissed.

“People are trying to work with it here in Cincinnati so it doesn’t overwhelm the justice system,” Mr. Stephens said.

In smaller counties, prisons are often the only well-funded response to a range of social ills, including drug abuse and mental illness.

To handle the expanded caseload, Dearborn County officials spent $11.5 million to double the size of the local jail and approved $11 million more to expand the county courthouse.

But money for drug treatment is scarce. At least 225 of the 250 inmates in the Dearborn County jail have a drug addiction, estimated Jonathan L. Cleary, a county judge. But drug treatment programs can serve only about 40 of them.

Mr. Negangard said he wished the county could find more money for drug treatment. But he said about half of all addicts in prison had a criminal mind-set and would keep committing crimes whether they got clean or not.

“We can’t just let the bad guys go,” he said.

THE CHANCELLOR FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS RESPONDS TO KAEPERNICK’S PROTEST BY CALLING ON EVERYONE TO STAND DURING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM AND TO RESPECT OUR FLAG

Admiral William McRaven says it was important for the athletes to stand up straight when the National Anthem is being played, to face the flag, and to place their hand over their heart as a sign of respect to this nation

In a response to Colin Kaepernick’s ‘stand up by sitting down’ protest, University of Texas System Chancellor William McRaven wrote a memo the system’s presidents and athletic directors on August 29 in which he called on everyone to stand during the national anthem and to respect the flag.

Chancellor McRaven is a retired Navy Admiral. Here are some excerpts from his memo:

“I spent 37 years defending freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Nothing is more important to this democracy. Nothing! However, while no one should be compelled to stand, they should recognize that by sitting in protest to the flag they are disrespecting everyone who sacrificed to make this country what it is today — as imperfect as it might be.”

“Those that believe the flag represents oppression should remember all the Americans who fought to eliminate bigotry, racism, sexism, imperialism, communism, and terrorism. The flag rode with the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th, 10th, 24th and 25th Calvary and Infantry Regiments. It was carried by the suffragists down the streets of New York City. It flew with the Tuskegee Airmen of WWII. It was planted in the fields where Cesar Chavez spoke. It marched with Martin Luther King Jr. It rocketed into space on the shoulder patches of women, gays, Hispanic, Asian and African American astronauts.”

“… It is a flag for everyone, of every color, of every race, of every creed, and of every orientation, but the privilege of living under this flag does not come without cost. Nor should it come without respect. The nation and everything it strives for is embodied in the American flag. We strive to be more inclusive. We strive to be more understanding. We strive to fix the problems that plague our society.”

“But in striving to do so, we must have a common bond; some symbol that reminds us of our past struggles and propels us to a brighter, more enlightened future. That symbol is the American flag.”

“The young student-athletes are future leaders of this nation,” McRaven stated. “By showing respect for the flag, they are making it possible for America to be everything we dreamed it could be.”

Earlier on January 6, long before Kaepernick began disrespecting his country, McRaven sent a memo to the UT System’s presidents and athletic directors in which he stated that it was important for the athletes to stand up straight when the National Anthem is being played, to face the flag, and to place their hand over their heart as a sign of respect to this nation.

Here are some excerpts from that memo:

“The flag represents all that is good and decent about these United States. Honoring the flag does not imply all that the Republic for which it stands is perfect. Far from it, honoring the flag is our collective commitment that we will constantly attempt to get better as a nation, to improve as a people, and to use the freedoms we have been given to make the earth a better place.”

"In today’s world where the values we hold so dear seem to be under constant assault, I believe it is more important than ever for us to show respect for the flag; to demonstrate to the world that we are teaching our young men and women to honor the principles that made this country great,”

“I would ask that you encourage coaching staff and players to stand up straight when the National Anthem is being played; to face the flag and place their hand over their heart as a sign of respect to this nation. It is a simple act but I believe it will have a lasting affect [sic] on those that see it.”

Admiral McRaven shows why having a former career military man at the head of a large university system is so much better than having a wishy-washy educator at the head of it.

Kudos for Admiral McRaven! Kudos for NHL coach John Tortorella who said, “If any of my players sit on the bench for the national anthem, they will sit there the rest of the game.” Shane on the the 49ers for supporting Kaepernick’s sorry ass protest! And above all, uber-shame on the National Football league for allowing Kaepernick and NFL players on other teams to kneel, instead of standing, during the playing of the anthem.

FELONY BICYCLE RIDING

By Bob Walsh

Back in 2014 Monique Tillman, then 15, happened to be riding her bicycle while black thru the parking lot of a shopping mall in the Seattle-Tacoma area when she was “pulled over” by a Tacoma P D officer working as private security for the mall.

The girl and her brother, one year older than she, were heading for home from a fast food restaurant on May 24, and cut across the Tacoma Mall parking lot.

The officer, Jarden Williams, (who is white) asserted that they were creating a disturbance and trespassing. The cops have been unable or unwilling to say exactly what that disturbance was.

When Officer Williams took out his notebook Ms. Tillman attempted to ride away. She was immediately grabbed by Officer Williams. The situation went sideways and the officer ended up throwing her to the ground and zapping her. By this time several other people, mall security guards and not cops, showed up and interacted with the brother.

Ms. Tillman was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and obstructing, though these charges were dropped.

She and her family are now suing everybody in the state over the whole mess. One of the things being looked at is the appropriateness of using police officers in uniform and driving department vehicles as private security and what official department review, if any, happens when officers are involved in “off-duty” use of force incidents.

EDITOR’S Note: And I hope the girl’s family prevails in their lawsuit … big time!