News from Abroad
Thank you, Nick Welsh, for another pithy article in the Angry Poodle.
I am running a small farm in the heart of Rep. Tom McClintock’s home base, near Roseville, CA, don’t make eye contact with the locals. I also have a primary residence in North Lake Tahoe.
Remember the State Fire Fee? It’s the one that finally got revoked to pay for the Republican votes for SB12, soon to be recalled, I would guess. Do you have any idea where the money went? State Sen. Ted Gaines, carpetbagger extraordinaire, tried to force the State Board of Equalization (now defunct also) to come clean on where all the money went. They would not say.
I have got some news for you. The money was spent in the woods behind my home and homes throughout the Tahoe Basin to thin the woods for fire prevention. They go in during the fall and early winter with the big mechanical harvesters on tracks and turn the woods into something Samuel Clemens could gallop his horse through. Now, as you know, there is a big political push to keep Tahoe pretty and safe so the one percent can build billion-dollar homes, piers, heliports, submarine pens, seaplane docks etc, and fly their private jets in to rip around in their hundred-mile-per-hour “look at me, look at me, I have a little dick” thunder boats.
My point: if Santa Barbara would stop trying to change the world and get together with the neighbors, they could probably have gotten a bunch of the money, too. They might also be able to secure a better deal with the feds for the South Coast water, and maybe they could get Edison to fix the power grid so they don’t have to shut it off during bad weather!
For years, San Francisco did exactly what S.B. is doing: We know what is best for everyone else and will pass ordinance after ordinance to prove it. Well, S.F. is sure getting their comeuppance now. S.B. needs to stop using the City Council to address world issues and get their own, local, shit together.
By the way, I drive fruit through S.B. once a week on my way to Los Angeles. I stay at my girlfriend’s house up on San Roque. I had a run scheduled for last Tuesday, but Edison turned off the power and evacuated the local residents for 14 hours so they could change a pole with a helicopter. As I could not park in her driveway, I cancelled the trip because it is illegal to park my rental van on the streets in S.B., a big tall Ford Transit van, like the ones all the homeless drive.